The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti
The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti

Author: Kim Williams

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-09-08

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 3034604742

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Leon Battista Alberti was an outstanding polymath of the fifteenth century, alongside Piero della Francesca and before Leonardo da Vinci. While his contributions to architecture and the visual arts are well known and available in good English editions, and much of his literary and social writings are also available in English, his mathematical works are not well represented in readily available, accessible English editions have remained accessible only to specialists. The four treatises included here – Ludi matematici, De Componendis Cifris, Elementi di pittura and De lunularum quadratura – are extremely valuable in rounding out the portrait of this multitalented thinker. The treatises are presented in modern English translations, with commentary that is intended to make evident the depths of Alberti’s knowledge as well as address the treatises’ mathematical, historical and cultural context, their classical Greek roots, and their relationship to later works by Renaissance thinkers.

On Painting
On Painting

Author: Leon Battista Alberti

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1966-01-01

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9780300000016

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Alberti’s Della Pittura was the first modern analytical study of painting, a pioneering treatise on the theory of art. A systematic description of the one-point perspective construction, it was primarily designed to persuade both patron and painter in the Renaissance to discard the old tastes in painting for the new. John R. Spencer's translation of Della Pittura is based on all the known manuscripts and is edited with an Introduction and Notes.

Measured Words
Measured Words

Author: Arielle Saiber

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2017-11-29

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1487513313

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Measured Words explores the rich commerce between computation and writing that proliferated in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. In this captivating and generously illustrated work, Arielle Saiber studies the relationship between number, shape, and the written word in the works of four exceptional thinkers of the time: Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Pacioli, Niccolò Tartaglia, and Giambattista Della Porta. Although these Renaissance humanists came from different social classes and practised the mathematical and literary arts at varying levels of sophistication, they were all guided by a sense that there exist deep ontological and epistemological bonds between computational and verbal thinking and production. Their shared view that a network or continuity exists between the literary arts and mathematics yielded extraordinary results, from Alberti’s treatise on cryptography and Pacioli’s design calculations for the Roman alphabet to Tartaglia’s poetic solutions of cubic equations and Della Porta’s dramatic applications of geometry. Through lively, cogent analysis of these and other related texts of the period, Measured Words presents, literally and figuratively, brilliant examples of what interdisciplinary work can offer us.

The Geometry of an Art
The Geometry of an Art

Author: Kirsti Andersen

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2008-11-23

Total Pages: 837

ISBN-13: 0387489460

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This review of literature on perspective constructions from the Renaissance through the 18th century covers 175 authors, emphasizing Peiro della Francesca, Guidobaldo del Monte, Simon Stevin, Brook Taylor, and Johann Heinrich. It treats such topics as the various methods of constructing perspective, the development of theories underlying the constructions, and the communication between mathematicians and artisans in these developments.

Rome Measured and Imagined
Rome Measured and Imagined

Author: Jessica Maier

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-05-07

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 022612763X

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At the turn of the fifteenth century, Rome was a city in transitionparts ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan and Christianand as it emerged from its medieval decline through the return of papal power and the onset of the Renaissance, its portrayals in print transformed as well. Jessica Maier s book explores the history of the Roman city portrait genre during the rise of Renaissance print culture. She illustrates how the maps of this era helped to promote the city, to educate, and to facilitate armchair exploration and what they reveal about how the people of Rome viewed or otherwise imagined their city. She also advances our understanding of early modern cartography, which embodies a delicate, intentional balance between science and art. The text is beautifully illustrated with nearly 100 images of the genre, a dozen of them in color."

On Alberti and the Art of Building
On Alberti and the Art of Building

Author: Robert Tavernor

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780300076158

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Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) - writer, painter and sculptor, mathematician and, most famously, architectural theorist and architect - came closer than anyone to the Renaissance ideal of the 'complete man'. Recognised by his contemporaries as an extraordinary person, he helped to shape, through his writings and his practical example in the arts, the way in which the natural and artificial world was perceived and represented during the Renaissance.

The Word made Visible in the Painted Image
The Word made Visible in the Painted Image

Author: Stephen Miller

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-11-25

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1443886750

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This book explores the areas of perspective, proportion, witness and theological threshold in the devotional art of the Italian Renaissance, with particular reference to the painted image of Christ. While the Incarnation, in a very real way, legitimised the idea of the portrayal of God in human form (as Jesus Christ), problems remained as to how this might be achieved and whether it should be restricted to the second person of the Holy Trinity. This book looks at the creation of pictorial space and the presentation of the image – paying special attention to schemes of perspective, as a way to better describe reality, as well as to considerations of proportion through such geometric methodology as the Golden Section and dynamic root-rectangles (based on certain ‘perfect’ or divine ratios) to balance and harmonise form. The Word Made Visible in the Painted Image also explores the theological theme of threshold and liminal space, describes how themes such as the Incarnation and Revelation were represented, and looks at the symbolism employed in so doing. It shows how such themes were captured, set in space and communicated in the painted image. This study is necessarily interdisciplinary, combining the subject areas of art history and theory, theology, biblical study, philosophy, aesthetics, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, geometry, optics, physiology, psychology, and sociology, in greater and lesser degrees. Few books take such an interdisciplinary stance on art, theology, science and related disciplines to this extent.

Visual Culture and Mathematics in the Early Modern Period
Visual Culture and Mathematics in the Early Modern Period

Author: Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-01-06

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1317192060

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During the early modern period there was a natural correspondence between how artists might benefit from the knowledge of mathematics and how mathematicians might explore, through advances in the study of visual culture, new areas of enquiry that would uncover the mysteries of the visible world. This volume makes its contribution by offering new interdisciplinary approaches that not only investigate perspective but also examine how mathematics enriched aesthetic theory and the human mind. The contributors explore the portrayal of mathematical activity and mathematicians as well as their ideas and instruments, how artists displayed their mathematical skills and the choices visual artists made between geometry and arithmetic, as well as Euclid’s impact on drawing, artistic practice and theory. These chapters cover a broad geographical area that includes Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, France and England. The artists, philosophers and mathematicians whose work is discussed include Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Verrocchio, as well as Michelangelo, Galileo, Piero della Francesca, Girard Desargues, William Hogarth, Albrecht Dürer, Luca Pacioli and Raphael.

Humanism and the Urban World
Humanism and the Urban World

Author: Caspar Pearson

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-10-20

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0271073977

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In Humanism and the Urban World, Caspar Pearson offers a profoundly revisionist account of Leon Battista Alberti’s approach to the urban environment as exemplified in the extensive theoretical treatise De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building in Ten Books), brought mostly to completion in the 1450s, as well as in his larger body of written work. Past scholars have generally characterized the Italian Renaissance architect and theorist as an enthusiast of the city who envisioned it as a rational, Renaissance ideal. Pearson argues, however, that Alberti’s approach to urbanism was far more complex—that he was even “essentially hostile” to the city at times. Rather than proposing the “ideal” city, Pearson maintains, Alberti presented a variety of possible cities, each one different from another. This book explores the ways in which Alberti sought to remedy urban problems, tracing key themes that manifest in De re aedificatoria. Chapters address Alberti’s consideration of the city’s possible destruction and the city’s capacity to provide order despite its intrinsic instability; his assessment of a variety of political solutions to that instability; his affinity for the countryside and discussions of the virtues of the active versus the contemplative life; and his theories of aesthetics and beauty, in particular the belief that beauty may affect the soul of an enemy and thus preserve buildings from attack.