ABSTRACT
A comparative study of frontispieces of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries reveals the changing role of architecture within the social constructs of aristocratic patronage. The sixteenth-century frontispiece depicts the notion of the ordered city having, as its basis, urban decorum, magnificentia, and Vitruvian authority. The eighteenth-century project of the frontispiece represented the internationalization of processes of cultural development, which aimed to diffuse the universal canon of architecture through the transformation of individual taste in architecture. Leon Battista Alberti's architectural treatise was aimed at correcting the grammatical and rhetorical deficiencies of the Vitruvian text, De architectura, which was the only extant authoritative text on architecture left from antiquity. Alberti's transformation of Vitruvian ideals into a treatise had not included any illustrative explication for difficult concepts but was dedicated to transforming the worth of the ancient text for the readers of humanist scholarship of the fifteenth century.
