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.
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