And he succeeded. Look - we're talking about him, 529 years after his death in 1472. Scholarship on Alberti has been more or less continuous throughout that half-millennium but with no new stash of original material discovered, he remains elusive. He mastered the techniques of painting, laid down the ground rules for the newly-discovered science of perspective, but left no significant works of his own. He wrote on sculpture, could produce a good relief self-portrait, but was never going to make a name for himself in that field.

He endlessly discussed the role of the family in turbulent times, but produced no family himself. He devised some clever gadgets, but nothing to compare with his older contemporary, the great Florentine artist-craftsman-architect "Pippo" Brunelleschi. But while he produced no building that had anything like the astonishing effect of Pippo's great dome of Florence Cathedral, his few pieces of surviving architecture prove that he kickstarted the classical revival. Alberti was arguably the first modern architect - someone who designed for others to build.

Of course that was only one of his product lines. Alberti, as a leading humanist scholar, seems to have carried a mental Universal Man checklist: he ticked something off, went on to the next thing. What has made his name endure is no single work of art or science, but the way he captured the ideals of his era in writing. Book after book, he wrote the script for the Italian Renaissance in art, architecture, sociology. Janus-like, he both looked back to the ancient classical world across the intervening canyon of medievalism, and forward to a modern world of wonder-machines, stupendous buildings and a new, affluent middle class lifestyle.