The body has a history. Although Hamlet's "mortal coil" is said to speak universal and unchanging truths about our physical and emotional experiences, conceptions of the body in Shakespeare'
To many people the idea that 'the body' has its own history might sound faintly ridiculous. The body and its experiences are usually seen as something that we share with people from the past. Like 'hu
Leon Battista Alberti was one of the most important humanist scholars of the Italian Renaissance. Active in mid-fifteenth-century Florence, he was an architect, theorist, and author of texts on perspective and painting. Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting is a cardinal work that revolutionized Western art. In this volume Rocco Sinisgalli presents a new English translation and critical examination of Alberti's seminal text. Dr Sinisgalli reverses the received understanding of the relationship between the Italian and Latin versions of Alberti's treatise by demonstrating that Alberti wrote it first in Italian and then translated it into a polished Latin over the course of several decades. This volume is richly illustrated to help demonstrate how Alberti understood optics and art.
