Leonardo da Vinci

What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity, the ability to apply imagination to intellect. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him, like other creative geniuses, to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen. “Talent hits a target that

On a deeper level, Leonardo’s homosexuality seems to have been manifest in his sense of himself as somewhat different, an outsider who didn’t quite fit in.

The curator of drawings at Windsor, Martin Clayton, came up with the most convincing explanation. He posited that the painting was done in two phases, the first around 1480 and the other following the dissection studies he made in 1510. Clayton’s theory was supported by infrared analysis, which showed that the dual neck muscles were not part of the

He developed his thoughts about these topics not just from his own experience and reading; they were formulated also through conversations with friends and colleagues. Conceiving ideas was for Leonardo, as it has been throughout history for most other cross-disciplinary thinkers, a collaborative endeavor. Unlike Michelangelo and some other anguishe

When Leonardo drew his Vitruvian Man, he had a lot of interrelated ideas dancing in his imagination. These included the mathematical challenge of squaring the circle, the analogy between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of earth, the human proportions to be found through anatomical studies, the geometry of squares and circles in church archit

Leonardo had to send him a plea for overdue payments to cover his costs and those of “the two skilled workmen who are continually in my pay and at my expense.”2 Ludovico eventually made good by giving Leonardo an income-producing vineyard just outside of Milan, which he kept for the rest of his life.

The mechanical elements of the theatrical events interested Leonardo as much as the artistic ones, and he saw them as connected. He delighted in making ingenious contraptions that would fly, descend, and animate in ways that would excite his audiences. Before he had fully begun his writings on the flight of birds, he made a light sketch in his note

Throughout his life, Leonardo would remain enchanted by the transformation of shapes. The margins of his notebooks, and sometimes entire pages, would be filled with triangles inside semicircles inside squares inside circles as he played with tricks for turning one geometrical form into another with the same area or volume. He came up with 169 formu

Why the obsessiveness? Why the need for reams of data? Partly, at least initially, it was to help him paint humans, or horses, in various poses and movements. But there was something grander involved. Leonardo had set for himself the most magnificent of all tasks for the mind of mankind: nothing less than knowing fully the measure of man and how he

The commission that Leonardo received in October 1503 to paint a sprawling battle scene for Florence’s Council Hall in the Palazzo della Signoria could have become one of the most important of his life. Had he completed the mural along the lines of the preparatory drawings he made, the result would have been a narrative masterpiece as captivating a