Alberti, in the Prologue to della Pittura, famously claimed that the art of his contemporaries, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, exceeded the achievements of antiquity because they lacked models to follow. Alberti omitted what I will argue is the ancient "source book" for early Florentine innovations in linear and atmospheric perspective, as well as other visual phenomena. I refer to Lucretius's first century B.C. didactic poem, De rerum natura, that Poggio Bracciolini discovered in 1417 in the Benedictine library at Fulda and sent to Niccolo Niccoli, his humanist friend in Florence, who was also a friend of Donatello. In that text, Lucretius sought to reveal the scientific principles that underlie nature’s order, including the mechanism of sight with calculations of distance and dimension and of atmospheric distortion that would prove so inspirational for Alberti in his treatise and for the works of painting, sculpture, and architecture created by his artist friends.
