Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting

Peter Weller has written a nonfiction book Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting. On the surface, this seems most unusual: Peter Weller is known as an actor for playing lead roles in everything from RoboCop to Naked Lunch. If you dive a bit deeper, you’ll discover Peter Weller has earned a legitimate PhD in Italian Renaissance Art History from UCLA.

In Alberti in Exile, Peter looks at the life and influences of Leon Battista Alberti who created De pictura, the first modern approach to art history. Not only is it a look at the struggles of a writer to invent a structure and taxonomy of art history across hundreds of years, but also it looks at past attempts at the same challenge.

Beautiful images and a veritable metric ton of endnotes supplemental a text that is challenging, educational, yet also approachable. Sure, one can see this book being used as a textbook in an upper level Art History course, but with a little extra work, one can also read and get something from it with no art history background whatsoever.

Even though the introduction makes some fun pop culture references to such characters as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, make no mistake Alberti in Exile is a rugged piece of academia through and through. A sort of origin story for art history in the modern sense, Alberti in Exile makes you think of what came before and what the future may bring in the one constant in this world: art.

Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting is now available for purchase in hardcover and on Kindle from Amazon.