Leonardo da Vinci

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

The scene Leonardo set out to paint in the Adoration of the Magi was one of the most popular in Renaissance Florence: the moment when the three wise men, or kings, who have followed a guiding star to Bethlehem, present the newborn Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

So far all of Leonardo’s benefactors had fallen short. When he was a young painter in Florence, the city was ruled by one of history’s super-patrons, but Lorenzo de’ Medici gave him few if any commissions and sent him away carrying a lyre as a diplomatic gift. As for Ludovico Sforza, it was many years after Leonardo’s arrival in Milan before he was

Painting requires not only intellect, he said, but also imagination.

With the Baptism of Christ, Verrocchio went from being Leonardo’s teacher to being his collaborator. He had helped Leonardo learn the sculptural elements of painting, especially modeling, and also the way a body twists in motion. But Leonardo, with thin layers of oil both translucent and transcendent, and his ability to observe and imagine, was now

The scene Leonardo set out to paint in the Adoration of the Magi was one of the most popular in Renaissance Florence: the moment when the three wise men, or kings, who have followed a guiding star to Bethlehem, present the newborn Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The Feast of the Epiphany, which commemorates the revelation of the

When he was compiling his bird treatise, Leonardo began a section of another notebook with a directive to put them into a broader context. “To explain the science of the flight of birds, it is necessary to explain the science of the winds, which we shall prove by the motion of the waters,” he wrote. “The understanding of this science of water will

The Italian Renaissance was producing artist-engineer-architects who straddled disciplines, in the tradition of Brunelleschi and Alberti, and the tiburio project gave Leonardo the opportunity to work with two of the best: Donato Bramante and Francesco di Giorgio. They became his close friends, and their collaboration produced some interesting churc

mounting a two-ton ball on top of Brunelleschi’s dome of Florence’s cathedral. It was a triumph of both art and technology.