Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting

By: Peter Weller

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Synopsis: The prodigy poet, playwright, architect, painter, and humanist savant Leon Battista Alberti emerged in 1435 with De pictura ['On Painting'], the modern era's earliest discourse on Western art, written in classical Latin by an ostensible practitioner of the craft. Alberti has captivated the art world from his own epoch to ours, and his dubious Florentine identity enables this allure. In this volume, Peter Weller challenges the popular notion that De pictura's compendium on lines, points, mathematics, composition, narrative, and portraiture is primarily the result of Alberti's return to Florence and his short exposure to its visual art. Weller argues that Rome, Padua, Bologna, and northern Europe – environs where Alberti studied, worked, and lived during exile – empowered his paramount intellectual-artistic gift. Scrutiny of Alberti's evolution before Florence illuminates how this original Renaissance man merged the two most conspicuous cultural developments of early modern Italy – visual art and humanism — to create De pictura, our first modern book on painting.