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Reading between the Patrilines: Leon Battista Alberti's "Della Famiglia" in Light of His Illegitimacy by Thomas Kuehn is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Reading between the Patrilines: Leon Battista Alberti's "Della Famiglia" in Light of His Illegitimacy about?

L eon Battista Alberti's Della Famiglia has become a fixture in modern historical studies of the early Renaissance.' Despite all the attention directed to it, however, Della Famiglia remains an ambiguous text. It is seen as an apology for the 'bourgeois' or 'civic' mentality of the patriciate that ruled Florence.2 It is also seen as a 'humanistic' text, the result of the intellectual and aesthetic inclinations of its versatile author.3 Each view of Della Famiglia -as bourgeois or humanistichas to confront textual problems. For example, although the dialogue's contents seem to "respond to the need to resolve theoretically problems that concern humanity in general,"4 it does this only in the context and perspective of the urban patriciate. On the other hand, if it is an apology for the Florentine patriciate, it provides curiously few precise references to Florence, and the family in the dialogue remains isolated, enclosed, self-sufficient -a very idealized vision with respect to the fifteenth century.5 The fundamentally ambiguous character of so much of Della Famiglia has been ascribed to various factors. The dialogue form itself heightens ambiguities already present in Alberti's tex

Who reads Reading between the Patrilines: Leon Battista Alberti's "Della Famiglia" in Light of His Illegitimacy?

Author

Thomas Kuehn

Publisher

Leo S. Olschki Publisher; The University of Chicago Press; University of Chicago Press (ISSN 0393-5949)

Published

1985

Language

IT

Field

Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)