BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

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Transcribed version of the text

French

     The Latin edition printed by Jakob Cammerlander in Strasbourg in 1541 is attributed to the Rhineland humanist Eberhard Tappe. It borrows the principle of dividing books into chapters with specific titles from Geoffroy Tory's Parisian edition, while at the same time introducing a new division of the chapters for books IX and X. It adopts shorter and more pertinent titles and does not retain the paragraphs inside the chapters which had appeared in 1512. The later editions would keep these divisions. In 1546  Pietro Lauro would translate the 1541 chapter headings into Italian, Cosimo Bartoli in 1550 with a few variants, and Jean Martin into French in 1550, who put forth a new division into paragraphs. Towards the middle of the 16^th century, the De re ædificatoria remained an important architectural treatise, although obsolete.

Frédérique Lemerle (Centre national de la recherche scientifique,
Centre d'études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours)– 2013

Critical bibliography

F. Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti. Opera completa, Milan, Electa, 1986 (1^st ed.: 1973).

M. Carpo, L’architettura dell’età della stampa: oralità, scrittura, libro stampato e riproduzione meccanica dell’immagine nella storia delle teorie architettoniche, Milan, Jaca Book 1998.

M. Carpo, “La traduction française du De re ædificatoria (1553). Alberti, Martin, Serlio et l’échec d’un classicisme vulgaire”, Leon Battista Alberti, F. Furlan, P. Laurens & S. Matton (eds.), Turin, Nino Aragno/Paris, Vrin, 2000, 2, p. 934.