Alberti was possibly in Rome by 1431; Mancini speculates by 1428. The Curia employed composers and authors and editors of papal bulls, and Alberti was employed as such. Recreated in visual topography by Poggio and Flavio, Rome’s surviving monuments would advance Alberti’s dynamic visual encounters. Giotto’s and Cavallini’s formative works in Rome further endowed the spatial avant-garde in the city of Gentile, Pisano, Masaccio, Masolino, Ghiberti, and Donatello. The textual and visual gifts gleaned from Padua, Bologna, and northern Europe would evolve into Rome’s validation of all prescriptions in De pictura.

University experience in the 1420s resulted in two nervous breakdowns. No document attests to Alberti’s having been graduated; records are lost, rendering precise knowledge of curricula impossible. Ironically, the university’s primary endowment would be his discontent. Subsequent movement is speculation. Nonetheless, after honing rhetoric and optics – begun in Padua – Alberti finished the play Philodoxeos fabula and his confessional De commodis litterarum atque incommodis – both germane to the pursuit of glory. Visual art exposure evolved with antique motifs of Nicola Pisano and Jacopo della Quercia. Employed by Cardinal Niccol Albergati, Alberti would thence travel to northern Europe and confront the pictorial-architectural innovation there, further impacting prescriptions in De pictura.

Accordingly, the inquiry endures as to what specific art galvanized the modern world’s original treatise on painting. How Alberti’s remarkable journey through the art of his past and present is both reflected and refracted in De pictura demands examination of the lines of transmission through education and career in Alberti’s decisive locales before Florence.

The civic-historical sweep of Padua – from late 1200s republican commune through Carrara domination in the 1300s to final subjugation by Venice in 1405 – delivered a cultural revival in classical text and pedagogy. As humanism would affect art, so Alberti would give that lexicon to an erudite audience. Examining Alberti’s education in Padua reveals the context of what he read that became the source for De pictura and how antique and medieval texts began to inform its vocabulary. Illustrious teachers imbued Alberti, firsthand, with humanism: his instructor from about 1412 to 1420, Gasparino Barzizza, and his exceptional school, as well as dynamic associates Guarino da Verona and Vittorino da Feltre attended to the classical literature, mathematical precepts, monuments, and painting that would engender De pictura.

Alberti never mentions Florence in De pictura. This is intentional as the tract not so much ignores as merely suggests previous periods of art, and Alberti’s refusal to specify those interludes, such as Romanesque, Gothic, or medieval, reflects the need for a humanist audience to have all precepts couched in the domain of antiquity. His cryptic indication of sources consequently demands forensic scrutiny of his visual paradigm before Florence. The text itself invites this. In the face of no hard evidence or documentation, Alberti’s claim in De pictura to be an ostensible painter begs the query as to where or with whom he began his study of draftsmanship, either in the studio or in practice. Although he had left Padua for Bologna by 1420, conjecture suggests that while in Padua he may have seen and even studied the art of genius before and contemporary to his age.

This chapter paints the political and intellectual backdrop of Padua in the 1300s, which sets the stage for Alberti’s education. While Rolandino, Lovato, and Mussato were intellectual giants of a commune, Petrarch, Conversino, and Vergerio were literary giants at a court – that of Francesco Il Vecchio da Carrara, a patron of classical medals, art, and humanist educators and antiquarians. Accordingly, five factors made Padua a center of early humanism: independent university faculty, accession of classical rhetoric, Petrarch and his library, Carrara’s support for educators and antiquarians, and the city’s absorption by Venice, allowing unfettered education to gift Alberti a literary and visual universe.

By 1434, Alberti was in Florence in employ of Pope Eugenius IV, who would also facilitate the return from exile of Cosimo de’ Medici. The art of Florence would ensure Alberti’s rhetorical high notes in De pictura. Alberti’s popularity lies in his invitation to art, not in its execution. Art theory has never perpetuated art process; organic continuum precedes intellectual reflection. The genesis of De pictura, our first modern book on painting, derives from the personal passion of Leon Battista Alberti in the humanist classroom and attendance before the visual majesty of Padua, Bologna, northern Europe, and Rome – witnessed by the acute eye of an illegitimate son, born in exile.