Alberti writes on the art of building

Leon Battista Alberti presents “On the Art of Building”, the first major theory of architecture since Vitruvius. For him beauty is a harmony in which nothing can be added or taken away.

The architect became a learned artist, not merely a master builder.

Leon Battista Alberti was born in Genoa in 1404, the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant family living in exile. He studied law in Bologna, became a secretary in the papal chancery and travelled with the Curia to Florence in the 1430s. There he met the circle around Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio, and he wrote a book on painting in which he explained linear perspective in words for the first time. Alberti was a typical humanist: he wrote about the family, mathematics, horses and morals. In Rome he surveyed the ruins and made a map of the city, and under Pope Nicholas V he became an adviser when the pope wanted to renew the decaying city.

The treatise on the art of building, De re aedificatoria, is written in Latin and divided into ten books, like Vitruvius. But Alberti did not merely want to comment on his model. He organised the subject according to his own principles, with books on materials, on construction, on the various building types and on ornament. Beauty he called concinnitas, a harmony between the parts, while ornament was something added, like jewellery on a body. For him the city was like a large house and the house like a small city. The book deliberately had no illustrations; Alberti trusted the word more than copyists’ ability to reproduce drawings. It was printed in 1485, after his death in 1472.

Alberti was also active in practice, but in a new way: he designed, and others built. In Florence he gave the facade of Palazzo Rucellai a grid of pilasters in three orders and the church of Santa Maria Novella a facade with large volutes that linked the low aisles to the tall nave. In Rimini he remodelled a Gothic church with a Roman triumphal arch as its facade, and in Mantua he designed Sant’Andrea with a huge barrel vault that taught Bramante how to create monumental spaces. His book was translated into Italian in the mid-16th century and read all over Europe. With Alberti the architect became a thinker who designed, rather than primarily a craftsman.