Leon Battista Alberti

• 1. Introduction

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  Leon Battista Alberti once boasted that he could stand with his feet together and spring clean over a man's head. He claimed he could throw a coin so high inside the great cathedral of Florence that it rang against the vault. He tamed wild horses for amusement and climbed mountains for sport. These feats come from a short autobiography he wrote about himself around 1438, in Latin, in the third person, and many scholars still argue over how much to believe. The man making these claims was born in 1404 and died in 1472. In between, he wrote on painting, sculpture, architecture, family life, law, geography, and the gods of Olympus. He designed churches, palaces, and at least one fountain basin. He invented a cipher that historians would later call the most significant advance in cryptography since the ancient world. So who was this person who refused to stay inside any single field? What did he build, what did he write, and why does a curator of perspective from six centuries ago still turn up in arguments about Cubism, Einstein, and computer graphics? And what was it about a winged eye that he wanted carved beside his own face?

• 2. A Wealthy Exile's Son

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  Bianca Fieschi was his mother, and his father, Lorenzo di Benedetto Alberti, was a wealthy Florentine who had been exiled from his own city. Lorenzo was finally allowed to return in 1428. The family's banishment shaped where the young Alberti grew up and learned. He was sent to boarding school in Padua, then studied law at the University of Bologna. For a time he lived in Florence. In 1431 he travelled to Rome, took holy orders, and entered the service of the papal court. Rome gave him more than a clerical post. He spent his days among the ancient ruins, and the study of those broken sites stirred an interest in architecture that would steer the rest of his life. The buildings he later designed carried the imprint of what he saw in the Roman wreckage. He was described as tall and strong, an athlete skilled in horseback riding and gifted in many ways. Even as a schoolboy he stood out as a writer. By the age of twenty he had written a play polished enough to be passed off as a genuine piece of Classical literature. That talent for convincing imitation would follow him into adulthood, and one of his early forgeries would fool a famous printer long after he was gone.

• 3. The Genuine Forgery

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  Philodoxius, the comedy Alberti wrote when he was twenty, fooled the younger Aldus Manutius. Manutius edited and published it as the genuine work of an ancient writer he called Lepidus Comicus. The deception held because Alberti was a skilled composer of Latin verse and a careful student of the Greek and Roman authors he loved. Lucian was among his favourites, and Alberti borrowed many characters from him. That borrowing fed one of his stranger books, Momus, written between 1443 and 1450, a comedy about the Olympian deities. Some readers have treated Momus as a roman à clef, a story whose gods stand for real people. In certain sources, Jupiter has been identified with Pope Eugenius IV and Pope Nicholas V. The plot is savage and absurd. Momus, the god of mockery whose name comes from the Greek word for blame, is expelled from heaven and eventually castrated. Jupiter and the other gods come down to earth too, then flee back to heaven after Jupiter breaks his nose in a great storm. Alberti has also been credited as the author, or the designer of the woodcut illustrations, of a strange fantasy novel called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. His pen rarely stayed in one register for long.

• 4. Painting As Mathematics

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  "To make clear my exposition in writing this brief commentary on painting," Alberti began his treatise, "I will take first from the mathematicians those things with which my subject is concerned." That treatise was Della pittura, also known in Latin as De Pictura, begun in 1435 and inspired by the burgeoning pictorial art of early fifteenth-century Florence. He considered mathematics the foundation of arts and sciences. In the book he analysed the nature of painting and worked through perspective, composition, and colour. The Latin version was dedicated to his patron Gianfrancesco Gonzaga of Mantua. An Italian translation appeared in 1436, one year after the original, and its preface addressed Filippo Brunelleschi. Alberti's grasp of perspective rested on classical optics. His knowledge ran back to the Kitab al-manazir of the Arab polymath Alhazen, known as Ibn al-Haytham, who died around 1041. That work passed through the Franciscan optical workshops of the thirteenth century and scholars such as Roger Bacon, John Peckham, and Witelo. Out of this came the Albertian Window, his idea of the painting as a window onto a scene. It remains a foundational concept in linear perspective, still in use today in fields from architecture to computer graphics.

• 5. Imitating Nature's Best

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  "All steps of learning should be sought from nature," Alberti wrote in both Della pittura and De statua, his work on sculpture. The artist's ultimate aim was to imitate nature, so that the finished work would appear to the observer as similar as possible to real objects. But he did not mean copying nature exactly as it is. The artist should be especially attentive to beauty, "for in painting beauty is as pleasing as it is necessary." His instruction was to select. "So let's take from nature what we are going to paint," he wrote, "and from nature we choose the most beautiful and worthy things." Beauty, for Alberti, was "the harmony of all parts in relation to one another." A work was so constructed that nothing could be taken away or added without harming the beauty of the whole. This concord, he said, was realised in a particular number, proportion, and arrangement. The ideas were not new. They could be traced back to Pythagoras. What Alberti did was set them in a fresh context that suited the aesthetic conversation of his own time. He also built a theory he called historia, about how the accumulation of people, animals, and buildings creates harmony and holds the eye of learned and unlearned viewers alike. He drew on contact with artists like Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Ghiberti to turn theory into a practical handbook.

• 6. Building From The Ruins

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  In 1452 Alberti completed De re aedificatoria, the first architectural treatise of the Renaissance. He built it on the work of Vitruvius, the Roman architect and engineer who flourished between 46 and 30 BC, and on his own close study of ancient Roman buildings. The treatise ranged from history to town planning, from engineering to aesthetics. It was a large and expensive book, and it was not published until 1485, after which it became a major reference for architects. He wrote it, he said, "not only for craftsmen but also for anyone interested in the noble arts." The first Italian edition came out in 1546, and Cosimo Bartoli's standard Italian edition followed in 1550. The whole work was dedicated to Pope Nicholas V, who dreamed of rebuilding Rome but realised only a fragment of his visionary plans. Alberti treated the architect as a designer rather than a builder. He did not concern himself with engineering, and very few of his major projects were actually built. He studied column and lintel architecture from a visual rather than a structural viewpoint, and he correctly employed the Classical orders, unlike Brunelleschi, who used the column and pilaster more freely. He thought about the social effects of buildings and the shape of the city. He anticipated the principle of street hierarchy, with wide main streets feeding secondary ones and buildings of equal height.

• 7. Façades And Scrolls

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  The façade of the Rucellai Palace in Florence, designed beginning in 1446, was Alberti's first major architectural commission. Its design overlays a grid of shallow pilasters and cornices in classical style onto rusticated masonry, crowned by a heavy cornice, with Corinthian columns in the inner courtyard. The work was executed by Bernardo Rossellino, and it introduced classical building elements into Florentine civic architecture. Alberti added a continuous bench at the base for people to sit on, a sign of his attention to the urban landscape. In 1450 Sigismondo Malatesta commissioned him to transform the Gothic church of San Francesco in Rimini into a memorial chapel, the Tempio Malatestiano, whose façade was left incomplete. At Santa Maria Novella in Florence, worked on between 1448 and 1470, Alberti faced a harder puzzle. The lower level already had three doorways, six Gothic niches with tombs, polychrome marble, and an ocular window. He spread the polychromy over the whole front and added Classical pilasters, cornices, and a pediment, with a sunburst in tesserae instead of sculpture. His most celebrated solution joined the tall central nave to the much lower side aisles using two large scrolls. Those scrolls became a standard feature of church façades through the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical Revival, a precedent followed for four hundred years.

• 8. The Universal Genius

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  David Kahn, a historian of cryptography, called Alberti the "Father of Western Cryptography." He pointed to three advances credited to him: the earliest Western account of cryptanalysis, the invention of polyalphabetic substitution, and the invention of enciphered code. Alberti built the first polyalphabetic cipher, now called the Alberti cipher, and machine-assisted encryption with his Cipher Disk. He explained ciphers in an essay, De componendis cifris. The first known explanation of cryptanalysis had actually come six centuries earlier from Al-Kindi, a 9th-century Arab polymath. Alberti's restless curiosity reached further still. He wrote the first Italian grammar, collaborated with the Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli on astronomy, and produced a small Latin work on geography, Descriptio urbis Romae. He took holy orders and never married. He loved animals, kept a pet mongrel dog, and wrote a panegyric for it called Canis. He may appear in Mantegna's frescoes in the Camera degli Sposi as the older man in dark red who whispers in the ear of Ludovico Gonzaga, the ruler of Mantua. Alberti died in Rome on the 25th of April 1472, at the age of 68. Vasari called him "an admirable citizen, a man of culture... a friend of talented men, open and courteous with everyone." On Alberti's own self-portrait medallion, beside his profile dressed as a Roman, sat a winged eye and a single question, Quid tum, what then, lifted from Virgil's Eclogues.