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Alberti and the sciences

There is a guiding thread linking the themes of his treatises: "measurement", understood both as a conceptual form of the new idea of beauty based on the language of proportions, and as a geometrical unity that harmonises form, strength and weight. In this section the application of the perspective method to painting and sculpture is illustrated by the models of Brunelleschi's first and second tavolette, or panels, showing the Baptistery of San Giovanni and Piazza della Signoria, and the cast of the bas-relief of Herod's Banquet by Donatello.