Spies, espionage, and imposters can be found in human history as far back as our records go. This is not by coincidence, but rather by design. Today’s popular views of ancient and medieval history are nothing more than fantasies ushered in by some of the greatest minds to have ever lived here on earth.
For more than 300 years, this hoax has wreaked havoc upon scholars and lay people alike, warping their views and giving them a false sense of reality. Reader, this modest book is the result of serious and critical study into the origins of our historical records. It exposes the Renaissance forgery that has had such an extreme impact on our perceptions of the past. To begin, let me tell you about the main character and the time in which he lived.
We find ourselves in the historical Renaissance period, the period which transitioned humanity from the Medieval Ages to modernity. It covers the period from the 14th-century through the 17th-century. Associated with unprecedented social change, this era is best known for the revival of classical antiquity. It has been said to have started with a treatise named De pictura published in 1435; it contains the 1st scientific study of perspective. Its author, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), was an Italian polymath (author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer) - the ultimate Renaissance Man.
His establishment of the laws of linear perspective became a powerful instrument to depict everything from buildings to mechanical devices for the 1st time in a realistic manner. The treatises he wrote give modern historians invaluable insights into the standards of technology of the time.
While there's a tendency to attribute inventions based on their 1st pictorial debut, I view his work as a product of evolution. A natural selection that often went back to another brilliant mind with access to an abundance of intel for the 1st time.
The Renaissance brought with it numerous developments in technology and mathematics. The Printing Press was invented and rapidly shifted the way texts were produced and shared. Timekeeping devices such as the mechanical clock and the watch were designed and quickly became commonplace. Weapons, like the cannon and the musket were created, giving their wielders previously unfathomable power. The telescope, wallpaper, the flushing toilet, and more inventions completely revolutionized our world; invented hundreds of years ago and is still in use.
The world of architecture was not immune to these early modern changes. Architects were now being treated as distinctly different from a regular hands-on craftsman; a distinction not previously observed. Alberti used the expression "We Painters," but not as a painter or sculptor; as a teacher. The truth is, "In painting, Alberti achieved nothing of any great importance or beauty," wrote Giorgio Vasari in Lives of the Artists (1550). "The few paintings of his are far from perfect, but this is not surprising since Alberti devoted himself more toward research than to draftsmanship."
Anglicized into Renaissance during the 1800s, the word rinascita "rebirth" came from Vasari's Lives of the Artists. In it, Vasari argued that recorded progress in art reached its peak in Michelangelo. He emphasized Alberti's scholarly achievements, not his architectural talents.: "Alberti spent his time studying the proportions of ancient buildings; but above all, he concentrated on writing rather than on applied work. With Albertian ideals of beauty on his mind, Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci filled his notebooks with observations on human proportions." For Alberi, the beauty that we perceive in nature comes from the mathematics that dictates what patterns can physically manifest themselves.
Alberti's 1st major written work, Della pittura, did more than inspire Renaissance pictorial art in Florence. Alberti's work became a model for Medieval Romanesque architecture and Enlightenment-era neoclassical literature. In the mid-18th-century, his architecture inspired neoclassical architecture seen at the White House and Capitol in Washington, DC.
A founder of the Neoplatonic Florentine Academy, Alberti ascribed symbolic and sacred meanings to specific geometric shapes and proportions. He designed everything using infinitely self-similar mathematical constructs with fractal dimensions.The geometry used in his construction of Vatican altars and tabernacles is sacred today. Albertian concepts applied to everything from holy wells to religious art. By analyzing nature for designing, he explored the elements of perspective.
Alberti propounded a new philosophical nontheistic view called Humanism through early Quattrocento architects such as Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Ghiberti. He primarily provided them with a practical handbook to “Renaissance.”
Alberti rebuilt the Vatican long before he managed to realize only a fragment of his visionary plans. Through his books, he opened up his theories and ideals of the Renaissance to architects, scholars, and the like. De re aedificatoria "Florentine Vitruvius" was written not only for craftsmen but for anyone interested in the dark arts (liberal arts), as Alberti put it.
He regarded math as the common ground between art and science. In his treatise, Della Pittura said: "I will take 1st from the mathematicians those things with which my subject is concerned." Albertian Criteria became a standard feature of civic buildings in the later Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical Revival buildings.
Considered "the father of cryptography," Alberti was synonymous with encryption. The Alberti cipher (1467) introduced the polyalphabetic cipher.
Alberti's techniques secured intel in the presence of the public's adversarial behavior. During this time, states funded codebreakers, like Alberti, to obtain intelligence through frequency analysis. The Vatican hired Alberti to construct more than its walls and buildings. He analyzed protocols to prevent outsiders from reading private info for the Church. The Pre-Vatican period lasted until 1447, so he was there from the beginning.
In Alberti's self-portrait, he's dressed like an ancient Roman wearing a wig. To his left is his winged eye emblem. The association of an eye with the concept of Divine Providence comes from Alberti’s work with the church, whereby YHWH’s eye watches over humanity. Light rays often surround Alberti’s “All-Seeing Eye” logo. Another version is enclosed by a triangle to represent the Christian Trinity.
Alberti used his cipher disk for encryption, which implemented a polyalphabetic substitution with mixed alphabets as a decoder device. With a mixed alphabet, he encrypted messages, then when he wanted, he'd switch to a different alphabet, pointing to this with an uppercase letter or a number in the cryptogram. (puzzle with encrypted text).
Alberti became the architectural advisor to Pope Nicholas V and was involved with several projects at the Vatican. His treatise led to the increasing study of out-of-date records and the rebirth of classical styles of Latin. From the Renaissance, 1st in Italy and then increasingly across the world, his humanistic doctrine took hold of chronological studies.
Alberti had plenty of time in Rome to study its old sites, ruins, and objects. His work, De re aedificatoria (1452), clearly emulates De architectura by Vitruvius (30 BC), a Roman architect who died during the time of Christ. De architectura is the 1st book on architectural theory and the only document on ancient architecture to survive. Thus, Alberti’s treatise would be the 2nd.
While studying Vitruvius, I read about this Russian mathematician named Anatoly Fomenko (born 1945). He developed a statistical method that, professedly, proved Leon Battista Alberti was Vitruvius. I immediately started thinking about da Vinci's text, written in mirror writing. His Vitruvian Man came from the proportions of the human body, as described in Vitruvius' De architectura 3.1.2-3. I soon arrived at the notion that the Vitruvian man was, in fact, Alberti.
Although he is often characterized exclusively as an architect, this does Alberti no justice. In Artibus et Historiae, James Beck said: "to single out 1 of his fields over others as somehow functionally independent is of no help to characterize his extensive explorations."
As my research continued, I found Alberti to be a pioneer in Italian grammar. Alberti's study of language preserved in written sources concerned understanding texts from the classical period. The roots of philology lie in his lifetime. He modified the Latin language with that of Medieval Rome for use by the Vatican. Such properties led to the modern Italian linguistic style we hear today. Alberti attempted to return to the Latin of the classical period; he tried to produce more accurate editions of ancient lost texts. He used these for translation efforts into Latin.
Alberti also practiced Roman Law. His primary source of income was through Pope Nicholas V (1397-1455). A Pope well documented to have funded translations and architecture related to the distant past. Along with several museums, the Pope ordered the construction of the Vatican Library, the Vat. As the oldest in the world, it contains more collections of historical texts than anywhere else. Pope Nicholas V envisioned this "public library" as an institution for humanist scholarship. Alberti gathered all the Church's books, scattered from Italy, France, and Turkey.
As intel declined with the fall of Western Rome, perhaps so did their texts; many remained without a Latin translation. The fragile nature of papyrus meant that older documents not copied onto expensive parchment would eventually crumble and be lost. How do we know what's original?
The Byzantine Empire collapsed during Pope Nicholas V's rule. Let’s rewind so we understand the significance of this event. Constantine the Great (272-337) was the 1st Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He built his castle in the city center, renaming Byzantium after himself. Constantinople was the capital of "Rome" for over 1,000 years. This Eastern Roman Empire is commonly known as the Byzantine Empire.
The fall of Constantinople (1453) heightened the activity between Byzantine scholars and Alberti's translations into Latin. 3 years earlier, the invention of a mechanical movable type called the Printing Press allowed for rapid dissemination.
Here, I think a full range of counterfeits ensued, including our most cherished historians, poets, playwrights, and philosophers. Most of which are superimposed narratives, mirrored stories of prominent Renaissance figures. Alberti may have pulled it off through a network of bankers, explorers, builders, artists, cosmographers, and dealers.
In Italy, he studied old ruins for the Vatican, exciting his interest in architecture and strongly influencing the counterfeits he designed. Alberti would seamlessly integrate forged historical buildings within known archaeological sites, giving the appearance that they were much older. We find this in so-called "anomalous artifacts." Like when a hammer, made of iron and wood, is encased in rock from the Cretaceous period (London Hammer).
Espionage, or foreign intelligence, is the missing link in historical scholarship. Alberti used ciphers to protect secrets through classic cryptography. His methods of encryption used art, writing, and mechanical aids. It's common knowledge that Alberti applied fractal patterns to his blueprints.
We know De re aedificatoria became a significant reference for architects - but to what extent? If his geometric ratios were employed in fakes of Roman architecture, did Alberti incorporate this into "sacred sites" throughout the planet? Is the timeline of the chronological record encrypted similarly?
Cataclysms, like the Black Plague, can reduce a population in half; it looks like it did during the Renaissance. Earth's 14th-century population of 500 million people shrunk to 200 million by the time it was all over. It took hundreds of years for the human population to recover to its previous level, recurring as Plague outbreaks for centuries. I believe this enabled Alberti to assign different dates and locations to various accounts of the same recorded events, creating multiple "fractal copies" of these events.
These "phantoms" could have been misdated by centuries or even millennia, possibly becoming incorporated into the timeline of human civilization, which is common today. Indeed, the ancient art and architecture of Rome and Greece are at the heart of much of Western art today. Alberti is the reason colleges focus their study on the classical world.
Viral cataclysms, which may have included the Black Death, killed an estimated 25 million Chinese 15 years before reaching Constantinople in the 15th-century, as it did in 542. Both outbreaks would go on to kill over a 3rd of the city's population each time. Such catastrophes mirror, or "reflect," as I put it, similar events with remarkably similar characters over vast periods. Like a cryptogram, history is a substitution cipher, solved only through frequency analysis.
For example, Fomenko compares the contemporary timeline of Rome written by Titus Livius with a modern history of Rome written by Russian historian VS Sergeev. He calculated that the 2 have a high correlation and thus describe the same period, which is undisputed. He also compares modern texts which describe different periods and calculates low correlation, as expected. However, when he reaches, for example, the early timeline of Rome and the Renaissance records of Florence, he estimates a high correlation. Fomenko concludes that the early history of Rome is a copy of the Late-Medieval records of Rome, thus clashing with mainstream accounts.
These methods of comparison prove that many periods of history are nothing more than phantom reflections of events that really took place in the 15th century. Alberti is the man who initially set these phantom gears into motion, and records of his life can be found all across the globe. As mentioned before, he was a master cryptographer. He used his skills and connections to provide powerful stories meant to give people an exaggerated sense of antiquity.