The 15th-century Florentine Leon Battista Alberti was a ridiculously gifted painter, composer, poet and philosopher--not to mention the author of the first scientific analysis of perspective, a treatise on the housefly and a eulogy for his dog.

FORBES: I've got a secret

He started out as a gifted Abstract Expressionist painter.

WSJ: The Seductive Lure of Abstraction | Sightings by Terry Teachout

While Painter is a gifted story teller, the best one he told me is how he got elected president of his class at West Point.

FORBES: How Scott Painter's Honor Helped Him Raise $1.7 Billion in Start-up Capital

"Rising Up" first introduces us to the gifted young painter in Paris, experimenting with a variety of modernist painting languages.

WSJ: Rising Up: Hale Woodruff's Murals From Talladega College | High Museum of Art | From Mutiny to Harmony | By Karen Wilkin