Sublime

church of Santa Maria del Fiore. It had once been a magnificent piece of raw stone, but an unskillful sculptor had mistakenly bored a hole through it where there should have been a figure’s legs, generally mutilating it. Piero Soderini, Florence’s mayor, had contemplated trying to save the block by commissioning Leonardo da Vinci to work on it, or

The bribe bought Florence peace for a year, but in June 1502 Borgia was back. As his army sacked more surrounding towns, he commanded the leaders in Florence to send a delegation to hear his latest demands. Two people were selected to try to deal with him. The elder was Francesco Soderini, a wily Church leader who led one of the anti-Medici faction

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

Leonardo’s relationships with his half-brothers had improved since the resolution of the family’s inheritance disputes, and when he got to Rome he sought out his father’s oldest legitimate son, Giuliano da Vinci, who, not surprisingly, was a notary. Giuliano had been promised a benefice—a Church appointment that came with a stipend—but there had be

Leonardo’s foul mood and his lack of artistic productivity, in stark contrast to Michelangelo and Raphael at the time, served to alienate him from the Medici orbit. The situation worsened when Giuliano’s influence declined; he was sent off in early 1515 to marry the daughter of a French duke and then died a year later after a long bout with tubercu

Florence had controlled the town of Pisa, just over fifty miles down the Arno River toward the coast of the Mediterranean, for much of the fifteenth century. This was critical for Florence, which had no other outlet to the sea. But in 1494 Pisa managed to wriggle away and become a free republic. Florence’s middling army was incapable of breaching P

Andrea Toma-celli, who had used Boldrino to help him restore order in the Papal States, decided that he would anticipate Boldrino’s next desertion and win popularity with the local inhabitants by having him murdered at a dinner party in Macerata. Bold-rino’s company is said to have carried the body of their murdered leader with them for two years a

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.

Florence was the most civilized city in the world, and the chief source of the Renaissance.