This nervous
illness is not dissimilar to that which Rousseau describes in the
confessions of his youth. In vain, however, his physicians warned
Alberti of impending peril. A man of so much stanchness, accustomed
to control his nature with an iron will, is not ready to accept
advice. Alberti persevered in his studies, until at last the very seat
of intellect was invaded. His memory began to fail him for names,
while he still retained with wonderful accuracy whatever he had seen
with his eyes. It was now impossible to think of law as a profession.
Yet since he could not live without severe mental exercise, he had
recourse to studies which tax the verbal memory less than the
intuitive faculties of the reason. Physics and mathematics became his
chief resource; and he devoted his energies to literature. His
'Treatise on the Family' may be numbered among the best of those
compositions on social and speculative subjects in which the Italians
of the Renaissance sought to rival Cicero. His essays on the arts are
mentioned by Vasari with sincere approbation. Comedies, interludes,
orations, dialogues, and poems flowed with abundance from his facile
pen. Some were written in Latin, which he commanded more than fairly;
some in the Tuscan tongue, of which owing to the long exile of his
family in Lombardy, he is said to have been less a master. It was
owing to this youthful illness, from which apparently his constitution
never wholly recovered, that Alberti's genius was directed to
architecture.

Through his friendship with Flavio Biondo, the famous Roman antiquary,
Alberti received an introduction to Nicholas V. at the time when this,
the first great Pope of the Renaissance, was engaged in rebuilding the
palaces and fortifications of Rome. Nicholas discerned the genius of
the man, and employed him as his chief counsellor in all matters of
architecture. When the Pope died, he was able, while reciting his long
Latin will upon his deathbed, to boast that he had restored the Holy
See to its due dignity, and the Eternal City to the splendour worthy
of the seat of Christendom. The accomplishment of the second part of
his work he owed to the genius of Alberti. After doing thus much for
Rome under Thomas of Sarzana, and before beginning to beautify
Florence at the instance of the Rucellai family, Alberti entered the
service of the Malatesta, and undertook to remodel the Cathedral of S.
Francis at Rimini. He found it a plain Gothic structur