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| (1404-1472): Playwright, musician, painter, mathematician, scientist and athlete as well as architect and architectural theorist, many have seen Alberti as the ultimate example of the Renaissance ideal of the ‘complete man’. |
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| an arm’s length): unit of measure equal to approximately 23 inches common in the Italian Renaissance, but with a different exact dimension in each region of the country. |
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| the transparent (invisible) body of a Renaissance palazzo. (See hypostyle matrix). Both are associated with the ideal building in the mind as understood in Neoplatonic theory. |
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| the ratio of 1:1.618+ (an irrational number generated by adding the diagonal of 1/2 of a square to 1/2 of the length of its side to produce a rectangle of this ratio. |
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| the proportional series of the untempered musical scale and the putative universal harmony: 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, 4:5, etc. |
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| the matrix of vertical and horizontal lines (ideal beams and columns) constituting the three-dimensional grid of equal sized cubes which define the ideal volume of a Renaissance palazzo. The hypostyle matrix defines the corpo transparente |
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| the space between columns |
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| a number whose exact value cannot be calculated. A prime example is the diagonal of a square. By the Pythagorean theorem, if the side of the square is one unit, the diagonal is equal to the square root of 2, an irrational number. |
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| in Renaissance architectural theory, rooms which exhibit the highest degree of cubicity. |
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| diamond pattern of facing stones originated by the Romans for walls with a concrete core. |
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| (the noble level): the main living floor of a palazzo, usually one floor above the ground floor. In Europe, floors and elevators are numbered starting (with 1) from the piano nobile level rather than the ground floor, as is common the United States. |
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| (1475-1554), painter and architect, author of l’Architecttura, the first book on architecture whose aim was practical rather than theoretical. |
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| the use of roughly shaped stone faces to create texture and shadow |
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| using a geometrical construction to create a square exactly equal in area to a given circle. Such a construction has been proven to be impossible in geometry, but it can be approximated by various procedures. |
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