ABSTRACT
In his treatise on painting, De pictura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti avowed a new attitude towards human creativity, towards the ties that joined science and nature, towards God and Man. Whereas others – Nicolas of Cusa, Lorenzo Valla, Pico della Mirandola – would explore the generative possibilities of the libero arbitrio, Alberti supplied a practical, material means to their fulfillment when he theorized in writing what Florentine painters and architects had been practicing in workshops and in the piazza.1 More than a mechanical tool for creating nature’s facsimile in painting, the geometric perspective that Alberti described had enabled artists to open an aesthetic distance between the image surface and its beholder. This perceptual shift would come to define an era.2
