Studies on Alberti and Petrarch

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was the most versatile humanist of the fifteenth century: author of numerous compositions in both Latin and Italian and a groundbreaking theorist of painting sculpture and architecture. His Latin writings owe much to the model of Petrarch (1304-1374) the famed poet of the Italian Canzoniere but also a prolific author of Latin epistles biographies and poems that sparked the revival of classical culture in the early Italian Renaissance. The essays collected here reflect some thirty years of research into these pioneers of Humanism and offer important insights into forms of Renaissance 'self-fashioning' such as allegory and autobiography.