may turn their efforts towards painting, to the greatest feasible extent.» [6] Alberti, who rose to considerable fame as an architect in particular, applied musical numerical proportions to architectural construction. Famous examples are his designs for the churches of S. Francesco in Rimini (1453) and S. Andrea in Mantua (1470). [7]

Leonardo raised the argument to a higher plane. He doubted the superiority of the artes liberales as opposed to the fine arts. His exemplary comparison of art and music led to a demand that art should enjoy equal status. As a universal scholar, he was knowledgeable in all fields. It is said that Leonardo even designed musical instruments, for example a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head for Prince Lodovico Sforza in Milan. He is also said to have been an outstanding musician. For his famous portrait of the Mona Lisa he arranged for music and singing during the sittings, to encourage the subject to look cheerful. [8] In his now famous treatise «Il Paragone», Leonardo wrote in detail about the relationship between painting and music: «If you say that the non-mechanical sciences are the intellectual ones, that I say that

painting is intellectual and that it, just as music and geometry consider the relationship between the continuous quantities, and arithmetic the relationship between the discontinuous quantities, painting considers all continuous qualities of the relationship between light and shade and with perspective, those of distances.» [9] And further: «Music can be called nothing other than the sister of painting, as it is subject to hearing, as sense that comes after sight, and creates harmony by combining its well-proportioned and simultaneously appearing parts, though they are compelled to emerge and to fade away in a single or several tempos. These tempos enfold the wellfitting quality of the elements from which the harmony is composed, no differently from the way that the lines describe the elements of which the human beauty is composed. Painting towers over and dominates music, because it does not fade away immediately after it is created like unfortunate music, but, on the contrary, remains alive, and so something that in reality is nothing but a surface shows itself to be a living thing. Oh wondrous science, you keep the fragile beauty of mortal man alive, and it thus becomes