LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI: MASTER BUILDER OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE.

By Anthony Grafton. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press. 200 I. [pound]25

Poetry, Drama, Antiquarianism, Engineering, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture ... Leon Battista Alberti mastered them all. Sometimes ironic, sometimes contradictory, he has remained something of an enigma throughout the five centuries following his death in 1472. This might not matter were it not for the fact that at stake are fundamental questions, such as the origins of why we now train architects rather than master masons or of why European cities became planned around public spaces.

Alberti's status as the 'first modern' has led to his serving as a lightning rod for the concerns of his subsequent biographers. Hence Wittkower's Alberti was an advocate of Modernism, Tafuri's of Marxist anti-authoritarianism. In the course of this new, fascinating biography, Anthony Grafton makes these past agendas clear. Grafton gets to grips with the complexity of Alberti as the first 'universal tracing his interconnected concerns from his public poetry contest in Florence and his antiquarian studies among the ruins of Rome to the 'antique' forms and decoration of his buildings. In the end the humanist dream of a reborn republic of letters that Grafton sees as Alberti's ultimate purpose eluded him, destroyed by artistic bickerings in Florence and papal pride in Rome. But faith in the classical virtues of decorum and modesty remained with him until his death. Somewhat paradoxically, Alberti also emerges in this book as something of a chameleon, adapting himself to his changing circumstances much as he wo uld mould his famous buildings to fit their contexts. Grafton's Alberti is in many ways a creature of our own more relativist and less quixotic age.