ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights Alberti’s explicit and implicit views on the relationships between architecture and the affetti, architecture and the delight of the senses, and visual pleasure, and on their relationship to beauty. Art historical studies of the relationships between aesthetic expression and emotion have concentrated on painting to the neglect of architecture. Renaissance and early modern writings frequently advert to architecture as propitious in eliciting certain ‘affects’ and effective in suppressing others. The most important writer on architecture of the early Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti founds his analysis of the role of building on theory, observation, and reflection and forges a new language for the built environment. Classical and medieval thinkers associated architecture with the development of human civilization but relegated it to a low position in human achievement, consonant with its manual status. The multifarious functions of architecture preclude simplistic prescription. Roman architecture is characterized by Alberti chiefly by its moral quality.
