Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), humanist and architect, was born in Genoa, the illegitimate son of Lorenzo Alberti, a Florentine banker who had been exiled from Florence. He was named Battista Alberti, after the patron saint of Florence, John the Baptist, and assumed the name Leon only in the late 1430s. Between 1415 and 1418, Alberti studied in Padua with Gasparino Barzizza, and then went to Bologna to study civil and canon law. While a law student, the twenty-year-old Alberti composed a Latin comedy titled Philodoxeos (The Lover of Glory), which he circulated as an ancient work written by one Lepidus. It was probably in Bologna that he began to compose and collect what he called

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