Sublime

Leonardo’s most serious longtime companion, who joined Leonardo’s household in 1490, was angelic looking but devilish in personality, and thus acquired the nickname Salai, the Little Devil. Vasari described him as “a graceful and beautiful youth with fine curly hair in which Leonardo greatly delighted,” and he was the subject of many sexual comment

Because it was delivered to the French court and extensively copied, Madonna of the Yarnwinder turned out to be one of Leonardo’s most influential paintings. Leonardo’s followers, such as Bernardino Luini and Raphael, and soon painters throughout Europe, upended the genre of staid Madonna-and-child devotional paintings, creating instead narratives

Verrocchio’s workshop, which was nestled in a street near Piero’s notarial office, was the perfect place for Leonardo. Verrocchio conducted a rigorous teaching program that involved studying surface anatomy, mechanics, drawing techniques, and the effects of light and shade on material such as draperies.

The culmination of Leonardo’s collaborations with Verrocchio came in the mid-1470s with the completion of the Baptism of Christ, which shows John the Baptist pouring water over Jesus while two angels kneeling beside the River Jordan watch (fig. 10). Leonardo painted the radiant, turning angel on the far left of the scene, and Verrocchio was so awed

Many of the greatest Medieval and Renaissance paintings can also be seen as a form of imaginative soul-craft. Raphael’s School of Athens, for example, is imprinted on my soul (through endless gawping at the poster of it on my wall). It’s a portal between the sensory and the spiritual world, connecting us to Raphael’s ideal city, where the philosoph

Botticelli, whose workshop turned out devotional Madonnas at a faster clip than even Verrocchio’s, was seven years older than Leonardo and had won far greater patronage from the Medici. He was good at courting such favor.