by Lauren Reynolds

Created on: May 20, 2008   Last Updated: May 22, 2008

Leone Battista Alberti was Italy's foremost architect after the death of Brunelleschi in 1446. He was well educated and spent his career working for the church. Although art was not his first profession, it turned it to be what he was best known for. Alberti received one of the best educations available for noblemen such as himself. He studied classics at Gasparino Barizzo in Padua and then completed his education by studying law at the University of Bologna. Today, however, he is known as the man of many talents. He is accredited with being an Italian author, artist, architect, poet, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer. He has also become a famous model of the Renaissance "universal man".

Although his artwork and stylistic devices are what Alberti is best known for, his collections of books were also very impressive. In his treatise On Architecture, he discusses beauty as an instinctively recognizable concept. He says that when the mind is alerted to the presence of something carrying the distinctive traits of beauty within a congruent whole, then the mind will feel a certain joy. The artist's job, then, is to make sure that these distinctive elements come together correctly into what he calls "congruity", or perfection, and help the viewer to experience this joy.

Alberti argues that absent this congruity, art would cease to appeal to the human mind. A work of art that fails to cause joy when seen fails its most basic function. It has no more use to man. He believed that beauty and aestheticism were the primary goals of any work of art and is where all art derives its value.

Since Alberti was well educated in a variety of fields, including both natural sciences and philosophy, he had a wide understanding of humanity in general. This gave him the ability to be so passionate in his art, or at least to touch the centers of passion in people's hearts. If artists everywhere had this ability, the realm of art would far transcend the boundaries of its current state. Touching the inherent sense of beauty in humans would become a perfect art in of itself. Alberti suggested that artists learn the arts that deal with human nature.

Nature is the world wherein all beauty exists. Elements of everything can be found in nature. It is the artist's job to find those elements and put them together. The materials and ideas for artwork are all derived from nature. For any artist to be truly competent in his trade, he must have a firm knowledge of both human nature and nature. Understanding nature is a prerequisite to putting the elements of nature together into a cohesive whole. The way any artist knows when something is a cohesive whole is when these elements form the perfection sought by an inherent part of human nature.

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