The First Universal Man

Jules Lubbock

• Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance by Anthony Grafton
  Allen Lane, 432 pp, £9.99, January 2002, ISBN 0 14 029169 5
• The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting, 1400-1800 by Thomas Puttfarken
  Yale, 332 pp, £30.00, June 2000, ISBN 0 300 08156 1

Giovanni Pisano and Giotto are widely recognised as the founders of Renaissance sculpture and painting, and Brunelleschi of Renaissance architecture, but it was Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) who established the theoretical framework within which those arts have since been practised. He interpreted them in two great books, De Pictura (‘On Painting’) of 1435 and De Re Aedificatoria (‘On Building’), completed around 1460. The received wisdom is that Alberti handed down our notions of pictorial composition, of the imitation of nature, and of how to portray narrative; that he provided the first written account of single-point perspective; and that he defined the architectural ideal of the well-ordered city, arranged in a hierarchy of buildings rising from modest houses to beautiful churches set on magnificent piazzas. All theory of art is said to be a footnote to Alberti, just as all philosophy is said to be a footnote to Plato.