La Roma di Leon Battista Alberti

With the collaboration of Arnold Nesselrath

As part of the celebrations for the sixth centenary of the birth of Leon Battista Alberti, this books provides a view of how the ancient world was seen through precious drawings and manuscripts of the fifteenth century, compared with archaeological findings, it is a testimony of the monumental nature of ancient Rome and also a source of inspiration for Alberti’s contemporaries.
In the mid fifteenth century Rome, as a city, was seeking a new form and function, its very monuments appeared isolated and distant, immersed in a sparse urban fabric with extensive natural spaces where passing time had made the ruins of the city’s ancient buildings increasingly less recognizable, they appeared in fragments and were subjected to transformations, reuse and pillage. Representations of Rome at this time show the gradual emergence of the principal buildings that were to characterise the city, as it would eventually be transformed under the popes.
Leon Battista Alberti first arrived in Rome in 1432 to join the curia of Pope Eugene IV as an apostolic abbreviator. During the following forty years he was an attentive scholar of architectural ruins, artworks, inscriptions and coins of ancient Rome, a worthy competitor of the other humanists and artists residing in the city. Even in 1471, a year before his death, he guided Lorenzo il Magnifico, Bernardo Rucellai and other Florentines who had come to Rome to pay homage to the neo-elected pope Sixtus IV, through the city’s ancient monuments with a competence by then considered unquestionable. His firsthand knowledge of both the buildings and ancient writings had enabled him to write a treatise on architecture entitled De re aedificatoria, that could compete with Vitruvius and provided an outline for the new architecture of his age. The treatise was presented to Pope Nicholas V in 1452, but even before that date Alberti had demonstrated his scientific and innovative approach to such disciplines by carrying out a geometric survey of the city that was groundbreaking for his time.
Through over 120 works including ancient architectural elements, rare fifteenth-century drawings showing ancient buildings as they were visible at the time, either in part or complete, objects, manuscripts, sculptures and paintings, the volume illustrates the state of Rome’s ancient architecture and how it was perceived in Alberti’s time. In particular the architecture that inspired his treatise and his projects (Hadrian’s Mausoleum, the Pantheon, the Coliseum, the architecture of the Roman forums of Augustus and Trajan, the triumphal arches and the baths). The volume is completed with ancient artefacts (coins, bronze statues from the ships of Nemi and gems), manuscripts by the most important humanists operating in Rome at the time who were also known to Alberti and some of the most significant paintings and sculptures linked to his research and his vision of ancient art and culture. Finally the volume concludes with drawings showing the principal interventions carried out on ancient and Christian monuments under the popes, in particular the project for St. Peter’s and the surrounding area under Nicholas V, the Pope who first envisaged a new Christian Rome in the fifteenth century based on the ancient city.
The volume includes essays by Francesco Paolo Fiore, Howard Burns, Arnold Nesselrath, Paolo Fancelli, Alessandro Viscogliosi, Arnold Esch, Massimo Miglio, Christoph L. Frommel, Arnaldo Bruschi, Pier Nicola Pagliara, Arturo Calzona and Massimo Bulgarelli; these are followed by sections on the city (with texts by Flavia Cantatore and Francesco Paolo Di Teodoro), on ancient architecture (Piero Spagnesi, Arnold Nesselrath, Christiane Denker Nesselrath, Michela Tata, Paola Zampa, Alessandro Viscogliosi, Anita Lalle, Beatrice Pinna Caboni, Lucrezia Ungaro, Giorgio Ortolani, Renata Samperi, Riccardo Santangeli Valenzani and Max Schich), on the humanists and artists (Francesco Paolo Fiore, Enrico Parlato, Concetta Bianca, Anna Cavallaro and Mara Minasi), and restoration and new architecture.

Rome, Musei Capitolini
23 June – 16 October 2005
The official catalogue is available at the exhibition bookshop and at the bookstore in via Torino 61, Milan, and from 31 August in all Italian bookshops.