Sublime

Leonardo was a member of a middle-class family but separate from it. Like so many writers and artists, he grew up feeling a part of the world but also detached.

Au lieu de publier ses notes sur la peinture, Léonard les retouche sans cesse tout au long de sa carrière, comme la plupart de ses peintures. Dix ans plus tard, il ajoutera encore des réflexions tout en griffonnant ses idées pour la rédaction d’un nouveau traité.

Leonardo’s apprentices and students did not merely copy his designs. A show at the Louvre in 2012 featured paintings that students and assistants in his workshop did of his masterpieces. Many were variations that were produced alongside his original, indicating that he and his colleagues were together exploring various alternative approaches to the

What made Vitruvius’s work appealing to Leonardo and Francesco was that it gave concrete expression to an analogy that went back to Plato and the ancients, one that had become a defining metaphor of Renaissance humanism: the relationship between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the earth. This analogy was a foundation for the treatise that

Another set of drawings that Leonardo produced for the amusement of the Sforza court were pen-and-ink caricatures of funny-looking people he dubbed “visi mostruosi” (monstrous faces), which are now commonly called his “grotesques.” Most are small, just under the size of a credit card.

il étudie de manière novatrice l’anatomie, les fossiles, les oiseaux, le cœur, les machines volantes, l’optique, la botanique, la géologie, la mécanique des fluides et les armes. Il devient ainsi l’archétype de l’homme de la Renaissance, une source d’inspiration pour ceux qui croient que tous les éléments de « l’œuvre infinie de la nature », comme

“The first intention of the painter,” Leonardo later wrote, “is to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane, and he who surpasses others in this skill deserves most praise. This accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned, arises from light and shade, or we may say chiaroscuro.”30 That stateme