Even unfinished, the Adoration of the Magi and Saint Jerome show that Leonardo was pioneering a new style that treated narrative paintings and even portraits as psychological expositions.

Imagine an art-lover at an exhibition entitled ‘Dots 2008’. He speaks to two artists, each displaying a painting. In both cases, the art-lover cannot see past the seemingly random arrangement of dots of paint. He mentions this to the first artist, who says: “Oh, no, they’re not randomly placed. Each dot represents a friend of mine. The colour of th

Michelangelo’s painting has the sharp, delineated outlines that Leonardo, with his love of sfumato and blurred borders, scorned as a matter of philosophy, optics, mathematics, and aesthetics. To define objects, Michelangelo used lines rather than following Leonardo’s practice of using shadows, which is why Michelangelo’s look flat rather than three

To love and live with a painter means marveling at the space between the things they see that you cannot see, that they then make. White canvas, blank walls, his vision.