Sublime

He learned music without teachers, and his compositions were approved by learned musicians.

In his job-seeking letter to Ludovico Sforza, he boasted of his abilities “to take the water out of the trenches” and “in guiding water from one place to another.” While in Milan, he studied that city’s large network of canals, including the grand canal dug in 1460 to Lake Como, as well as its well-tended waterways, dams, locks, fountains, and irri

The project, which he would still refer to decades later in his notebook, ingrained in him a sense of the interplay between artistry and engineering; he made loving, meticulous drawings of the hoists and gear mechanisms that Verrocchio’s studio used, some of which had originally been devised by Brunelleschi.25

In systematising the arrangement of information, Erasmus’s common-place – just as merchants’ ledgers had revolutionised finance – turned the notebook into information technology, a piece of hardware in which data could be stored, categorised and retrieved as necessary.

Francesco di Giorgio from Siena.8 Thirteen years older than Leonardo, he was another exemplar of an artisan who combined art, engineering, and architecture. He had begun as a painter, moved as a young man to Urbino to work as an architect, returned to Siena to run the underground aqueduct system, and was a sculptor in his spare time. He was also in

Brunelleschi’s successor as a theorist of linear perspective was another of the towering Renaissance polymaths, Leon Battista Alberti (1404 –1472), who refined many of Brunelleschi’s experiments and extended his discoveries about perspective. An artist, architect, engineer, and writer, Alberti was like Leonardo in many ways: both were illegitimate