Sublime

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

While he was in Imola with Machiavelli and Borgia, Leonardo made what may be his greatest contribution to the art of war. It is a map of Imola, but not any ordinary map (fig. 87).18 It is a work of beauty, innovative style, and military utility. It combines, in his inimitable manner, art and science.

Borgia’s passport described Leonardo as he had fancied himself ever since his letter to the Duke of Milan twenty years earlier: as a military engineer and innovator rather than a painter. He had been warmly embraced, in fulsome and familial terms, by the most vibrant warrior of the age. For the moment, the man who had been described as no longer ab

Rather than commissioning a big piece of public art, the king offered Leonardo an ideal assignment for the culmination of his career: designing a new town and palace complex for the royal court at the village of Romorantin, on the Sauldre River in the center of France, some fifty miles from Amboise. It would, if it came to pass, allow the expressio

As with so many other of Leonardo’s visionary designs, he was ahead of what was practical for his time. Ludovico did not adopt his vision of the city, but in this case Leonardo’s proposals were sensible as well as brilliant. If even part of his plan had been implemented, it might have transformed the nature of cities, reduced the onslaught of plagu

Indeed, l’amore masculino, as Lomazzo quoted Leonardo calling it, was so common in Florence that the word Florenzer became slang in Germany for “gay.”

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