light—utterly without menace. For mediæval ferocity he substitutes pagan pleasantness.
I regard Alberti as one of the most completely Hellenic of all Italians. He had the Attic sense of measure, of order, of regularity. His love of geometry (vide Milhaud's theory of the geometrical foundation of Greek culture), his search for the perfect type of human beauty, his care in measurement, and his passion for the architectonic, the symmetrical, the non-fantastic, bring him close to the intellectual type of the Greeks.
And he resembled them, as well, in the varied curiosity that made him turn from law to letters, from painting to architecture or sculpture, from physics to mathematics, from religion and ethics to grammar. He was the first of those universal men of the Renaissance whose line was to culminate in Leonardo: men who stopped work on an equestrian statue to write an apologue, or turned to the invention of military engines after the building of a church or the conclusion of a series of scientific experiments.
In this respect also Alberti expresses that liberating tendency which developed after the firmly organic society of the Middle Ages had broken up, and men no longer felt themselves bound to city, art, and guild, but rather, like greyhounds freed of the leash, sped hither and yon in search
