Leon Battista Alberti in Exile

Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting

Peter Weller

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009548670
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Preliminaries: ‘‘The Florence Problem’’
• Introduction
• Chapter One Padua: Historical Realm and Intellectual Culture
• Chapter Two Alberti in Padua I: Intellectual Evolution (c. 1412–1420)
• Chapter Three Alberti in Padua II: Visual Evolution (c. 1412–1420)
• Chapter Four Alberti in Bologna (c. 1421–1428?)
• Chapter Five Alberti in Rome (c. Late 1420s–1434)
• Chapter Six Finalities and Florence
• Bibliography
• Index