Sublime

The first time he moved away from Florence to Milan, in 1482, Leonardo left the Adoration of the Magi as merely a cartoon. When he decided to move the second time, in 1506, he left with the Battle of Anghiari similarly promising but unpainted. He would end up making Milan his home base for seven years, with only temporary visits back to Florence. H

At the time when he was perfecting Lisa’s smile, Leonardo was spending his nights in the depths of the morgue under the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, peeling the flesh off cadavers and exposing the muscles and nerves underneath. He became fascinated about how a smile begins to form and instructed himself to analyze every possible movement of each

Cesare Borgia was the son of the Spanish-Italian cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, soon to become Pope Alexander VI, who vies for the hotly contested title of most libertine Renaissance pope. “He had in the fullest measure all the vices of the flesh and of the spirit,” the pope’s contemporary Francesco Guicciardini wrote. He was the first pope to recognize

When mastering drapery drawings in Verrocchio’s studio, Leonardo also pioneered sfumato, the technique of blurring contours and edges. It is a way for artists to render objects as they appear to our eye rather than with sharp contours. This advance caused Vasari to proclaim Leonardo the inventor of the “modern manner” in painting, and the art histo

We have met Giacomo Andrea before. He was the host of the dinner that Leonardo went to with Salai two days after the ten-year-old scamp had become his assistant, at which Salai “supped for two and did mischief for four,” including breaking three cruets and spilling the wine.20 That dinner happened on July 24, 1490, just four weeks after Leonardo an

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.