Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting

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, theorist, and 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 it 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.