Sublime

For most of 1512, he resided comfortably in the family home of his student and surrogate son, Francesco Melzi, who turned twenty-one that year. It was an odd familial menagerie: Francesco had been adopted as a ward by Leonardo, and they were staying with his biological father, Girolamo Melzi. Also there was the still-beloved Salai, now thirty-two.

I think of Leo as a vast chunk of blotting paper, and nothing escapes imprinting itself on his quick eye, awesome intellect, and generous heart.

During the period when he was probing the human body, Leonardo was also studying the body of the earth. True to form, he made analogies between the two. He was skillful at discerning how patterns resonate in nature, and the grandest and most encompassing of these analogies, in both his art and his science, was the comparison between the body of man