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A fresh English translation of five Alberti works that illuminate
new aspects of the literary aims and development of the first
“Renaissance man.” Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) was one
of the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. His
extraordinary range of abilities as a writer, architect, art
theorist, and even athlete earned him the controversial title of
the first “Renaissance man.” The works collected in
Biographical and Autobiographical Writings reflect Alberti’s
lived experiences and his interests in the genre. This volume
includes On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature, which
partly reflects his experiences as a student in Bologna; The Life
of St. Potitus, the biography of a Christian martyr, which also
contains autobiographical projections and was to have been the
first in a series of lives of saints; My Dog, a mock funeral
oration for his dead dog; My Life, one of the first autobiographies
of the early modern period and the main source for Jacob
Burckhardt’s portrait of Alberti; and a comic encomium, The Fly.
In particular, the last three works—My Dog, My Life, and The
Fly—constitute a kind of trilogy, as the humanist finds one of
his main themes, the portrait of the ideal life, with a strong
emphasis on humor. This edition presents the first collected
English translations of these works alongside an authoritative
Latin text.
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Momus (Hardcover)
Leon Battista Alberti; Edited by Sarah Knight, Virginia Brown
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R795
Discovery Miles 7 950
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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"Momus" is the most ambitious literary creation of Leon Battista
Alberti, the famous humanist-scientist-artist and "universal man"
of the Italian Renaissance. In this dark comedy, written around
1450, Alberti charts the lively fortunes of his anti-hero Momus,
the unscrupulous and vitriolic god of criticism. Alberti deploys
his singular erudition and wit to satirize subjects from court life
and politics to philosophy and intellectuals, from grand
architectural designs to human and divine folly. The possible
contemporary resonance of Alberti's satire--read variously as a
humanist roman-a-clef and as a veiled mockery of the
mid-Quattrocento papacy--is among its most intriguing aspects.
While his more famous books on architecture, painting, and family
life have long been regarded as indispensable to a study of
Renaissance culture, "Momus" has recently attracted increasing
attention from scholars as a work anticipating the realism of
Machiavelli and the satiric wit of Erasmus. This edition provides a
new Latin text, the first to be based on the two earliest
manuscripts, both corrected by Alberti himself, and includes the
first full translation into English.
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