
Renaissance Builder Leon Battista Alberti: Mr. Humanismus (2000) - walterbell
https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/03/reviews/001203.03bouchet.html
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walterbell
From his bio,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Battista_Alberti](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Battista_Alberti)

 _" Alberti (1404 – 1472) was an Italian humanist author, artist, architect,
poet, priest, linguist, philosopher and cryptographer; he epitomised the
Renaissance Man .... Cryptography historian David Kahn titles him the "Father
of Western Cryptography" .. "the earliest Western exposition of cryptanalysis,
the invention of polyalphabetic substitution, and the invention of enciphered
code."_

From the article:

 _"..his treatise on painting and his later magnum opus on architecture ..
have proved his most enduring works .. this revolution ''radically changed
both the social structures that created buildings and works of art and the
products that resulted.'' ... Alberti expounded a methodology for artists akin
to the preparation of an oration and thereby laid the foundations for what
became the academic tradition in art down to the 19th century..

..Alberti determined to become an engineer like Brunelleschi and observes that
the word engineer derives from the Latin ingenium, or brilliance of intellect,
as well as ingenia, the weapons or devices that an engineer created..

..The picture that emerges here is of a scholar-actor, subtle and labile, who
marshalled his knowledge of antiquity and his creative talents to forge a new
role for himself as adviser to artists and power brokers alike."_

