Download or read book The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti written by Kim Williams and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leon Battista Alberti was an outstanding polymath of the fifteenth century, alongside Piero della Francesca and before Leonardo da Vinci. While his contributions to architecture and the visual arts are well known and available in good English editions, and much of his literary and social writings are also available in English, his mathematical works are not well represented in readily available, accessible English editions have remained accessible only to specialists. The four treatises included here – Ludi matematici, De Componendis Cifris, Elementi di pittura and De lunularum quadratura – are extremely valuable in rounding out the portrait of this multitalented thinker. The treatises are presented in modern English translations, with commentary that is intended to make evident the depths of Alberti’s knowledge as well as address the treatises’ mathematical, historical and cultural context, their classical Greek roots, and their relationship to later works by Renaissance thinkers.
Download or read book The Geometry of an Art written by Kirsti Andersen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-11-23 with total page 837 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This review of literature on perspective constructions from the Renaissance through the 18th century covers 175 authors, emphasizing Peiro della Francesca, Guidobaldo del Monte, Simon Stevin, Brook Taylor, and Johann Heinrich. It treats such topics as the various methods of constructing perspective, the development of theories underlying the constructions, and the communication between mathematicians and artisans in these developments.
Download or read book On Painting written by Leon Battista Alberti and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1966-01-01 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alberti’s Della Pittura was the first modern analytical study of painting, a pioneering treatise on the theory of art. A systematic description of the one-point perspective construction, it was primarily designed to persuade both patron and painter in the Renaissance to discard the old tastes in painting for the new. John R. Spencer's translation of Della Pittura is based on all the known manuscripts and is edited with an Introduction and Notes.
Download or read book Measured Words written by Arielle Saiber and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2017-11-29 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Measured Words explores the rich commerce between computation and writing that proliferated in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. In this captivating and generously illustrated work, Arielle Saiber studies the relationship between number, shape, and the written word in the works of four exceptional thinkers of the time: Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Pacioli, Niccolò Tartaglia, and Giambattista Della Porta. Although these Renaissance humanists came from different social classes and practised the mathematical and literary arts at varying levels of sophistication, they were all guided by a sense that there exist deep ontological and epistemological bonds between computational and verbal thinking and production. Their shared view that a network or continuity exists between the literary arts and mathematics yielded extraordinary results, from Alberti’s treatise on cryptography and Pacioli’s design calculations for the Roman alphabet to Tartaglia’s poetic solutions of cubic equations and Della Porta’s dramatic applications of geometry. Through lively, cogent analysis of these and other related texts of the period, Measured Words presents, literally and figuratively, brilliant examples of what interdisciplinary work can offer us.
Download or read book Rome Measured and Imagined written by Jessica Maier and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-05-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the fifteenth century, Rome was a city in transitionparts ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan and Christianand as it emerged from its medieval decline through the return of papal power and the onset of the Renaissance, its portrayals in print transformed as well. Jessica Maier s book explores the history of the Roman city portrait genre during the rise of Renaissance print culture. She illustrates how the maps of this era helped to promote the city, to educate, and to facilitate armchair exploration and what they reveal about how the people of Rome viewed or otherwise imagined their city. She also advances our understanding of early modern cartography, which embodies a delicate, intentional balance between science and art. The text is beautifully illustrated with nearly 100 images of the genre, a dozen of them in color."
Download or read book The Word made Visible in the Painted Image written by Stephen Miller and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-25 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the areas of perspective, proportion, witness and theological threshold in the devotional art of the Italian Renaissance, with particular reference to the painted image of Christ. While the Incarnation, in a very real way, legitimised the idea of the portrayal of God in human form (as Jesus Christ), problems remained as to how this might be achieved and whether it should be restricted to the second person of the Holy Trinity. This book looks at the creation of pictorial space and the presentation of the image – paying special attention to schemes of perspective, as a way to better describe reality, as well as to considerations of proportion through such geometric methodology as the Golden Section and dynamic root-rectangles (based on certain ‘perfect’ or divine ratios) to balance and harmonise form. The Word Made Visible in the Painted Image also explores the theological theme of threshold and liminal space, describes how themes such as the Incarnation and Revelation were represented, and looks at the symbolism employed in so doing. It shows how such themes were captured, set in space and communicated in the painted image. This study is necessarily interdisciplinary, combining the subject areas of art history and theory, theology, biblical study, philosophy, aesthetics, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, geometry, optics, physiology, psychology, and sociology, in greater and lesser degrees. Few books take such an interdisciplinary stance on art, theology, science and related disciplines to this extent.
Download or read book On Alberti and the Art of Building written by Robert Tavernor and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) - writer, painter and sculptor, mathematician and, most famously, architectural theorist and architect - came closer than anyone to the Renaissance ideal of the 'complete man'. Recognised by his contemporaries as an extraordinary person, he helped to shape, through his writings and his practical example in the arts, the way in which the natural and artificial world was perceived and represented during the Renaissance.
Download or read book Leon Battista Alberti Universal Man of the Early Renaissance written by Joan Gadol and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the Italian artist's achievements in painting, sculpture, architectu mathematics, and other fields, illuminating the aesthetic, scientific, and moral philosophy of the era.
Download or read book Visual Culture and Mathematics in the Early Modern Period written by Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the early modern period there was a natural correspondence between how artists might benefit from the knowledge of mathematics and how mathematicians might explore, through advances in the study of visual culture, new areas of enquiry that would uncover the mysteries of the visible world. This volume makes its contribution by offering new interdisciplinary approaches that not only investigate perspective but also examine how mathematics enriched aesthetic theory and the human mind. The contributors explore the portrayal of mathematical activity and mathematicians as well as their ideas and instruments, how artists displayed their mathematical skills and the choices visual artists made between geometry and arithmetic, as well as Euclid’s impact on drawing, artistic practice and theory. These chapters cover a broad geographical area that includes Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, France and England. The artists, philosophers and mathematicians whose work is discussed include Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Verrocchio, as well as Michelangelo, Galileo, Piero della Francesca, Girard Desargues, William Hogarth, Albrecht Dürer, Luca Pacioli and Raphael.
Download or read book On the Art of Building in Ten Books written by Leon Battista Alberti and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1991-07-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: De Re Aedificatoria, by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), was the first modern treatise on the theory and practice of architecture. Its importance for the subsequent history of architecture is incalculable, yet this is the first English translation based on the original, exceptionally eloquent Latin text on which Alberti's reputation as a theorist is founded.
Download or read book Humanism and the Urban World written by Caspar Pearson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 countryside and discussions of the virtues of the active versus the contemplative life; and his theories of aesthetics and beauty, in particular the belief that beauty may affect the soul of an enemy and thus preserve buildings from attack.
Download or read book Leon Battista Alberti written by Caspar Pearson and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2022-07-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new account of the sui generis Renaissance writer and architect Leon Battista Alberti. One of the most brilliant and original authors and architects of the entire Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti had an output encompassing engineering, surveying, cryptography, poetry, humor, political commentary, and more. He employed irony, satire, and playful allusion in his written works, and developed a sophisticated approach to architecture that combined the ancient and modern. Born into the Florentine elite, Alberti was nonetheless disadvantaged due to exile and illegitimacy. As a result, he became an acute analyst of the social institutions of his time, as well as a profoundly existential writer who was intensely preoccupied with the human condition. This new account explores Alberti’s life and works, examining how his personal and intellectual preoccupations continually pushed him to engage with an ever-broader spectrum of Renaissance culture.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy written by Marco Sgarbi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 3618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.
Download or read book A History in Sum written by Steve Nadis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twentieth century, American mathematicians began to make critical advances in a field previously dominated by Europeans. Harvard’s mathematics department was at the center of these developments. A History in Sum is an inviting account of the pioneers who trailblazed a distinctly American tradition of mathematics—in algebraic geometry and topology, complex analysis, number theory, and a host of esoteric subdisciplines that have rarely been written about outside of journal articles or advanced textbooks. The heady mathematical concepts that emerged, and the men and women who shaped them, are described here in lively, accessible prose. The story begins in 1825, when a precocious sixteen-year-old freshman, Benjamin Peirce, arrived at the College. He would become the first American to produce original mathematics—an ambition frowned upon in an era when professors largely limited themselves to teaching. Peirce’s successors—William Fogg Osgood and Maxime Bôcher—undertook the task of transforming the math department into a world-class research center, attracting to the faculty such luminaries as George David Birkhoff. Birkhoff produced a dazzling body of work, while training a generation of innovators—students like Marston Morse and Hassler Whitney, who forged novel pathways in topology and other areas. Influential figures from around the world soon flocked to Harvard, some overcoming great challenges to pursue their elected calling. A History in Sum elucidates the contributions of these extraordinary minds and makes clear why the history of the Harvard mathematics department is an essential part of the history of mathematics in America and beyond.
Download or read book Math at the Art Museum written by Group Majoongmul and published by . This book was released on 2015-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Math concepts: perspective, compositions, symmetry"--Cover.
Download or read book Leon Battista Alberti written by Martin McLaughlin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fresh, accessible, and rounded synthesis of the life and literary work of an important Renaissance figure"--
Download or read book Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture written by Peter Fane-Saunders and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Naturalis historia by Pliny the Elder provided Renaissance scholars, artists and architects with details of ancient architectural practice and long-lost architectural wonders - material that was often unavailable elsewhere in classical literature. Pliny's descriptions frequently included the dimensions of these buildings, as well as details of their unusual construction materials and ornament. This book describes, for the first time, how the passages were interpreted from around 1430 to 1580, that is, from Alberti to Palladio. Chapters are arranged chronologically within three interrelated sections - antiquarianism; architectural writings; drawings and built monuments - thereby making it possible for the reader to follow the changing attitudes to Pliny over the period. The resulting study establishes the Naturalis historia as the single most important literary source after Vitruvius's De architectura.
