Can I read Humanism and the Urban World : Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City on EtoBox?

Humanism and the Urban World : Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City by Caspar Pearson is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Humanism and the Urban World : Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City about?

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 country

Author

Caspar Pearson

Publisher

Pennsylvania State University Press

Published

2011

Language

EN

ISBN

9780271048550

Subjects

Architecture, Art, Philosophy