Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting
Leon Battista Alberti: <I>On Painting</I>
Leon Battista Alberti was one of the most important humanist scholars of the Italian Renaissance. Active in mid-fifteenth-century Florence, he was an architect, theorist, and author of texts on perspective and painting. Alberti’s On Painting is a cardinal work that revolutionized Western art. In this volume, Rocco Sinisgalli presents a new English translation and critical examination of Alberti’s seminal text. Dr. Sinisgalli reverses the received understanding of the relationship between the Italian and Latin versions of Alberti’s treatise by demonstrating that Alberti wrote it first in Italian and then translated it into a polished Latin over the course of several decades. This volume is richly illustrated to help demonstrate how Alberti understood optics and art.
- Presents a new, correct translation from Latin into English
- Features 110 illustrations comprising more than 300 drawings
- The drawings explain and illustrate the most important passages of the book
Reviews & endorsements
"This new English edition will serve as a useful introduction to Alberti’s text and as a fair guide to further study."
-Charles H. Carman,University at Buffalo
Product details
March 2012Adobe eBook Reader
9781139037150
0 pages
0kg
112 b/w illus.
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- Part I. Introduction:
- 1. From Tuscan to Latin and not vice versa
- 2. Regiomontanus, Dürer and the Edito princeps
- 3. The Tuscan vernacular text, its Prologue and Dedication to Brunelleschi
- 4. The false priority of Latin
- 5. The Florentine tradition
- 6. From Janitschek to Grayson
- Part II. Text:
- 7. Prologue addressed to Filippo Brunelleschi
- 8. Letter to Giovanni Francesco Prince of Mantua
- 9. Book one: the rudiments
- 10. Book two: the picture
- 11. Book three: the painter.
