Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian
Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2000), xi + 417pp, 28 b&w illustrations, ISBN 0713994533
Architect, artist, poet, dramatist, antiquary, mathematician, engineer, cryptographer, champion of the vernacular, theorist of the arts, architecture, and society, Leon Battista Alberti was the obvious choice as
Jacob Burckhardt’s uomo universale . Alberti has continued to attract such outstanding figures as Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Wittkower, and
Richard Krautheimer. However, Alberti’s archetypal interdisciplinarity has counted against him; increasing academic specialisation has made it difficult for scholars to fully appreciate his achievement.
The search for unity in Alberti’s work is the main motive for Anthony
Grafton’s book. Although Grafton brings no new primary sources to light, he does bring a new approach. At the heart of this approach is an examination of the influence of rhetoric on Alberti: ‘In every discipline or pursuit Alberti attempted, he set out to organize and learn from his audience’s first responses to him. He built communities of hearers and readers, critics who could reassure and correct him as proved necessary.
But communities had to communicate. Hence he spent much of his life... trying to construct languages that did not yet exist: languages whose users could regulate the practice of different arts. In the end, Alberti called into being not only a classical theater but a whole range of imaginary and real institutions: communities of scholars, of literati and painters, of architects and patrons. For only groups, as the orator knew, could usefully approve of or improve on the text, or the image, or the building that an individual had conceived. Alberti set out not only to perform but to create a whole series of arenas in which others could do the same. Surprisingly often, he succeeded at this ambitious, self-imposed task, deploying the resources of his classical culture to become not only a pioneering architect but a master builder in a much wider sense: the creator of new cultural systems and institutions’.
The paucity of personal primary sources prevents a conventional day-today biography of Alberti. Instead Grafton offers ‘... a series of studies in the different forms of intellectual work that Alberti undertook, one that also investigates the environments and communities in which he undertook them, [which] will enable us to watch him turning his rhetorical wheel, using different conventions, always creatively, and trying to build social institutions to regulate new cultural practices, like the learned painting and classical architecture that began to flourish in his time.’ The studies which Grafton presents to us include: ‘Humanism:
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Scholarship’; ‘From New
Technologies to Fine Arts: Alberti Among the Engineers’; ‘On Painting:

Alberti and the Origins of Criticism’; ‘Interpreting Florence: From
Reading to Rebuilding’; ‘The Artist at Court: Alberti in Ferrara’; ‘His
Lost City: Alberti the Antiquary’; ‘Alberti on the Art of Building’; and
‘The Architect and City Planner’.
This is not a definitive life of Alberti, assuming that one were either possible or desirable. Nevertheless, it is an endlessly stimulating study which should appeal to anyone interested in the development of the
Italian Renaissance.
University of Warwick Jonathan Davies