Society, Beauty, and the Humanist Architect in Alberti's de re aedificatoria

1969 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 61-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carroll William Westfall
Keyword(s):  
Actual Practice ◽  
Fertile Period ◽  
De Re ◽  
De Re Aedificatoria ◽  
Broad Interpretation

Leon Battista Albertl's de re aedificatoria has not been clearly discussed as a theory of architecture with an appeal far beyond the practice of architecture. Alberti's intention was not only to give a theory for practice but also to integrate architecture with a broad interpretation of the new humanist culture. The treatise, begun sometime in the 1440s and substantially completed by 1450, begins where his della pittura of 1435 had left off; it therefore belongs to that fertile period in his career before he had endulged in the actual practice of architecture. Still primarily a man of letters, it was to other humanists that he addressed himself and to other humanists that he must have owed his primary debt.

scholarly journals Via non difficilis. Los viales de acceso en las villas renacentistas con desarrollo axial

2015 ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
José Muñoz Domínguez
Keyword(s):  
De Re ◽  
De Re Aedificatoria

Desde la propuesta teórica de Alberti en De re aedificatoria (ca. 1450-1485), el camino de acceso a la villa constituye uno de sus componentes definidores por excelencia, integrado muy tempranamente como parte de su composición general. En relación con este elemento de ordenación, se estudia un conjunto de villas que presentan desarrollo axial –principalmente dentro del tipo aterrazado– con viales de acceso de notable longitud, todas dentro del período renacentista, desde el ejemplo más antiguo de Quaracchi (ca. 1453) o Castello (ca. 1538-1550), entre otros de Toscana, entorno de Roma o el Véneto, hasta casos españoles como La Fresneda (ca. 1562-1569) o El Bosque de Béjar (ca. 1567).

scholarly journals La ruina, el diseño y los materiales en De Re edificatoria de Leon Battista Alberti

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (105) ◽  
pp. 39
Author(s):  
Mariana Sverlij
Keyword(s):  
Leon Battista Alberti ◽  
De Re ◽  
De Re Aedificatoria

En los diez libros que conforman De re aedificatoria, el tratado de arquitectura de Leon Battista Alberti, la ruina expresa un modelo y una moraleja: es el último reducto donde anidan los rastros de una sabiduría perdida, y la firme consecuencia de un tiempo que todo lo devora, en sintonía con la violencia de la historia. A partir de esta doble enseñanza, Alberti busca instalar en su tratado ciertos principios de estabilidad. Buscando comprender estos principios, en el presente artículo nos proponemos analizar los conceptos de lineamenta (diseño) y materia (materiales) que el humanista nacido en Génova desarrolla en los dos primeros libros de su tratado, y ubicarlos en el marco de una historia construida, destruida, y vuelta a construir.

The Tsar’s Last Philosopher on the Method of Architectural History: Orthodox Theology versus Geistesgeschichte

2008 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 239-259
Author(s):  
Branko Mitrović
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Work Demands ◽  
Leon Battista Alberti ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
De Re ◽  
De Re Aedificatoria ◽  
Red Army

A photograph dating from the years of the Russian Civil War shows Vasiliy Pavlovich Zubov in the uniform of the Red Army: an unlikely conscript to it, given his poor eyesight (as betrayed by his thick glasses), but in fact one who served as a scribe in an artillery unit located near Moscow (Fig. 1). Another photograph, taken not long before his death in 1963, shows him in the greyish suit of the Khrushchev years: a survivor who, by becoming Russia’s greatest intellectual historian, managed to avoid playing any active part in political history (Fig. 2).Zubov is the towering figure of Russian architectural history in the twentieth century. The most pertinent way to introduce him here is as the Russian translator of Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (Fig. 3) and as one of the two co-translators of Daniele Barbara’s commentary on Vitruvius. The former treatise is notorious for the complexities of its text, and it took a team of three scholars to produce the most recent English translation. Understanding of the latter work demands such an extensive knowledge of both Renaissance and Roman intellectual history that it is considered virtually untranslatable, and the translation on which Zubov collaborated is the only one ever published in any living language. He was also the author of an extensive commentary on Alberti’s architectural treatise (Fig. 4), much praised by those Renaissance scholars who can read Russian, while those few of his articles on Leon Battista Alberti that were published in French or Italian during his lifetime are still widely cited today.

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