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Rh Emerson's term, the "representative man" of the Quattrocentro, of an age sad and wondrous in its ambiguity and its versatility. His life is truly a mirror of the time.

Consider his ancestry. He came of that glorious Alberti family which has given Florence so many successful merchants, energetic statesmen, and turbulent partisans. Shortly before the time of his birth the family had been banished, and Leon Battista was born in exile in Genoa, where his kinsmen continued their mercantile pursuits and plotted a return to Florence. He might have become a merchant-politician like his ancestors, might have won riches and governed men. He preferred, on the contrary, to devote himself to letters. Study attracted him. He wished to know Greek and Latin, to read Plato and Virgil; he had no desire to export cloths to the East, or to measure his strength with the leader of a hostile faction.

In his childhood his father sought to train his body, to make him strong and handsome; and they tell us, indeed, that he could tame wild horses, and that he used to climb pathless mountains. But the lure of letters called him to Bologna and the law; and he turned to study with such ardor that he lost his health and became a lean and trembling scholar, suffering from nervous ills and absentmindedness.