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Anthony Grafton treats Alberti's writings as mosaics fashioned out of passages collected from ancient sources. He shows that, in the compositional interstices between such passages, Alberti expresses his most immediate social concerns: with his own position and with the reception of the work by his first readers. By focusing on the interstices rather than on the body of the texts, Grafton draws the most convincing portrait to date of Alberti as a man in a social environment. -- Jack M. Greenstein Wall Street Journal [Grafton] has produced a convincing and engaging account of Alberti's intellectual milieu in what is arguably the most important general contribution to Albertian studies of recent decades. -- Bruce Boucher New York Times Book Review

Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University.

Acknowledgments I. Who Was Leon Battista Alberti? Making an Identity in the 1430s II. Humanism: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Scholarship IlI. From New Technologies to Fine Arts: Alberti Among the Engineers IV. On Painting: Alberti and the Origins of Criticism V. Interpreting Florence: From Reading to Rebuilding VI. The Artist at Court: Alberti in Ferrara VII. His Lost City: Alberti the Antiquary VIII. Alberti on the Art of Building IX. The Architect and City Planner Epilogue Notes Index