Alberti completed work on the Pitti Palace in Florence but his best design is said to be the St. Francis Church at Rimini. He also designed the new facade of St. Maria Novella Church at Florence and is believed to be the architect of the unfinished courtyard at the Palazzo Venezia which nearly 500 years later was the office of the late and unlamented Benito Mussolini. His painting, “La Visitazione”, is in the Uffizi gallery. As an ecclesiastic, Alberti was Canon of the Metropolitan Church of Florence in 1447 and later was Abbot of the San Sovino monastery, Pisa. But it was as an artist that Alberti made his contribution to the art and science of light and shadows. He invented the _camera lucida_, a machine which aided artists and painters by reflecting images and scenes to be painted or drawn. The device, a modification of the “dark room”, could also be used to make it easy to copy a design. In a sense, the _camera lucida_ was the forerunner of the modern blue-print duplicator. After Alberti had made his original drawings, an assistant, with the aid of the device, could rapidly copy them and give duplicates to the builders for use on the construction job. Vasari’s _Lives of Painters, Sculptors and Architects_ is the chief source of information about Alberti. That writer said Alberti was more anxious for invention than for fame and had more interest in experimenting than in publishing his results. This is an attempt to explain why Alberti’s own words of description of his _camera lucida_ are not preserved. Alberti was said to have written on the art of representation, explaining his “depictive showings” which “spectators found unbelievable”. According to Vasari’s description it would appear that Alberti used a form of the _camera obscura_ or room box-camera but introduced special scenes such as paintings of mountains and the seas and the stars. In this way Alberti sought to introduce a touch of showmanship into the performances of the room camera which up to this time was used chiefly for observation of eclipses and other scientific purposes. Though Alberti died when Leonardo da Vinci was a young man, it is certain that Leonardo knew of him, as they were natives of the same city. Perhaps da Vinci had even attended some of Alberti’s magic shadows exhibitions.