De la famille marchande à la cour princière: <i>I Libri della Famiglia</i> de Leon Battista Alberti

This article concerns a major work by Alberti in the tradition of treatises on household management. The first three books construct the ideal bourgeois domestic economy around the family; the fourth and last book shows that this ideal is being supplanted by the courtly model, whose centre of gravity is not the family but the court. But Alberti does not idealize the courtly life, as do most of the household treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.