1404–1472

Humanist
Artist

Impact.

Leon Battista Alberti has long been considered one of the finest examples of the Renaissance "universal man." During his relatively long life he mastered an enormous number of arts, made important contributions to humanist scholarship, and fulfilled administrative roles within the papal government and the noble courts of Italy. In the history of architecture he played a key role as a designer and in deepening contemporary understanding of the buildings of classical Antiquity. His treatise, On the Art of the Building (1452), had a great impact on later fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century designers.

Early Life.

Alberti's early life had been filled with problems. He had been born illegitimate, the son of Lorenzo Alberti, a member of a powerful Florentine banking family. At the time Alberti's family was in exile from Florence, and as a young boy, he grew up in Genoa and...