Leone Battista Alberti (February 14, 1404 – April 25, 1472) was an Italian painter, poet, linguist, philosopher, cryptographer, musician, architect, and general Renaissance polymath . His life was described in Giorgio Vasari's Vite. In Italy, his first name is usually spelled Leon.

Alberti was born in Genoa, the illegitimate son in a family of Florentine merchants. His father had been forced to leave Florence for political reasons and had settled in Genoa, Alberti's city of birth. Alberti studied at Padua under Gasparino da Barizizza and was later educated in law at the University of Bologna. In his mid-twenties, he embarked on a tour of Europe. His law career curtailed by an illness which induced a partial loss of memory, he turned his abilities to science and art. He was a good friend of Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect of Brunelleschi's Dome in Florence.

He died in Florence in 1472.


Contributions

Alberti made a variety of contributions to several fields:

* In art, he is best known for his treatise De pictura (On painting) (1435) which contained the first scientific study of perspective. An Italian translation of De pictura (Della pittura) was published in 1436, one year after the original Latin version and addressed Filippo Brunelleschi in the preface. The Latin version had been dedicated to Alberti's humanist patron, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga of Mantua. He also wrote works on sculpture, De Statua.
* Alberti used his artistic treatises to propound a new humanistic theory of art. He drew on his contacts with early Quattrocento artists such as Brunelleschi and Masaccio to provide a practical handbook for the renaissance artist.
* Whilst Alberti's treatises on Painting and Architecture have been hailed as the founding texts of a new form of art, breaking from the gothic past, it is impossible to know the extent of their practical impact within his lifetime. His praise of the Calumny of Apelles led to several attampts to emulate it, including paintings by Botticelli and Signorelli. And we can see his stylistic ideals being put into practice in the works of Mantegna, Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico. But how far Alberti was responsible for these innovations and how far he was simply articulating the trends of the artistic movement, with which his practical experience had made him familiar, is impossible to ascertain.
* He was so skilled in Latin verse that a comedy he wrote in his twentieth year, entitled Philodoxius, would later deceive the younger Aldus Manutius, who edited and published it as the genuine work of Lepidus.
* He has been credited with being the actual author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a strange fantasy novel, whose typographic qualities and illustrations have made it legendary as one of the most beautiful books ever printed. There is a good deal of debate about this attribution, however.
* In music, he was reputed one of the first organists of the age. He held the appointment of canon in the metropolitan church of Florence, and thus had leisure to devote himself to his favourite art.

Facade of Santa Maria Novella
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Facade of Santa Maria Novella

* In architecture he is generally regarded as one of those most devoted to restoring the formal language of classical architecture. At Rome he was employed by Pope Nicholas V in the restoration of the papal palace and of the restoration of the Roman aqueduct of Acqua Vergine, which debouched into a simple basin designed by Alberti, which was swept away later by the Baroque Trevi Fountain. At Mantua he designed the church of Sant'Andrea, and at Rimini the celebrated church of San Francesco. On a commission from the Rucellai family he designed the principal facade of the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, as well as the family palace in the Via della Vigna Nuova, known as the Palazzo Rucellai. He wrote an influential work on architecture, De Re Aedificatoria, which by the 18th century had been translated into Italian, French, Spanish and English. The most accurate English translation was by Giacomo Leoni in the early 18th century. In it he proposed new methods of fortification which became the standard defense for towns in the age of gunpowder, and dominated siege planning for hundreds of years.

* Latest studies (D. Mazzini, S. Simone, Villa Medici a Fiesole. Leon Battista Alberti e il prototipo di villa rinascimentale, Centro Di, Firenze 2004, following the ‘Tesi di laurea’ on the Villa Medici in Fiesole written by Donata Mazzini and Simone Martini, with Gabrilele Morolli and presented in 2000), for the first time, propose that Villa Medici in Fiesole owes its design to Leon Battista Alberti, not to Michelozzo, and that it then became the prototype of the Renaissance villa. The original building, once subsequent alterations had been identified, was then studied and particular attention paid to the proportions; new elements emerged regarding its attribution, leading to the conclusion not only that Leon Battista Alberti was involved in its design, but also that this hilltop dwelling, commissioned by Giovanni de’ Medici, Cosimo il Vecchio’s second son, with its view over the city, is the very first example of a Renaissance villa: that is to say it follows the Albertian criteria for rendering a country dwelling a “villa suburbana”. The beauty of this building is not due to medieval decorative elements, but to the simplicity of the structure which results in economy, necessity, beauty and, above all, harmony in the proportions. The parts of the villa are balanced, both internally and externally, following Alberti’s canons of ideal harmony, which relate to numerical order, to music and geometry.

The Villa Medici in Fiesole should therefore be considered the “muse” for numerous other buildings, not only in the Florence area, which from the end of the XV century onwards find inspiration and creative innovation here.

* Apart from his treatises on the arts, Alberti also wrote: Philodoxus ("Lover of Glory", 1424), De commodis litterarum atque incommodis ("On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literary Studies", 1429), Intercoenales ("Table Talk", ca. 1429), Della famiglia ("On the Family", begun 1432) Vita S. Potiti ("Life of St. Potitus", 1433), De iure (On Law, 1437), Theogenius ("The Origin of the Gods", ca. 1440), Profugorium ab aerumna ("Refuge from Mental Anguish", 1442-43), Momus (1450) and De Iciarchia ("On the Prince", 1468).
* Alberti was an accomplished cryptographer by the standard of his day, and invented both polyalphabetic ciphers and machine-assisted encryption using his Cipher Disk. The polyalphabetic cipher was, at least in principle, for it was not properly used for several hundred years, the most significant advance in cryptography since before Julius Caesar's time. Cryptography historian David Kahn titles him the "Father of Western Cryptography", pointing to three significant advances in the field which can be attributed to Alberti: "the earliest Western exposition of cryptanalysis, the invention of polyalphabetic substitution, and the invention of enciphered code" (The Codebreakers, 1967).
* According to Alberti himself, in a short autobiography written c. 1438 in Latin and in the third person, (Many but not all scholars consider this work to be an autobiography) he was capable of "standing with his feet together, and springing over a man's head." The autobiography survives thanks to an eighteenth century transcription by Antonio Muratori. Alberti also claimed that he "excelled in all bodily exercises; could, with feet tied, leap over a standing man; could in the great cathedral, throw a coin far up to ring against the vault; amused himself by taming wild horses and climbing mountains." Needless to say, many in the Renaissance promoted themselves in various ways and Alberti's eagerness to promote his skills should be understood, to some extent, within that framework. (This advice should be followed in reading the above information, some of which originates in this so-called autobiography.)
* He was also interested in the drawing of maps and worked with the astronomer, astrologer, and cartographer Paolo Toscanelli.

                       

Courtesy of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Battista_Alberti