L’altro sapere. Bello, Arte, Immagine in Leon Battista Alberti

Abstract

The great attention that, during the past few years, has been paid to Leon Battista Alberti has led to the creation of research centers and to the organization of exhibitions and conferences dedicated to him, but it has yet to result, especially in Italy, in a new approach to his aesthetic theories. This represents a serious scholarly gap, because Alberti was an important figure in the history of aesthetics, both for the role he played in the aesthetic and literary debates of the 15th century, as well as for the impact that his thought had on theory and art in subsequent centuries. The present volume constitutes an important tool to fill such gap. The volume centers on three key concepts: beauty, art, and images. The first chapter problematizes the traditional view that Alberti promoted an objective notion of beauty as harmony, showing instead how he also entertained a functionalist aesthetics and considered the perception of beauty as a subjectve experience linked to individual taste. In the second chapter, after examining the relationship between Alberti’s treatises and ancient models, the analysis focuses on the “learned artist”, outlining a conception of knowledge that, refuting all abstractions, is rooted in practical experience and activity. The last chapter examines Alberti’s theory of images, which has been neglected by scholars, and focuses on Egyptian hieroglyphs. The concluding pages of the present volume analyze the hierglyph of the winged eye, which was adopted by Leon Battista Alberti as his personal emblem, and suggest that it may provide a key for a comprehensive interpretation of his humanistic thought.