Review of Living Well in Renaissance Italy: The Virtues of Humanism and the Irony of Leon Battista Alberti, by Timothy Kircher.

Leon Battista Alberti wrote with a sense of irony that separated his works from his humanist contemporaries and linked him to the tradition of fourteenth-century vernacular writers, particularly Petrarch and Boccaccio. His irony was characterized by his encouragement to look for virtue beneath appearances and his distrust of equating virtue with humanist learning.