Renaissance architecture and geometry

Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 treatise on geometry and science qualified him as a scientist. It explained to painters how to place their figures in proper perspective, and one can claim that his beautiful buildings are great works of art.

Because of his great adaptability, he was the father of Early Renaissance art theory and the archetypal “universal man.” He is revered first and foremost as the founder of modern architecture. 

Alberti’s faith in mathematical principles and rational order led him into overlapping fields, including science, art, philosophy, cosmography, cryptology, and modern and classical languages.

Through several groundbreaking treatises, his ideas were put into writing that had the most profound and lasting effect on Early Renaissance art and architecture.

Further, in painting, his thoughts on perspective provided the groundwork for two next-generation Renaissance giants, Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo used scientific and mathematical perspectives to develop his paintings. Alberti’s contribution to painting, architecture and sculpture was cemented with his three groundbreaking treatises, respectively: De Pittura (1435), De re aedificatoria (1452) and De Statua (1568). These textbooks would constitute the core of the Florentine Renaissance and provide it with the rules of scientific and mathematical balance on which we built a new age in art and art theory. He also believed in creating beautiful architectural designs while constructing buildings and architectural structures.

First, to produce self-portrait

He did this in the form of a medallion, which he also introduced as a feature of the symbolic emblem. Alberti had effectively revised the designs and symbols of antiquity (Roman cameos and Egyptian hieroglyphics in his case) and thus pointed the way forward for the royal and scholarly portrait medals that would follow.

While Alberti was remembered for many things, perhaps most notably his writings and his building designs, this piece(his self-portrait emblem…link saved) offers abundant proof of Alberti’s skill as an artist and his admiration for the ages of antiquity.

Alberti became good friends with Brunelleschi, the sculptor Donatello and Leonardo da Vinci (who would elaborate on Alberti’s theories of geometry and perspective) and subsequently “threw himself into the artistic renaissance of quattrocento [fifteenth century] Florence”. He took up painting and sculpture, but his outstanding achievement of this period was his treatise De Pictura (1435). The impact of the treatise on painting and relief work, in particular, was immediate and immense and provided, as Grafton describes, “the first modern manual for painters [and] the first systematic modern work on the arts”.

Alberti also forged a close friendship in Florence with the cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli (who had produced the maps for Columbus’s first voyage). The two men collaborated on astronomical projects – both astronomy and geography benefitting from the science of perspective – and Alberti contributed to this field through a small treatise on geography. Gadol suggests it was probably “the first work of its kind since antiquity [and set] forth the rules for surveying and mapping a land area, in this case, the city of Rome, and it was probably as influential as his earlier treatise on the painting.”

Alberti also forged a close friendship in Florence with the cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli (who had produced the maps for Columbus’s first voyage). The two men collaborated on astronomical projects – both astronomy and geography benefitting from the science of perspective – and Alberti contributed to this field through a small treatise on geography. Gadol suggests it was probably “the first work of its kind since antiquity [and set] forth the rules for surveying and mapping a land area, in this case, the city of Rome, and it was probably as influential as his earlier treatise on the painting.”