Leone Battista Alberti published his De Pictura, (On Painting), in 1435.  He was a Florentine who combined wide learning with a scientific outlook and a deep devotion to classical studies. He also practised painting, sculpture and architecture. The original Latin edition of De Pictura was followed in 1436 by an Italian version dedicated to Brunelleschi, though it was many years before its influence was at all widely felt.

Alberti combined technical instruction, aimed at achieving a faithful imitation of nature, with guidance about subject-matter and the manner in which a subject should be presented. The painter was recommended to study the writers of antiquity for narrative themes, looking particularly for some pregnant moment, a dramatic or emotional incident that lent itself to framing, marrying form and subject as a moment frozen in time.

Alberti took for granted the artist's freedom to choose for himself, in other words that his employment was no longer confined to the Church and its limited repertory of themes. He encouraged the artist to develop a humanistic outlook and not to rest content with being a mere craftsman. He should therefore study the Liberal Arts. He should 'make himself familiar with poets and orators and other men of letters, for he will not only obtain excellent ornaments from such learned minds, but he will also be assisted in those very inventions which in painting may gain him the greatest praise. The eminent painter Phidias used to say that he had learned from Homer how best to represent the majesty of Jupiter.'

Later humanists were to explore further this question of a relationship between painting and poetry. Alberti, meanwhile, recommended the artist to try his hand at an allegorical subject said to have once been painted by Apelles (fourth century bc) and which was known through a description by the satirical writer Lucian who lived in the second century ad. The theme was Calumny and the scene showed an innocent youth dragged before a judge, who was adorned with ass's ears, by a woman who personified the vice in question. Also depicted were figures representing Ignorance, Suspicion, Envy, Treachery and Deceit. But all would surely end well for in the rear came Repentance, followed by 'chaste and modest Truth'. The first and most famous rendering of this theme still extant is Botticelli's, done in the 14905 some sixty years after De Pictura was published.

Whether Apelles ever painted such a picture in the first place is another matter. Such extensive use of anonymous figures (as opposed to the gods) to personify abstractions was fairly rare before the Christian era. In any case, a description such as Lucian's, one of a whole series he wrote purporting to describe various works of art, was not intended as art/criticism. It was primarily a literary exercise and was part of a writer's training in the subject of rhetoric. Similar series of so- called descriptions were produced by other Greek writers, notably the two Philostratus (Elder and Younger) who were roughly contemporary with Lucian. None of their essays has been positively identified with any known work of art.

Nevertheless, the classical 'description', or ekphrasis, which had been revived by humanists as early as the fourteenth century, became popular from the early sixteenth century with artists in search of antique themes. Lucian was known to Italian humanists from a Latin translation made early in the fifteenth century. He was used by the Sienese painter Sodoma for the scene of the marriage of Alexander the Great and Roxana which decorates an upper room in the Villa Farnesina at Rome. According to Lucian the original was by the Greek painter Action.

The writings of the Greek Philostratus reappeared in Italy in 1503 in the original Greek which, by that date, was commonly understood in educated society. Their publication was due to the industry of the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius who reprinted much of Greek classical literature. An Italian translation of Philostratus was made about 1510 for Isabella d'Este, Duchess of Mantua, who was an enthusiastic patron of the arts. It was the source of such dreanv like idylls as Titian's Andrians and the Feast of Venus, the latter commissioned by Isabella's brother Alfonso. Rubens also painted both subjects, basing himself on Titian.