Alberti wrote the Renaissance rulebook for buildings and pictures
By the time he was twenty, Leon Battista Alberti had written a comedy that readers accepted as a genuine ancient text. The Genoa-born priest (1404–1472) went on to explain perspective to painters in Della pittura, write the Renaissance's first treatise on architecture, design Mantua's Sant'Andrea, and share credit for founding European cryptography.
Born in Genoa to exiled Florentine Lorenzo Alberti and Bianca Fieschi, he boarded in Padua, studied law at Bologna, took orders in Rome in 1431, and haunted ancient ruins that reshaped his façades. By twenty he had forged a play mistaken for classical literature; by 1435 Della pittura, dedicated to Brunelleschi, borrowed mathematics to clarify perspective, composition, and colour for painters chasing nature's beauty as harmonious proportion.
Architecture drew him from 1438 under Leonello d'Este; as advisor to Pope Nicholas V he eyed Vatican works. The Rucellai Palace façade (from 1446), Rimini's Tempio Malatestiano for Sigismondo Malatesta, and Santa Maria Novella's scrolled upper front solved awkward nave-to-aisle joins that church builders copied for centuries. Mantua's unfinished San Sebastiano and posthumously built Sant'Andrea (design 1471) show the classical orders handled with Vitruvian discipline rather than Brunelleschi's freer pilasters.
Smaller projects ran alongside: an essay on ciphers, De componendis cifris, the first grammar of Italian, astronomy with the Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli, and a short Latin panorama of Rome. He wrote about family life and money in Tuscan, never married, and composed a eulogy, Canis, for his mongrel dog. Vasari remembered him as courteous and honourable; he died in Rome on 25 April 1472, aged 68. Underneath all of it sat mathematics: beauty, for Alberti, meant parts in such concord that nothing could be added or removed without harm.
Few of his designs were ever built, and he judged columns and lintels by how they looked rather than how they carried load. His eye was social and urban: the Rucellai Palace got a built-in bench running along its base for passers-by, and he pictured cities of broad main streets feeding narrower ones, lined with buildings of equal height. For Nicholas V he restored the Acqua Vergine aqueduct and ended it in a plain basin, later swept away for the Baroque Trevi Fountain. De re aedificatoria reached print only in 1485, gained its first Italian edition in 1546, and Cosimo Bartoli's standard version in 1550.
Source: Leon Battista Alberti
