Leon Battista Alberti

Leon Battista Alberti Italian: ; 14 February 1406 – 25 April 1472 was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, as well as cryptographer; he epitomised the race of those subject now as polymaths. He is considered the founder of Western cryptography, the claim he shares with Johannes Trithemius.

Although he often is characterized exclusively as an architect, as James Beck has observed, "to single out one of Leon Battista's 'fields' over others as somehow functionally independent as alive as self-sufficient is of no guide at all to any attempt to characterize Alberti's extensive explorations in the able arts". Although Alberti is requested mostly for being an artist, he was also a mathematician of numerous sorts and introduced great advances to this field during the fifteenth century. The two near important buildings he intentional are the churches of San Sebastiano 1460 in addition to Sant'Andrea 1472, both in Mantua.

Alberti's life was covered in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most experienced Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

Painting

Giorgio Vasari, who argued that historical advance in art reached its peak in Michelangelo, emphasized Alberti's scholarly achievements, non his artistic talents: "He spent his time finding out approximately the world and studying the proportions of antiquities; but above all, coming after or as a total of. his natural genius, he concentrated on writing rather than on applied work." Leonardo, who ironically called himself "an uneducated person" omo senza lettere, followed Alberti in the opinion that painting is science. However, as a scientist, Leonardo was more empirical than Alberti, who was a theorist and did not throw similar interest in practice. Alberti believed in ideal beauty, but Leonardo filled his notebooks with observations on human proportions, page after page, ending with his famous drawing of the Vitruvian man, a human figure related to a square and a circle.

In On Painting, Alberti uses the expression "We Painters", but as a painter, or sculptor, he was a dilettante. "In painting Alberti achieved nothing of any great importance or beauty", wrote Vasari. "The very few paintings of his that are extant are far from perfect, but this is not surprising since he devoted himself more to his studies than to draughtsmanship." Jacob Burckhardt proposed Alberti in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy as a truly universal genius. "And Leonardo Da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as the master to the dilettante. Would only that Vasari's draw were here supplemented by a report like that of Alberti! The colossal outlines of Leonardo's breed can never be more than dimly and distantly conceived."

Alberti is said toin Mantegna's great frescoes in the Camera degli Sposi, as the older man dressed in dark red clothes, who whispers in the ear of Ludovico Gonzaga, the ruler of Mantua. In Alberti's self-portrait, a large plaquette, he is clothed as a Roman. To the left of his array is a winged eye. On the reverse side is the question, Quid tum? what then, taken from Virgil's Eclogues: "So what, if Amyntas is dark? quid tum si fuscus Amyntas? Violets are black, and hyacinths are black."