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, a theorist, and the author of texts on perspective and painting. Alberti’s 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 On Painting 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.

Rocco Sinisgalli is Professor of Sciences of Representation in Art and Architecture at the Sapienza 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.

Rocco Sinisgalli

University of Rome, La Sapienza

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© Rocco Sinisgalli 2011

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First published 2011
Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN 978-1-107-00062-9 Hardback

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