Leonardo da Vinci

In April 1476, a week before his twenty-fourth birthday, Leonardo was accused of engaging in sodomy with a male prostitute. It happened around the time that his father finally had another child, a legitimate son who would become his heir. The anonymous allegation against Leonardo was placed in a tamburo, one of the letter drums designated for recei

If you stand close enough to the painting at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, you can see his fingerprint just to the right of Ginevra’s jaw, where her ringlets of hair blur into the background juniper tree and a distinct little spiky sprig juts out. Another can be found just behind her right shoulder.

One of Leonardo’s earliest male companions was a young musician in Florence named Atalante Migliorotti, whom he taught to play the lyre.

Florence had controlled the town of Pisa, just over fifty miles down the Arno River toward the coast of the Mediterranean, for much of the fifteenth century. This was critical for Florence, which had no other outlet to the sea. But in 1494 Pisa managed to wriggle away and become a free republic. Florence’s middling army was incapable of breaching P

Heightening the significance of the commission was the fact that Leonardo would end up pitted against his personal and professional young rival, Michelangelo, who was chosen in early 1504 to paint the other large mural in the hall. Even though neither painting was finished—like Leonardo’s, Michelangelo’s work is known to us only through copies and

In his own nature and in his art, Leonardo’s attitude toward…

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When he began painting The Last Supper around 1495, Leonardo was at a high point in his career. With his official appointment as artist and engineer of the Sforza court, he was comfortably ensconced at Milan’s old palace, the Corte Vecchia, with his retinue of assistants and students. He was renowned as a painter, admired as the sculptor of the mam

By pursuing science that went well beyond its utility for painting a picture, Leonardo could have fallen prey to academism. Some critics have suggested that his excess of diagrams showing light hitting contoured objects and his deluge of notes about shadows were at best a waste of time and at worst led him to be too studied in some later works. To

Leonardo realized that the art of painting and the science of optics were inseparable from the study of perspective. Along with the proper ability to deploy shadows, the mastery of various types of perspective allowed painters to convey a three-dimensional beauty on a flat surface. A true understanding of perspective involved more than merely a for