A Humanist architect, artist, and writer on many subjects (1404-1472); no intellectual of the 15th century showed more enthusiasm for modernity. As a young man he praised the dome that Brunelleschi had raised over the Florentine cathedral as a feat of technology "unknown and unthought of among the ancients." As an old man, he walked the Vatican gardens with his old friend Leonardo Dati, enthusiastically discussing the new art of printing. He wrote innovative books in Italian as well as in Latin. Yet no one did more to show that ancient forms could take on new life when applied to modern topics and problems. Born in Genoa, the illegitimate son of an exiled member of a great Florentine family, Alberti learned the crafts of Humanism at the school of Gasparino Barzizza and may have studied law at Bologna. In the 1420s he became an abbreviator at the papal curia, and in the 1430s, when the ban on his family was lifted and the curia of Eugenius IV moved north to Florence, he returned to his…