Leonardo Da Vinci

Vision without execution is hallucination. But I also came to believe that his ability to blur the line between reality and fantasy, just like his sfumato techniques for blurring the lines of a painting, was a key to his creativity. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s

In order to make money, Leonardo at times helped his apprentices produce pieces as if on an assembly line, as had been the practice in Verrocchio’s studio.

Through his work on machinery, Leonardo developed a mechanistic view of the world foreshadowing that of Newton. All movements in the universe—of human limbs and of cogs in machines, of blood in our veins and of water in rivers—operate according to the same laws, he concluded.

Stand before the Mona Lisa, and the historical discussions about how it was commissioned fade into oblivion. As Leonardo worked on it for most of the last sixteen years of his life, it became more than a portrait of an individual. It became universal, a distillation of his accumulated wisdom about the outward manifestations of our inner lives and a

Among the many intriguing things about Leonardo are the mysteries that surround much of his work.