La saggezza disincantata di Leon Battista Alberti

The essay aims to investigate the two aspects with which Leon Battista Alberti introduces himself: on one side the great and rational architect and artist, the infallible and determinate theoretical of civil coexistence and family’s equilibrium as prerequisites of “good living”. On the other side, mainly in the latin works such as Momus and Intercenales, the disillusioned pessimist who captures ruthlessly (before Machiavelli and Erasmo) the human weaknesses, the Church and State corruption, the nonsensical logic of wars, the same distortion of the evangelical message combined with a strong crisis of the political action. To this bitter human condition Alberti, in the wake of Plinio, thus opposes the urge to “build”, to put an end to the disintegrations of the civil and religious society, to be protagonists of a real renewal of traditions through art and good governance of the essential nuclei of society both from the economic and family point of view.