Leon Battista Alberti
Alberti wrote “On the Art of Building”, the great architectural treatise of the Renaissance, modelled on Vitruvius. His façades for Santa Maria Novella in Florence and Sant’Andrea in Mantua show how the ancient temple front and triumphal arch could be applied to a church.
Leon Battista Alberti was born in Genoa in 1404, the illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine merchant family. He received a thorough humanist education in Padua and then studied law in Bologna. Around 1432 he became a secretary at the papal curia, a post that gave him a livelihood and time for study. He was a versatile scholar who wrote on the family, morality, mathematics, cartography and language, and he was also an athlete and musician. When he came to Florence with the papal court in 1434 he met Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio. The following year he wrote “On Painting”, the first theoretical account of linear perspective, and dedicated it to Brunelleschi.
Alberti’s principal theoretical work is “De re aedificatoria”, on the art of building, in ten books modelled on Vitruvius, completed around 1452 and printed in 1485. In it he defines beauty as a harmony of the parts, in which nothing can be added or taken away without making the whole worse. As an architect he worked mostly as an adviser and designer, while others directed the building work. He designed the façade of the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence with superimposed orders, remodelled the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini on a Roman triumphal arch, completed the façade of Santa Maria Novella and designed the churches of San Sebastiano and Sant’Andrea in Mantua, where the triumphal arch shapes the interior as well.
Alberti died in Rome in 1472. He created the image of the architect as intellectual and artist, someone who designs through drawings and theory rather than as a master builder on site, a role that has shaped the profession ever since. His book was the first printed architectural treatise since antiquity and influenced Bramante, Palladio and generations of theorists. Sant’Andrea’s great barrel-vaulted space with chapels between massive piers became a model for later churches, not least Il Gesù in Rome. The solution of using volutes to link a tall central section with lower sides, as on Santa Maria Novella, was repeated in countless Baroque churches, in Sweden too, for example on church façades of the Swedish Empire period.