Editing Leon Battista Alberti (section)

===Early life===
[[File:Raising of the Son of Teophilus and St. Peter Enthroned 27.jpg|thumb|A portrait of Alberti by [[Filippino Lippi]] is thought to exist in the [[Brancacci Chapel]], as part of Lippi's completion of the [[Masaccio]] painting, the ''Raising of the Son of Theophilus and St. Peter Enthroned'']]
Leon Battista Alberti was born in 1404 in [[Genoa]]. His mother was Bianca Fieschi. His father, Lorenzo di Benedetto Alberti, was a wealthy Florentine who had been exiled from his own city, but allowed to return in 1428. Alberti was sent to boarding school in Padua, then studied law at [[Bologna]].<ref>Treccani encyclopedia, ''[https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/leon-battista-alberti_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ Leon Battista Alberti] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220401035356/https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/leon-battista-alberti_(Dizionario-Biografico) |date=2022-04-01 }}''</ref><ref name=MS>Melissa Snell, ''[http://historymedren.about.com/od/awho/a/bio_alberti.htm Leon Battsta Alberti] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150906081613/http://historymedren.about.com/od/awho/a/bio_alberti.htm |date=2015-09-06 }}'', About.com: Medieval History.</ref> He lived for a time in [[Florence]], then in 1431 travelled to Rome, where he took [[Holy orders in the Catholic Church|holy orders]] and entered the service of the papal court.<ref name=IL/> During this time he studied the [[Ancient Roman architecture|ancient ruins]], which excited his interest in architecture and strongly influenced the form of the buildings that he designed.<ref name=IL>''The Renaissance:a Illustrated Encyclopedia'', Octopus (1979) {{ISBN|0706408578}}</ref>

Leon Battista Alberti was gifted in many ways. He was tall, strong, and a fine athlete who could ride the wildest horse and jump over a person's head.<ref name="Renaissance Italy 1860"/> He distinguished himself as a writer while still a child at school, and by the age of twenty had written a play that was successfully passed off as a genuine piece of Classical literature.<ref name=MS/> In 1435 he began his first major written work, ''[[De Pictura|Della pittura]]'', which was inspired by the burgeoning pictorial art in Florence in the early fifteenth century. In this work he analysed the nature of painting and explored the elements of perspective, composition, and colour.<ref name=IL/>

In 1438 he began to focus more on architecture and was encouraged by the Marchese [[Leonello d'Este]] of Ferrara, for whom he built a small [[triumphal arch]] to support an equestrian statue of Leonello's father.<ref name=MS/> In 1447 Alberti became architectural advisor to [[Pope Nicholas V]] and was involved in several projects at the [[Vatican City|Vatican]].<ref name=MS/>