Architecture has long been dominated by Platonizing assumptions about the relationship between idea and material. It is usually asserted that idea precedes the work in a triumph of idea over matter. Perhaps most important instance and origin of this view of subservient role of material to idea in architecture is found in the Italian Renaissance discussion of disegno, when Neoplatonism was highly influential through such philosophers as the Florentine Marsilio Ficino, who translated the works of Plato and the Neoplatonist Plotinus from Greek into Latin. An etching made early in the twentieth century by Swiss-born artist Paul Klee, who later taught the Vorkurs at the Bauhaus. A likely source of Klee's image is a 1531 emblem by Andrea Alciati called Constrained Genius. The constrained genius emblem from Alciati was certainly a direct antecedent for a Renaissance architectural frontispiece in works by Walther Hermann Ryff, who had a brief but prolific career as an author and translator of popular scientific works.