Sublime

Leonardo’s triumph designing The Masque of the Planets brought him a modest amount of fame—more than he had received as a painter of unfinished panels and certainly more than he had ever earned as a military engineer. It also delighted him. His notebooks show the interest he took in the mechanism of the automated props and scenery changes. The inte

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.

Although generally considered by his contemporaries to be friendly and gentle, Leonardo was at times dark and troubled. His notebooks and drawings are a window into his fevered, imaginative, manic, and sometimes elated mind. Had he been a student at the outset of the twenty-first century, he may have been put on a pharmaceutical regimen to alleviat

Leonardo was always on the lookout for powerful patrons, and in 1513, with Milan still controlled by his former patrons the Sforzas, a new one appeared in Rome. In March of that year, Giovanni de’ Medici was elected to become Pope Leo X. The son of Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de’ Medici, the Florentine ruler who was a halfhearted patron to Leonardo a