McLaughlin, Martin. Leon Battista Alberti: Writer and Humanist

Alberti: Writer and Humanist is clear, elegant, and learned.McLaughlin explores the life and works of Battista degli Alberti (1404-72), or Baptista de Albertis, and calls attention to him being the first in the Renaissance to write an autobiography, Vita, a short and unfinished Latin work first published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.In Vita, Alberti used a third person narrator, McLaughlin maintains, to be like one of the Lives of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius.For McLaughlin, the attention that Jacob Burckhardt gave Alberti's Vita in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (trans.S.G.C. Middlemore [London: Allen & Unwin, 1890]) spread its influence (15).In chapter 1, McLaughlin seeks to give an accurate view of Alberti's life, and, in chapter 2, he examines Vita to compare Alberti's representation of his life and the myth about him in Burckhardt's work (16).McLaughlin emphasizes that Alberti wrote in Latin and Italian on many subjects across many genres, including dialogues, humorous works, and treatises (31).Moreover, McLaughlin follows the tradition of scholars such as Anthony Grafton in comparing Burckhardt's portrait of Alberti with Alberti's own self-portrait in Vita (35-36).McLaughlin sums up Burckhardt's representation of Alberti as "a man of intensity and strong personality, and thus of qualities which are anachronistically projected backwards onto the subject, while his work ethic and humour have been underplayed and his weaknesses, paranoia, and melancholies have been air-brushed out" (44; see also 37).McLaughlin maintains that Alberti was a versatile writer and architect (49), and that this versatility and innovation characterize Alberti's work across genres.For McLaughlin, Alberti contributes to a "turn" in Humanism in the wake of Petrarch (50).Like Petrarch, Alberti focused on recovering and analyzing classical texts, but he was less interested in restoring texts than he was in examining and assimilating their values and content while also concentrating on a wider range of disciplines (50).Both Petrarch and Alberti were literary figures trained in the law who took minor religious orders and had ecclesiastical benefices throughout their lives, but Alberti also focused on mathematics and natural philosophy (51).As McLaughlin notes, Alberti embraced the technical,

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