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.

From there he went to Venice, where he offered military advice on defending against a threatened Turkish invasion. Always interested in the flow of water and its military uses, he devised a mobile wooden lock that he believed could allow the Isonzo River to flood a valley that would be used by any invaders.1 Like many of his visionary schemes, it w

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

Leonardo may have gone to work with Borgia at the behest of Machiavelli and Florence’s leaders as a gesture of goodwill, similar to the way he had been dispatched twenty years earlier to Milan as a diplomatic gesture to Ludovico Sforza. Or he may have been sent as a way for Florence to have an agent embedded with Borgia’s forces. Maybe it was both.

While in Milan in 1507, Leonardo met a fourteen-year-old named Francesco Melzi (fig. 101). He was the son of a distinguished nobleman who was a captain in the Milanese militia and later a civil engineer who worked to reinforce the city’s fortifications, endeavors that fascinated Leonardo. The Melzis lived in the largest villa in the town of Vaprio,

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

The utopian city he envisioned would have two levels: an upper level designed for beauty and pedestrian life, and a level hidden below for canals, commerce, sanitation, and sewage.

“Save me from strife and battle, a most beastly madness,” Leonardo once wrote. Yet for eight months he had put himself at Borgia’s service and traveled with his armies. Why would a person whose notebook aphorisms decry killing and whose personal morality led him to be a vegetarian go to work for the most brutal murderer of the era? Partly this choi