rising artisan. He gives orders to be carried out by his inferiors, and does not deign to work with his own hands.
He feels the superiority of the creative intellect, of the imaginative spirit. He would be the mind that originates, the will that commands, not the base instrument of material execution. He brought into art his inherited nobility; and the Renaissance received from him that spiritual aristocracy that made it so marvelous and so ephemeral.
Before the century grew dark and the first barbarians came over the Alps to plunder Italy, helpless in her refinement, Alberti died serenely at Rome, in 1472. He had written that man is "like a ship destined not to rot in the harbor, but to plow new paths over the sea, and to tend ever through self-exercise toward praise and the fruit of glory." And in this sense he had been indeed a voyager.
Perhaps the very extent of his verbal versatility kept him from greater actual achievement. In the presence of his multiform and restless spirit, one thinks of his experience with the ship of the Lake of Nemi. Tradition had it that an ancient trireme lay sunken in this lake. Cardinal Colonna commissioned Alberti to try to raise it, and he, by clever mechanisms, succeeded in sending divers down and in bringing up the prow
