Leon Battista Alberti - Childhood and Education

Childhood and Education

An Italian humanist, Alberti is often seen as a model of the Renaissance "universal man". He was born in Genoa, one of two illegitimate sons of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Lorenzo Alberti. Leon Battista's mother, Bianca Fieschi, was a Bolognese widow who died during an outbreak of bubonic plague. Like many other families, the Albertis had been expelled from their native city, Florence, by the republican government, run by the Albizzis. At the time of Leon Battista's birth, his father Lorenzo lived in Genoa, but the family soon moved to Venice, where Lorenzo ran the family bank with his brother. Lorenzo married again in 1408. The ban on the family was lifted in 1428, and that same year Leon visited Florence for the first time.

Alberti received the best education then available to an Italian nobleman. From around 1414 to 1418 he studied classics at the famous school of Gasparino Barzizza in Padua. He then completed his education at the University of Bologna, where he studied law. In his youth, according to stories, Alberti could—with his feet together—jump over a man's head, he was a superb horseman, and he "learned music without a master, and yet his compositions were admired by professional judges."

After the death of his father, Alberti was supported by his uncles. In his twenties Alberti wrote On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Letters, which he dedicated to his brother Carlo, also a scholar and writer. Alberti's Latin comedy, Philodoxus, aimed to teach that "a man dedicated to study and hard work can attain glory, just as well as a rich and fortunate man." For a short time it was passed as a genuinely antique Roman play. Like Petrarch, who had been the first famous philologist to study the works of the ancient Roman poets, Alberti loved classics, but he compared continual reading and rereading in libraries. Later he also complained, that "the learned don't become rich, or if they do become rich from literary pursuits, the sources of their wealth are shameful." Other early works, Amator (c. 1429), Ecatonfilea (c. 1429), and Deiphira (c. 1429–1434), dealt with love, virtues, and failed relationships.