Sublime

any work of art starts with a rough sketch.

Leonardo’s dedication to portraying the outward manifestations of inner emotions would end up driving not only his art but some of his anatomical studies. He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others. He would even try, when d

helped her acquire a large coffered ceiling from Orvieto, the hill town near Rome, decorated with painted scenes from ancient myths.

With his visual acuity, Leonardo had a natural feel for geometry, and that branch of math helped him formulate some rules for how nature works. However, his facility with shapes was not matched by one for numbers, so arithmetic did not come naturally. In his notebooks are entries where, for example, he doubles 4,096 to get 8,092, forgetting to carr

Un de ses prédécesseurs, Leon Battista Alberti, artiste-ingénieur, a écrit quelques années auparavant que cette matière est essentielle à l’artiste car, pour dépeindre correctement un individu ou un animal, il faut avant tout connaître ses caractéristiques internes. « Isole chaque os de l’animal, ajoute dessus ses muscles, puis recouvre le tout de

Only one of Leonardo’s military conceptions is known to have made it off the pages of his notebooks and onto the battlefield, and he arguably deserves priority as its inventor. The wheellock, or wheel lock, which he devised in the 1490s, was a way to create a spark for igniting the gunpowder in a musket or similar hand-carried weapon. When the trig

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