Leon Battista Alberti’s Delineation of the City of Rome (Descriptio vrbis Romæ)

Critical edition by Jean-Yves Boriaud & Francesco Furlan

English translation by Peter Hicks

In the 1440s, Leon Battista Alberti carried out a topographical survey of the city of Rome that, he claims, was conducted as accurately as possible using “mathematical tools” (ex mathematicis instrumentis). Around 1450 he published his findings in a small book, entitled Descriptio urbis Romæ, which describes a simple technical device, a drawing instrument composed of two graduated parts: a circle, which Alberti calls horizon, and its revolving spoke (called, appropriately, radius), that each reader of his book is expected to use to draw his or her own personal copy of Alberti’s original map of Rome.

Long neglected, this work of Alberti’s has been the subject of a recent critical revival. The Société Internationale Leon Battista Alberti and ACMRS have joined forces to publish the first critical edition of Alberti’s Latin text based on all known manuscripts, a philological study of its manuscript tradition and of its tradition in print, its first English translation, and two essays that assess and contextualize the relation of text and images. As will be shown, Alberti’s apparently untimely experimentation with digital technologies should be seen in the light of Alberti’s critical approach to the production and transmission of hand-made drawings — a crucial node of his work as a theoretician as well as a practitioner in several visual arts. In turn, this issue pertains to a larger and more general field of enquiry: the history of the use of variable media for the transmission of reliable visual information before the rise of printed images.