Abstract.
On the basis of a new survey, Angela Pintore analyzes the microarchitecture of the Rucellai Sepulchre in Florence, the only object designed ex novo by Leon Battista Alberti. Attention is also given to the relationship established between the sepulchre and the chapel that houses it, and to the modifications made to the chapel by Alberti himself. Alberti studied carefully the combinations between the number of the elements of the front elevation and that of lateral elevation and of the apse so that the relationship between them would recall the harmonic musical ratios that he set forth in De re aedificatoria, in which he outlines the correspondence between architectural proportions and harmonic musical ratios that will become the element that characterizes Renaissance architectural theory, inaugurating a tradition that will begin to see a decline only in the eighteenth century. In spite of the myriad difficulties of establishing if these speculations had indeed any concrete effect on architecture, it is clear that Alberti’s theory is not the result of individual reflection, based solely on the classical sources that Alberti himself explicitly cites in his treatise, but rather is the culmination of an age-old tradition of thought that, during the whole arc of the Middle Ages, had deepened the study of the symbolic and expressive value of harmonic ratios.
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Pintore, A. Musical Symbolism in the Works of Leon Battista Alberti. Nexus Netw J 6, 49–70 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00004-004-0018-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00004-004-0018-3