Abstract
Beginning with the difference between the title of the first edition of Grafton’s book and that of the Italian translation, this paper aims to retrace some of its fundamental themes, all of which share a common feature: Alberti’s contradictions. He was in fact the eclectic and versatile Renaissance scholar par excellence and his talent was already considered versatile and chameleonic by his contemporaries. In all of his work, however, he is a paradoxical Janus figure: he is energized by his research into literary and artistic decorum but distressed by an awareness of the fragility and weakness of the human condition. The method of literary composition typical of Alberti and the other humanists – that is, a hypertextual and ‘mosaic’ method – forces us to read his works with an eye toward their ambiguity and uncertainty because his accumulative techniques amplify and expand their constitutive contrasts and oppositions.