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Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance
Leon Battista Alberti Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance Author:Anthony Grafton Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was one of the most exciting figures of the Italian Renaissance. He wrote the first modern treatise on painting, the first modern manual of classical architecture, and a powerful set of "dialogues" about the princely families of Florence. But Alberti also made his own spectacular advances in the art of painting ... more »and in engineering, and was responsible for some of the most exciting architectural designs in Italy. In this volume, one of our most distinguished Renaissance scholars offers the superlative biography and cultural history that Alberti has long deserved. It is a compelling portrait of a mysterious and original intellectual. "Anthony Grafton treats Alberti's writings as mosaics fashioned out of passages collected from ancient sources. He shows that, in the compositional interstices between such passages, Alberti expresses his most immediate social concerns: with his own position and with the reception of the work by his first readers. By focusing on the interstices rather than on the body of the texts, Grafton draws the most convincing portrait to date of Alberti as a man in a social environment." --Jack M. Greenstein, Wall Street Journal "[Grafton] has produced a convincing and engaging account of Alberti's intellectual milieu in what is arguably the most important general contribution to Albertian studies of recent decades." --Bruce Boucher, New York Times Book Review« less