Leon Battista Alberti: The Chameleon’s Eye(Renaissance Lives)

One of the most brilliant and original authors and architects of the entire Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti had an output that encompassed engineering, surveying, cryptography, poetry, humour, political commentary and more. He employed irony, satire and playful allusion in his written works, and developed a sophisticated approach to architecture that combined the ancient and modern. Born into the Florentine elite, Alberti was nonetheless disadvantaged owing to exile and illegitimacy. As a result, he became an acute analyst of the social institutions of his time, as well as a profoundly existential writer who was intensely interested in the human condition. This new account explores Alberti’s life and works, examining how his personal and intellectual preoccupations continually pushed him to engage with an ever-broader spectrum of Renaissance culture.

About the Author :
Caspar Pearson is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Warburg Institute, and the author of Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City (2011).

Review :
This splendid biography of Leon Battista Alberti, beautifully produced, with a rich selection of well-placed and well-reproduced illustrations, vividly portrays one of the most complex and fascinating figures in a complex and fascinating time, one whose preoccupations are entirely relevant today. This is an engaging, lucidly written review of Alberti (1404–72), a prominent, fascinating, productive, and influential Renaissance figure. Alberti’s voluminous, innovative writings and the few buildings he designed are usually written about separately, but Pearson, an established scholar, brings Alberti's writing and his architecture together into a comprehensive view. His analysis and interpretations offer insights into the individual works and, more important, into the complex character of the whole man. Pearson's attention to the audiences for Alberti’s literary works and to a lesser extent to his patrons’ purposes for his buildings add depth beyond mere analysis of their literary or artistic achievements. A sturdy stitch-bound book on glossy paper with 68 excellent illustrations, most in color, this book is intended to appeal to nonspecialist readers. The author condenses a mass of primary and secondary sources, discretely citing them in endnotes. An important resource for those interested in architecture, culture, and history. Highly recommended. Caspar Pearson’s book is the best English introduction to Leon Battista Alberti. The volume is more than just a biography: it engages solidly with the literary and technical works of this prolific writer, and takes account of key ideas put forward by scholars in the recent Alberti revival . . . Enhanced by a generous number of high-quality illustrations, not all of them predictable, Leon Battista Alberti: The Chameleon’s Eye is succinct, admirably clear and often witty, all qualities of which Alberti himself would have approved. This is a book born out of passion: the lively passion for one of the most preeminent and yet most elusive minds of the Italian Renaissance. Caspar Pearson’s new biography of Leon Battista Alberti strikes the reader as meticulously detailed and comprehensive, while remaining, page after page, refreshingly witty, agile and appealing. The kaleidoscopic worlds of the most versatile of Italian humanists – the most provocative and controversial one in his unabashed modernity – are wrought together dynamically. Alberti is neither the solar, jovial and sanguine architect popularised by Jacob Burckhardt, nor the selenic, saturnine and melancholic humanist depicted by Eugenio Garin: Pearson resists the temptation of coming up with yet another unavailing formula to grasp Alberti’s polygonal literary persona. His beautifully illustrated book is a tour de force: a masterpiece of synthesis that illuminates Alberti’s life and works with the brilliance and clarity of a prose that combines scholarly depth and sophistication with reader-friendliness.