Alberti, Leon Battista (1404–72), Italian humanist writer on the theory of art and architecture, designer of buildings, and, in varying degrees, athlete, lawyer, mathematician, moral philosopher, musician, painter, playwright, and satirist, born in Genoa, the illegitimate son of a Florentine exile. He was educated in Padua, where he was inducted into the humanist movement, and later studied law at Bologna.

In 1424 he wrote a Latin comedy, Philodoxeus, and subsequently wrote satires (Intercenales and Momus) and works of moral philosophy (Teogenio and Della tranquillità dell’animo). In 1431 he moved to Rome, where he worked in the papal secretariat and was eventually appointed as papal adviser for the restoration of Rome (1437–55), and so worked alongside Bernardo Rossellino; in 1432 he made his first documented visit to Florence, travelling in the train of Pope Eugenius IV.

In 1435, apparently in reaction to the new classicizing style in art that he had seen for the first time in Florence, he wrote De pictura, an essay on painting dedicated to Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua. In this treatise, which is concerned with the theory of painting rather than the painter’s practice of the craft, Alberti draws heavily on the descriptions of ancient Greek paintings given by Pliny in his Historia naturalis. Like Pliny, Alberti believed that good art requires an understanding of optics and careful attention to the imitation of nature; the first book of Alberti’s treatise is given over almost entirely to a discussion of the geometrical optics of vision and the mathematical rules for correct perspective.

Alberti’s principal concern, however, is with the historia, which is what the picture is about, the story it tells and the way it tells it; these are matters on which a patron would express an opinion when commissioning a work of art. De pictura establishes what was to prove to be a long-lived and influential connection between humanism and the new style in art.

In 1436 Alberti translated the treatise into Italian (Della pittura), introducing some small changes and dedicating the work to Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Ghiberti, and Luca della Robbia Italian text was not printed until the late nineteenth century. The Latin De pictura was printed in 1540, then in a new Italian translation in 1547, and in another new translation in 1568 as part of a collection of Alberti’s Opuscoli morali.

In 1450 Alberti received his first important architectural commission when he was asked by Sigismondo Malatesta to refashion the Gothic Church of San Francesco in Rimini into the building now known as the Tempio Malatestiano. Alberti designed a marble shell to encase the church; the front, which was based on a Roman triumphal arch, was never finished. The original design, which included a large dome, is preserved on a commemorative medal.

Alberti’s next patron was Giovanni Rucellai whom he designed the façades of the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence (1456–70) and of the Palazzo Rucellai, for which he also designed the Loggia dei Rucellai at right angles with the palace; he designed the Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre (1467) in the Rucellai Chapel in San Pancrazio, and may have been the architect of the chapel. The façade of Santa Maria Novella, which is covered with marble inlay, is based on a geometrical design and on an ideal of harmonic proportion based on ratios derived from music: the pitch of a resonating cord will rise by an octave if its length is halved, by a fifth if its length is reduced by a third, and by a fourth if its length is reduced by a quarter; the ratios 1 : 2, 2 : 3, and 3 : 4 were therefore deemed by Alberti to be as harmonious in architecture as in music. The façade of Santa Maria Novella was the first Renaissance building to embody these ratios in its structure.

Alberti designed buildings, but never worked on site while building was in progress: he designed Palazzo Rucellai, for example, but construction was overseen by Rossellino. The only buildings that he designed in their entirety (unless he was the architect of Cappella Rucellai) were two churches in Mantua, San Sebastiano (from 1460) and San Andrea, neither of which was completed during his lifetime. In 1452 he published De re aedificatoria, the first architectural treatise of the Renaissance, and dedicated it to Pope Nicholas V; a complete edition appeared in 1485. In this treatise Alberti articulated his understanding of Vitruvius, described the architectural orders, and set out the principles of town planning and the ideals of mathematical proportion. His final theoretical work was De statua (c.1464).

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