Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo’s record of unreliability was not simply because he decided to give up on certain paintings. He wanted to perfect them, so he kept hold of many of them for years, making refinements. Even some of his commissions that were completed, or almost so—Ginevra de’ Benci and the Mona Lisa, for example—were never delivered to clients. Leonardo clun

Make lists. And be sure to put odd things on them. Leonardo’s to-do lists may have been the greatest testaments to pure…

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The visit marked the climax of the Medici practice of using public pageants and spectacles to dissipate popular discontent.

Even though it was typical of him, we still should marvel that he would decide that before sculpting a horse he had to dissect one. Once again his compulsion to engage in anatomical investigations for his art eventually led him to pursue the science for its own sake. We can see this process unfold as he worked on the horse: careful measurements and

His engineering instincts led him to envision some ingenious conveniences: the windows of the studio should have adjustable blinds so the light could be easily controlled, and the painting easels should be on platforms that could be raised and lowered with pulleys, “so that it would be the painting, not the painter, that would move up and down.”

While working as a master painter in Verrocchio’s shop during his late teens and early twenties, Leonardo contributed elements to two paintings: he was responsible for the scampering dog and shiny fish in Tobias and the Angel (fig. 8) and for the angel on the far left in the Baptism of Christ.

Leonardo had the eye and temperament and curiosity to become an exemplar of this scientific method. “Galileo, born 112 years after Leonardo, is usually credited with being the first to develop this kind of rigorous empirical approach and is often hailed as the father of modern science,” the historian Fritjof Capra wrote. “There can be no doubt that

This allows viewers to look at the eyes of the woman, which, as Leonardo declared, are “the window of the soul.”

It’s reassuring to discover that Leonardo spent as much on books as he did on clothes. In the inventories he made in 1504, he listed 116 volumes.