Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Some tanning and marking due to age. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> The principal aim of this book is to portray Alberti’s intellectual character. I regard him not as an art theorist primarily nor as a humanist an architect a cartographer nor even a mathematician but as a representative of that Renaissance type which Burckhardt called the “universal man.” What I sought to understand was the coherence of his thought the ideas that led him from one set of problems to another and this is what I now seek to present. I should like to say at the outset then that although this is a comprehensive treatment of Alberti in the sense of dealing with all his varied works it is an analysis in terms of the basic ideas and ways of thought that unified them. It is not and does not pretend to be an exhaustive study of each of his major undertakings. Much remains to be done in special areas to extend our knowledge of his particular works and of their historical influence and in the notes I have called attention to certain issues which I hope others will pursue. But for this book it is enough if it succeeds in conveying a faithful image of Alberti’s world of thought making its many-sidedness comprehensible and disclosing its central unifying ideas. Because of Alberti’s “universal” interests he was caught up by and he helped determine the course of almost all the currents of early Renaissance culture. The aesthetic cosmological natural-scientific and ethical and social interests of his age were centered in his case in a few rather simple but seminal ideas which appear in chapter 1 in the technical mathematical form in which they first presented themselves to him as the ideas of perspective Prospettiva. I have treated them in full detail there for two reasons: first so that those unfamiliar with the perspectival “science” of the Renaissance might understand its systematic core without reference to mathematical works on the topic; and secondly so that the evolution of these ideas might be understood for simple as they may seem to us now it is nonetheless a subject of historical wonder how they ever arose. (LL)