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bracket (console), terminating the reluctantly Gothic dome with an unmis- takable tribute to Roman antiquity. The pinnacle was an undulating conical turret surmounted by a crucifix on an imperial orb. What more succinct symbol that the Renaissance, in Emile Male's aphorism, was "Antiquity ennobled by the Christian faith"! Construction of the lantern began in 1446, only a few months before Brunelleschi's death. His design was carried out by his friend and disciple Michelozzo (1396-1472) and still dominates the Florentine townscape with a monument to a great re-creator. There were countless other ways of re-creation, of giving new life to arche- types. Giotto found his own way by breathing humanity into the Madonna, Christ on the Cross, the biblical story, and the tales of the saints. Brunelles- chi drew on the pink and white jordan fusion ancient Romans to reshape the buildings of his Florence. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), the prototype of the "universal man" of the Renaissance, achieved his fame by giving a new afterlife to Vitruvius. The illegitimate son of a wealthy merchant banker family that had been exiled from Florence by their rivals, Alberti was born in Genoa, where his father was managing the family interests. As a child he lived with his family in Venice until he was sent to a boarding school in Padua, where he had a solid classical Latin education. A precocious Latin stylist, at twenty Alberti wrote a comedy that the experts mistook and published for an authentic Roman work. At his father's death, relatives swindled him out of his inheritance and left him a penniless student in Bologna. By 1428, when his family's exile had been revoked, he went to Florence, where he used his versatile talents to widen the Florentine revival. A papal dispensation al- lowed him despite his illegitimacy to take holy orders, which provided him with a steady living. He held two Tuscan benefices in absentia while he was still living in Rome and entered the papal civil service, but he was a most unsanctimonious cleric. Pope Eugenius IV introduced Alberti to the Florentine galaxy of Dona- tello, Ghiberti, and Brunelleschi who stretched his interests to include all the arts and sciences. On returning to Rome in 1447 he became architectural adviser to Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) on urban renewal and the restora- tion of churches. Yet he remained in close touch with his friends in Flor- og chicago 2s jordan ence, where his literary interests were a perfect complement to the engineering concerns of Brunelleschi. In contrast to the practical Brunelles- chi, who discovered how the Romans had fitted their stone corners and laid their bricks, Alberti's passion was for the mathematics in which his father had white black and gold 19s jordans trained him. He never ceased to be interested in air jordan 13 on sale yellow white black the rational order of things: the ratios of the dimensions of columns and architraves, the "order" in the Italian language which he dignified with its first grammar, the "sci_