Leon Battista Alberti: Writer and Humanist

In this scholarly study, McLaughlin (Italo Calvino), an Italian professor emeritus at Oxford University, examines 15th-century Italian polymath Alberti’s “significance as a writer” through close readings of his treatises, dialogues, and autobiography. Comparing Petrarch’s outlook on the art and philosophy of antiquity to Alberti’s, as outlined in the 1435 treatise De pictura, McLaughlin suggests Alberti was less concerned with the restoration of classical texts than his Renaissance forefather and more willing to believe that the works of such contemporary artists as Filippo Brunelleschi rivaled the achievements of the ancients. Alberti pioneered the mixture of Latin genres with Italian vernacular, McLaughlin contends, describing how the dialogue De familia, written in the Tuscan vernacular between 1433 and 1443, tackles contemporaneous concerns about the purpose of family while using a Latin form and “drawing on a vast range of classical sources.” McLaughlin knows his subject inside and out, but pedantic discussions of inaccuracies in 19th-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt’s biographical writings on Alberti and the “links between Alberti’s architectural theories in De re aedificatoria and his practice as an architect” won’t hold much appeal for readers not already invested in the Italian polymath. This is chiefly for students of the Italian Renaissance. (June)