Sublime

There are two key differences that distinguish Leonardo’s version of Vitruvian Man from those done around the same time by his two friends, Francesco di Giorgio and Giacomo Andrea. In both scientific precision and artistic distinction, Leonardo’s is in an entirely different realm (fig. 44). Rarely on display, because prolonged exposure to light wou

Leonardo got to pursue, in a leisurely and broad fashion, all of his curiosities and passions at the Melzi villa. Though he no longer had access to human corpses, he dissected animals, including the rib cages of oxen and still-beating hearts of pigs. He completed his geology writings in the Codex Leicester, analyzing the nearby rock formations and

Rome was a new city for him, a place he had never lived. It was teeming with great architects, including his friend Donato Bramante, who was modernizing vast swatches of roads and buildings. Among his other projects, Bramante was building a formal, terraced courtyard, flanked by arched corridors, that would connect the Vatican to the elegant papal

Lorsque Léonard souhaitait peindre un personnage, il considérait avant tout le statut social et les émotions qu’il devait représenter : noble ou plébéien, joyeux ou sévère, troublé ou serein, vieux ou jeune, courroucé ou inquiet, bon ou mauvais. Une fois décidé, il se rendait dans des endroits qu’il savait fréquentés par ce type de personnes et obs

A large measure of the firm’s success was due, as Richard Roth was later bluntly to explain in his essay, “High-Rise Down to Earth,” to their aim “not to create masterpieces” but to provide buildings that worked efficiently and economically for their clients: buil

seeing it as an inspiration for architecture that would be both more sensual and more geometrically complex than the conventional modernist box.