Sublime

Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects is considered art history’s foundational text.

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

The legacy of two such polymaths had a formative influence on Leonardo. The first was Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), the designer of the cathedral dome.

With the help of the writings of Alberti and the development of mathematical perspective, the social and intellectual standing of painters was rising, and a few were becoming sought-after names.

There are two key differences that distinguish Leonardo’s version of Vitruvian Man from those done around the same time by his two friends, Francesco di Giorgio and Giacomo Andrea. In both scientific precision and artistic distinction, Leonardo’s is in an entirely different realm (fig. 44). Rarely on display, because prolonged exposure to light wou

« Le peintre est assis devant son ouvrage de manière à être parfaitement à l’aise. Il est bien habillé et manie un pinceau léger trempé dans une couleur délicate. Il est vêtu comme il lui plaît. Son logis est propre et rempli d’œuvres magnifiques, et il agrémente souvent son travail de musique ou de la lecture d’excellents ouvrages. »

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