#124 Leon Battista Alberti in Exile: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Weller

Saturday, June 6th Live on Zoom

10am Los Angeles / 1pm New York / 6pm London / 7pm Florence

Leon Battista Alberti, the prodigy poet, playwright, architect, painter, and humanist savant, was the author of De pictura (“On Painting”), a treatise composed first in Latin in 1435, then published in 1450.  It is one of his three treatises on art; the other two are De statua and De re aedificatoria – the three would form the Renaissance concept for the fine arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture. In 2025, Peter Weller published Leon Battista Alberti: Tracing the Path to the First Modern Book on Painting, in which he challenges the popular notion that De pictura's compendium on lines, points, mathematics, composition, narrative, and portraiture is primarily the result of Alberti's return to Florence and his short exposure to its visual art.  Weller argues that Rome, Padua, Bologna, and Northern Europe – environs where Alberti studied, worked, and lived during exile – empowered his paramount intellectual-artistic gifts.  Alberti, who many call the original “Renaissance man,” merged the two most conspicuous cultural developments of early modern Italy – visual art and humanism ― to create De pictura, our first modern book on painting.

Peter Weller is not just a scholar and writer, but an American actor and director and jazz trumpeter in the quintet FLY NAKED. In 2004, Weller completed an MA in Roman and Renaissance Art at the unique Syracuse University program in Florence, Italy. In 2014 he received his PhD from UCLA. His dissertation was Alberti Before Florence: Early Sources Informing Leon Battista Alberti's De pictura. He has appeared in more than 70 films and TV series, including RoboCop (1987) in which he played the title character; and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), including such films as Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite (1995), and David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991). He recently launched his YouTube channel, Weller World and is soon to appear with Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino’s sequel to ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, directed by David Fincher.

To RSVP: Paola50122@gmail.com

Minimum suggested donation: $28

This talk is free for Friends of Paola's Studiolo!

Look forward to seeing you on Zoom!