Leon Battista Alberti

Born in February 1404, Alberti moved through disciplines the way most men move through a single career. He treated cryptography, mathematics, and the fine arts not as separate fields but as pieces of the same inquiry. By 1460 he had begun San Sebastiano in Mantua, followed in 1472 by Sant'Andrea in the same city — buildings that carried his ideas about proportion and form into stone. Vasari later included him in the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, though even that list couldn't quite hold him. He died in April 1472, having spent his life proving that a mind doe…