Sublime

Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty. For honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary’s reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humour enough in her to laugh

Goya, the nearest old master to our own time,

While in Milan in 1507, Leonardo met a fourteen-year-old named Francesco Melzi (fig. 101). He was the son of a distinguished nobleman who was a captain in the Milanese militia and later a civil engineer who worked to reinforce the city’s fortifications, endeavors that fascinated Leonardo. The Melzis lived in the largest villa in the town of Vaprio,

For the rest of Leonardo’s life, Francesco Melzi would be by his side. He worked as Leonardo’s personal assistant and scribe, drafted his letters, kept his papers, and preserved them after his death. He wrote in a graceful italic, and his notations are to be found throughout Leonardo’s notebooks. He also was Leonardo’s art student. Though never a m

Painted in oil on a walnut panel, the portrait of Cecilia, now known as Lady with an Ermine, was so innovative, so emotionally charged and alive, that it helped to transform the art of portraiture. The twentieth-century art historian John Pope-Hennessy called it the “first modern portrait” and “the first painting in European art to introduce the id

Johannes Vermeer, precious things of which the world has perhaps only thirty-four.