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design, rather than carried out a scheme laid down by a committee. Brunelleschi was a characteristic Renaissance figure, in that he carefully studied Roman and especially Etruscan models, and he certainly used elements from antiquity. But when we look carefully at what he produced, there is not much that is Roman about it, or Greek either. From 1419 he created the beautiful asylum for orphans, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, whose façade certainly employs the decorative vocabulary of classical architecture. But this spacious loggia of fragile Corinthian columns, supporting semicircular arches, with roundels in the spandrels, surmounted by a deep entablature, is quite unlike anything the Romans ever built in its slender grace and delicate proportion. It has sometimes been called the first true Renaissance building, and it introduced a design that could be adapted, and was, to countless different purposes over the coming centuries, and really has nothing to do with ancient Rome. It was a new style, indeed, a new way of beauty.

Brunelleschi used the same vocabulary, with his own additions, and amplified his original concepts, in his superb sacristy added to San Lorenzo in Florence, and in the Pazzi Chapel he designed for another great Florentine church, Santa Croce. These airy, elegant, harmonious and wonderfully proportioned creations, with (in the case of the Pazzi Chapel) roundels by the ingenious Della Robbia and delicate color schemes of gray and white, together with the natural colors of marble and brass, stone, iron and wood, delighted all who visited them, exuding as they did a princely simplicity in contrast to the Gothic clutter. To the artist who saw them for the first time, it was truly the shock of the new, not so much a revivification of antiquity as a realized beauty that he had never conceived and that made him itch to get out his pencil and work.

There are the unspoken elements of a theory behind Brunelleschi’s creations: a simplification of parts, so that an orderly repetition becomes the norm, rather than an endless variety of inventions, a single system of lighting where possible and a balance between the elements so that there is no dominant feature but a pervading style that brings the whole together. Moreover, in rejecting the Gothic and building upon the classical, he invented a new vocabulary of devices—curved entablatures as arches over columns, alternations of pillars and pilasters, scroll buttresses, alternations of flattened curves and flattened triangles, volutes and pendentives as punctuation marks—which made up a great part of the new vernacular that architects eagerly embraced, first in Italy, then everywhere. All this was presented by examples.

The theory was left to an intellectual of Florentine origins (though born in Genoa), Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472). Twenty-seven years Brunelleschi’s junior, he got a university education in Bologna—as well as a classical grounding at Padua. He was indeed much closer to the humanist writers than to the artist-craftsmen trained in goldsmithery, and was and remained a prolific writer all his life: comedies, philosophy, religion, ethics, various sciences, the care and riding of horses—these and many other matters he studied and put into print. As a secretary first to a cardinal, then to Pope Eugenius IV in the 1430s, he learned the art of communication, and practiced it. Eugenius took him to Rome, and there he engaged in archaeology, made a detailed study of Roman antiquities and was emboldened by what he saw to write a monumental series of aesthetic treatises, the first of any significance since Roman times, on sculpture, painting and, above all, architecture.

De re aedificatoria—Alberti usually wrote in Latin, which was later translated into Italian if there was a demand—was an elucidating, critical appraisal and reformulation of the great work of Vitruvius, On Architecture, the only work on the subject to come down to us from ancient times. (Alberti’s treatise reached printed form in 1485, a year before Vitruvius’s book was printed.) It is in every