Architects and Designers

Leon Battista Alberti

lay-OHN bah-TEE-stah al-BAIR-tee

Renaissance

Citation Formats

General Reference

Architecture and Design Atlas. "Leon Battista Alberti." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-architecture.interactiveatlas.org/architects/leon-battista-alberti.

APA Style

Architecture and Design Atlas. (n.d.). Leon Battista Alberti. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-architecture.interactiveatlas.org/architects/leon-battista-alberti

BibTeX

@misc{architectureanddesignatlas-leon-battista-alberti,
  author = {Architecture and Design Atlas},
  title = {Leon Battista Alberti},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-architecture.interactiveatlas.org/architects/leon-battista-alberti},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Italian Renaissance humanist, architect and author, 1404 to 1472, whose De re aedificatoria, presented to Pope Nicholas V in 1452, was the first work of architectural theory written since antiquity, self-consciously modelled on Vitruvius's De architectura. Alberti grounded architectural beauty in mathematical proportion and built the Palazzo Rucellai and Santa Maria Novella facades in Florence and Sant'Andrea in Mantua, establishing architecture as a liberal art rather than a craft.

Facts

Birth Date

1404-02-14 1

Birth Year

1404 1

Death Date

1472-04-25 1

Death Year

1472 1

Nationality

Italian 1

Defining Contribution

Reviving classical architectural theory grounded in mathematical proportion, in De re aedificatoria, the first treatise of its kind since Vitruvius. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections