From Leon Battista Alberti to Jane Austen via Giacomo Leoni and BBC drama

Abstract

Despite the exalted presence in the title of the names of Leon Battista Alberti and Jane Austen, the present paper is fundamentally a plea for greater recognition of the talents and achievements of Giacomo Leoni (1686-1746), as editor of the great Italian humanist, Leon Battista Alberti, as an architect in his own right and as a proselytiser of AngloPalladian architecture. Leoni's English edition of Alberti's great Renaissance treatise On Architecture (1726-29) endured for two and a half centuries, and even now has a strong presence in the only other translation done since that date, Joseph Rykwert's edition of 1988. Leoni helped create and consolidate a taste for Palladian or Anglo-Palladian architecture in England through that edition of Alberti, and through his earlier publication of Andrea Palladio's The Four Books of Architecture (1715-20).