Alberti, Leone Battista

See Cedi Grayson (ed.), Leone Battista Alberti. On Painting and cm Sculpture (London Phaidon, 1972). 

A determination to link the four elements to colours persisted long after the Greek primaries had been discarded. The Renaissance artist Leon Battista Alberti awarded red to fire, blue to air, green to water, and ash colour (cinereum) to earth Leonardo da Vinci made earth yellow instead. These associations would have surely informed the contemporaneous ideas of painters about how to mix and use colours. 

See the quotation from Leon Battista Alberti in Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford, 1988), p. 16. 

When Vasco returned, he found me at my side of the big desk behind a pile of every book on cryptography in the Maestro s library—Roger Bacon, Johannes Trithemius, Girolamo Cardano, Leon Battista Alberti, Giovani Porta, Blaise de Vigenere. Al-Kindi was there, too, but I can t read Arabic. Needless to say, I had made small progress with those I could read. 

Grafton, A. Leon Battista Alberti Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance, 1st edn. Hill and Wang, New York (2000)... 

Figure 2.4 Leon Battista Alberti. (With permission. Drawn by Joy E. Tartter.)...

The most common type of cipher in ancient times was the substitution cipher. This was the type of cipher employed by Julius Caesar during the Gallic Wars, by the Italian Leon Battista Alberti in a device called the Alberti Cipher Disk described in a treatise in 1467, and by Sir Francis Bacon of Great Britain. In the 1400 s, the Egyptians discovered a way to decrypt substitution ciphers by analyzing the frequency of the letters of the alphabet. Knowing the frequency of a letter made it easy to decipher a message. 

---