Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, born around 80 BC, served in the Roman army under Caesar and specialized in the design and construction of artillery machines. His duties took him to what are now Spain and France and as far away as North Africa. Vitruvius later became an architect and worked on a temple, no longer in existence, in the town of Fano in Italy

. They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe—but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.17

Leonardo was often critical of Botticelli, whose version of an Annunciation scene, painted in 1481, was probably what prompted Leonardo to write, “I recently saw an Annunciation in which the angel looked as if she wished to chase Our Lady out of the room with movement of such violence that she might have been a hated enemy; and Our Lady seemed in s

When Leonardo arrived, Milan was ruled by Ludovico Sforza, who was also thirty. A dark-skinned and burly man nicknamed “Il Moro” (the Moor), he was not actually the Duke of Milan yet, though he exercised the authority and would soon grab the title. His father, Francesco Sforza, one of seven illegitimate sons of a military mercenary, had seized powe

“The first intention of the painter,” Leonardo later wrote, “is to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane, and he who surpasses others in this skill deserves most praise. This accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned, arises from light and shade, or we may say chiaroscuro.”30 That stateme

Leonardo’s work producing theatrical pageants was enjoyable and remunerative, but it also served a larger purpose. It required him to execute his fantasies. Unlike paintings, performances had real deadlines. They had to be ready when the curtains parted. He could not cling to them and seek to perfect them indefinitely. Some of the devices that he m

The ongoing hostilities involving the French and their shifting alliances with Italian city-states often resembled pageantry and processionals more than war. “A march through Italy was an occasion for feasts, spectacles, firework displays, jousts, the expropriation of estates, and occasional massacres,” wrote Robert Payne. “The French aristocracy a

When mastering drapery drawings in Verrocchio’s studio, Leonardo also pioneered sfumato, the technique of blurring contours and edges. It is a way for artists to render objects as they appear to our eye rather than with sharp contours. This advance caused Vasari to proclaim Leonardo the inventor of the “modern manner” in painting, and the art histo

The utopian city he envisioned would have two levels: an upper level designed for beauty and pedestrian life, and a level hidden below for canals, commerce, sanitation, and sewage.