| Abstract: | "Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was one of the most famous figures of the Italian Renaissance. His extraordinary range of abilities as a writer, architect, art theorist, and even athlete earned him the title of the first "Renaissance man." Alberti was a prolific author, but only a few of his works are well known today: these are his vernacular dialogue on the family (De familia, 1433-43); his treatise on painting, which he wrote first in the vernacular and then in Latin (Della pittura/De pictura, 1435-36; 1439-41); and his Latin treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building), written 1443-72. Yet these represent only the tip of the huge iceberg of writings that he composed. Consequently, one of the first aims of this volume is to bring to the attention of a wider public five significant Latin compositions that have largely been neglected even though they tell us much about his literary aims and development, and contain a strongly biographical and/or autobiographical dimension. The pieces that make up this volume are: the early treatise/invective De commodis litterarum atque incommodis (On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature, 1428-32), which partly reflects his experiences as a student in Bologna in the 1420s; the biography of an obscure Christian martyr, Vita S. Potiti (The Life of Saint Potitus, 1432-34), which also contains autobiographical projections; a mock funeral oration for his dead dog, Canis (My Dog, c. 1438), which however also has distinct autobiographical overtones; his own autobiography, entitled Vita (My Life, 1438-44), one of the first autobiographies of the early modern period; and a comic encomium of the fly, entitled Musca (The Fly, 1441-43), inspired by one of Lucian's works, but this too contains many elements of his own self-portrait. These five Latin works, written over a space of fifteen years, provide an insight into a crucial phase of Alberti's growth as a writer, as he gradually finds his own voice in these biographical and autobiographical writings"-- |
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