Leon Battista Alberti
1404-1472
Italian Architect and Writer
Like many key figures in the history of mathematics during the Middle Ages, Leon Battista Alberti was not a professional mathematician, and the advances he made in that discipline were in service to another—in his case, architecture. Nonetheless, his contributions were of great importance and included the first general study on the laws of perspective (Della pittura, 1435) and a book on cryptography that includes the first use of a frequency table. Alberti also worked with Toscanelli dal Pozzo (1397-1482), who later provided the maps used by Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) for his now-famous first voyage on a project involving geometrical mapping.
Born in Genoa on February 14, 1404, Alberti was the illegitimate son of Lorenzo Alberti, a prominent Florentine who had been banishedfrom his city three years before. He attended school at Padua, then enrolled at the University of Bologna in 1421. There he earned a degree in canon law in about 1428, and around this time received an appointment as prior of San Martino in Tuscany. Alberti would hold that position for the remainder of his life, but he also served the church in a number of other capacities.
Alberti wrote a large number of works on a vast array of subjects, from architecture to the family to morality to law. These began to appear in the 1430s, and his most important writings—those on the arts—began after he was appointed to the court of Pope Eugenius IV in 1434. The following year saw the publication of the Latin De pictura, which appeared in a more popular Italian version as Della pittura in 1436. The latter marked the first mathematical explanation of the theories of one-point linear perspective developed by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446).
The 1430s and 1440s saw Alberti in a number of locations around Italy, serving a papal court that was often forced to relocate temporarily due to unrest in Rome. By 1443, the pope had returned to his home, and it was during this time that Alberti began his seminal Latin study of architecture, De re aedificatoria. The latter, which drew on the ideas of the Roman writer Vitruvius (c. A.D. 1), would have an enormous impact on European architects in the two centuries that followed.
Alberti's work as an architect dates primarily to the period beginning in 1447, when he designed the Rucellai Palace in Florence. There followed numerous commissions throughout Italy, though the grandest of these—a vast building plan for Rome commissioned by Pope Nicholas V in 1450—was never realized.
In 1471 Alberti, who had played a key role in reviving Italians' interest in their architectural past, served as a guide to the Roman ruins for a distinguished party that included Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492). Alberti died in Rome soon afterward, most likely in early April 1472.
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