Cosimo Bartoli, L'architettura di Leonbatista Alberti ... , Venezia, 1565.
Second Italian translation of Leon Battista Alberti's (1404-1472) De re aedificatoria by Cosimo Bartoli (1503-1572). Alberti contributed decisively to the fortune of Vitruvius by means of this work with which he laid the foundations to the modern genre of the architecture treatise. Alberti discussed Vitruvian matter and its themes with a more rational and systematic articulation.
This is a fundamental work also on a linguistic level: Alberti approached the difficult Vitruvian lexicon with a creative spirit, replacing the many Grecisms with corresponding Latin terms sometimes coined ex-novo for the purpose.
Bartoli, involved in the political and cultural project of the Accademia Fiorentina founded by Cosimo I, introduced more innovations, translating Alberti's treatise into "Florentine language", as stated in the title, with little fidelity to the original text: Alberti's lexicon is ignored and systematically replaced by technical terms retrieved from the artisan world of the sixteenth century Florence.
The first edition of the work, in folio, came out in Florence in 1550 published by Torrentini, in 1500 copies that went out of print in a few years. Our specimen is part of the second edition, published in 1565 in Florence by Franceschi, in quarto.