Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting
A New Translation and Critical Edition

In this volume Rocco Sinisgalli presents a new English translation and critical examination of Alberti's seminal text.

Leon Battista Alberti (Author), Rocco Sinisgalli (Edited and translated by)

9781107694934, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 July 2013

232 pages, 112 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

"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

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. Leon Battista Alberti: 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.

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.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD], The arts: general issues [AB]