Leon Battista Alberti
(1404-72)
.JPG)
Self-Portrait Plaque, (c. 1435)
Leon Battista Alberti
Bronze
Leon Battista Alberti was the illegitimate son a patrician family which
had acquired great riches by the fourteenth century. He refused to
go into the family business, and instead became a member of the Papal civil
service and settled in Rome. It was there that he began to study
the art and architecture of antiquity and became a leading humanist.
Alberti's relied on the scientific method. His treatise, On
Painting (1435), for example, opens with a series of definitions in
mathematical terms. Much later in the book, in speaking of the education
of the painter, he says categorically that "No painter can paint well without
a thorough knowledge of geometry." The reasons for this mathematical
knowledge are twofold:
-
the painter must have some scientific understanding of what is seen
-
the painter requires geometrical knowledge to set it down correctly
Alberti's insistence upon a painter's knowledge of geogemtry led him to
invent a squared screen -- he calls it a velo -- which made
it easier to give objects their precise position in space. Such a
screen was, in fact, much used by painters of the High Renaissance, especially
in dealing with problems of foreshortening. But many objected to
the fact that it tied the artist down to a static view-point, or what has
come to be termed one-point perspective (Click
on here for an image by Raphael that best exemplifies this visual strategy!)
Bibliography
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©1998. Created by Joel A. Hollander. Last updated
7/2/98.