Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

Alberti's De re aedificatoria is the earliest case in the history of Italian Renaissance architectural treatises dealing with recovery of antiquity through textual and archaeological pursuits. The key source of the Renaissance theoreticians was Vitruvius' De architectura. However, Alberti was keenly...

Alberti's De re aedificatoria is the earliest case in the history of Italian Renaissance architectural treatises dealing with recovery of antiquity through textual and archaeological pursuits. The key source of the Renaissance theoreticians was Vitruvius' De architectura. However, Alberti was keenly aware of inaccuracy and Hellenization of Latinity in this classical text, and tried to compensate them in his own treatise. Furthermore he claimed a reformed discipline of the architects as well as the patrons, and prescribed how future buildings and cities should be built, based on the proper authority of ancient architecture in proper and intelligible Latin. Such an adaptation of classical usage in order to reestablish a modern norm preceded in his earlier work Momus, a satire on the contemporary Italian society of his own by following the model of Lucian. Alberti's suggestion of proper government in Momus's phrase was expanded in De re aedificatoria, for he consider the buildings are subject to the rules of morality and public interests. He proclaimed that the nature of beauty is the reasoned harmony of every part within a body, and architectural beauty also lies on the harmonized arrangement of all the elements within an individual building and of all individual buildings and facilities within a city. For the architects to execute this task, he formulated the concept of lineanenta, the form derived from the mind in order to prescribe the proper place, numbers, scale, and orders for whole building structure. It is the future oriented city-plans and building designs to serve the public interest and the good of all the individual citizens who make up the City-State that Alberti pursued in his treatise.

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