The Renaissance Man

Portrait of a Spymaster

De: Michael Alberta

Narrado por: Joshua Saxon

Scholars suggest the Renaissance started with the first scientific study of perspective. It was introduced in a treatise named De pictura, published in 1435. The author was Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). He was an Italian polymath.

Considered "the father of cryptography," Alberti was synonymous with secrets. The Vatican hired Alberti to construct more than buildings. He analyzed protocols to prevent outsiders from reading private info for the Church. Espionage, or foreign intelligence, is the missing link in historical scholarship.

Alberti’s other major work, De re aedificatoria (1452), clearly emulates De architectura by Vitruvius (30 BC). Looking further into Vitruvius, I learned about this Russian mathematician named Anatoly Fomenko (1945-). He developed a statistical method that, professedly, proved Alberti was Vitruvius. Alberti's most important patron, Pope Nicholas V (1397–1455), is well documented to have funded translations and architecture related to the distant past. Conveniently, the final decline of the Byzantines, hence the Roman Empire's fall, was under Pope Nicholas V's watch. The fall of Constantinople (1453) led to the migration of scholars and texts directly to Alberti (and his colleagues).

I believe the Black Death plague enabled Alberti to assign different dates and locations to various accounts of the same recorded events, creating multiple "copies" of these events. Three inventions, in particular, the printing press, firearms, and the nautical compass, were invented in Alberti's lifetime. Such innovations allowed spies to communicate, exercise power, and finally travel at distances unimaginable in earlier times. For example, the Florentine cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli and Alberti collaborated in map-making through astronomy (a close science to geography at that time), producing "Descriptio Urbis Romae." Toscanelli provided Columbus with the map that guided him on his first voyage.

©2022 Michael Anthony Alberta (P)2023 Michael Anthony Alberta