Date: April 5th to 8th, 2011
Location: Auditorium of the UFMG School of Architecture

The inventiveness of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) is infinite. There is nothing or almost nothing – literature, arts, sciences, economics, morals and politics – that Alberti has not dealt with and that has not been profoundly modified by the always unique reading that he gave him. And in such a way that not only culture, but also the modes of rationality were able to take on unprecedented aspects that even the term « humanism » is unable to circumscribe. It is still up to contemporary times to reflect on these aspects.

Our Colloquium aims precisely to define, in addition to the traditional categories of historiography, these new modes of rationality that the peculiar approach to knowledge given by Alberti engendered in all fields – artistic and technical, moral, political, etc. – and to measure its influence over time, until today. The ambition of this Colloquium is precisely this: to investigate how Alberti’s work can help us think about the world today, on both sides of the Atlantic. From this perspective, we highlight four themes that seem especially relevant to us:

1) Alberti’s influence on the city’s new rationalities, based on an anthropological approach that emphasizes human fragility in the face of the chaos of the world;
2) Its founding role in terms of artistic, technical and operational rationalities, which redefine theory and practice and give them new configurations;
3) His far-sighted approach and his decisive understanding, in the context of his time, of the text/image relationship, which will play a fundamental role in the constitution of modern rationality;
4) Finally, the logic of transmission and translation involved in this unique interpretation of knowledge.

The Colloquium addressed these topics in six different sessions and one session dedicated to analyzing the results of the meeting and the perspectives then opened.