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

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.

Rocco Sinisgalli is Professor of Sciences of Representation in Art and Architecture at the University of Rome. He is the author of more than twenty books, including A History of the Perspective Scene from the Renaissance to the Baroque and Leonardo and the Divine Proportion.