Leon battista alberti biography of albert

Italian architect and author (1404-1472)

Leon Battista Alberti (Italian:[leombatˈtistaalˈbɛɾti]; 14 February 1404 – 25 April 1472) was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer; he epitomised the nature of those identified now as polymaths. He is considered the founder of Western cryptography, a claim he shares with Johannes Trithemius.

He is often considered primarily an architect. However, according to James Beck, "to single out one of Leon Battista's 'fields' over others as somehow functionally independent and self-sufficient is of no help at all to any effort to characterize Alberti's extensive explorations in the fine arts". Although Alberti is known mostly as an artist, he was also a mathematician and made significant contributions to that field. Among the most famous buildings he designed are the churches of San Sebastiano (1460) and Sant'Andrea (1472), both in Mantua.

Alberti's life was told in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

Biography

Early life

Leon Battista Alberti was born in 1404 in Genoa. His mother was Bianca Fieschi. His father, Lorenzo di Benedetto Alberti, was a wealthy Florentine who had been exiled from his own city, but allowed to return in 1428. Alberti was sent to boarding school in Padua, then studied law at Bologna. He lived for a time in Florence, then in 1431 travelled to Rome, where he took holy orders and entered the service of the papal court. During this time he studied the ancient ruins, which excited his interest in architecture and strongly influenced the form of the buildings that he designed.

Leon Battista Alberti was gifted in many ways. He was tall, strong, and a fine athlete who could ride the wildest horse and jump over a person's head.^&#

The first book in English to examine Leon Battista Alberti’s major literary works in Latin and Italian, which are often overshadowed by his achievements in architecture

Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was one of the most prolific and original writers of the Italian Renaissance—a fact often eclipsed by his more celebrated achievements as an art theorist and architect, and by Jacob Burckhardt’s mythologizing of Alberti as a "Renaissance or Universal Man." In this book, Martin McLaughlin counters this partial perspective on Alberti, considering him more broadly as a writer dedicated to literature and humanism, a major protagonist and experimentalist in the literary scene of early Renaissance Italy. McLaughlin, a noted authority on Alberti, examines all of Alberti’s major works in Latin and the Italian vernacular and analyzes his vast knowledge of classical texts and culture.

McLaughlin begins with what we know of Alberti’s life, comparing the facts laid out in Alberti’s autobiography with the myth created in the nineteenth century by Burckhardt, before moving on to his extraordinarily wide knowledge of classical texts. He then turns to Alberti’s works, tracing his development as a writer through texts that range from an early comedy in Latin successfully passed off as the work of a fictitious ancient author to later philosophical dialogues written in the Italian vernacular (a revolutionary choice at the time); humorous works in Latin, including the first novel in that language since antiquity; and the famous treatises on painting and architecture. McLaughlin also examines the astonishing range of Alberti's ancient sources and how this reading influenced his writing; what the humanist read, he argues, often explains what he wrote, and what he wrote reflected his relentless industry and pursuit of originality.

After Leon Battista Alberti, it was the destiny of the Renaissance man to never be satisfied. The darting eye that flies and scans from above, that investigates and discovers before knowing, is the symbol that was chosen by the inventor of the Renaissance, a thinker who was interested in and wrote about everything over his long career. A polytropic traveller like the Greek Ulysses, a Florentine exile like Petrarch. Like the latter – and exactly one century later – Alberti came to Bologna to study Law, but he left far more enriched by the men-of-letters and scientists who gravitated around the Università degli Artisti, thanks to whom the old ‘Madre degli Studi’ could still call itself ‘Alma’.

Leon Battista Alberti was born in 1404 in Genoa, the hometown of his mother, Bianca Fieschi, widow of a Grimaldi.  His father, Lorenzo di Benedetto Alberti, belonged to a wealthy, powerful family of Florentine merchants and bankers, exiled by their rivals, the Albizi.

After a short stay in Venice, the Alberti family went to Padua (1416) where Leon Battista began to study literature, attending the school of the humanist Gasparino Barzizza along with Francesco Barbaro, Il Filelfo and Il Panormita and became friends with Paolo Dal Pozzo Toscanelli and possibly Niccolò Cusano.

Moving to Bologna, he enrolled at the School of Canon Law, although he was immediately drawn to the sparkling humanistic and scientific climate at the nascent Università delle Arti.  Physics and Mathematics were to become the pillars of his literary and artistic production.

During his long period in Bologna, often marked by illness, the young man needed to deal with the aversion of his family which, after his father died in 1421, tried multiple times to disown him, since he was an illegitimate son.

In reaction to this dramatic, solitary period, Alberti turned to writing, composing the amorous comedyPhilodoxeos (1424), which was immediately stolen by his friend I