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.

As architectural images became vehicles for natural philosophical thinking and practices, they also challenged certain conventions of architectural design. Dietterlin’s Architectura upended enduring principles of architectural naturalism and stability promoted in Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria by developing a genre of amorphous ornaments that resembled the internal forms of the human body while effacing the conventional distinctions between architectural structure and surface, interior and exterior. Dietterlin derived these corporeal ornaments from empirically oriented images such as anatomical flap prints and the woodcuts of Vesalius’s De corporis fabrica. As architects and artists in northern Europe adopted the Architectura’s anatomical ornaments, they revealed the limits of architectural naturalism. Paradoxically, the waxing role of architectural images as tools for studying and embodying nature destabilized architecture’s long-standing traditions of naturalistic design.