Sublime

He’s an architect’s architect; he told me he’s interested in how buildings can help do the metaphysical work of what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called true dwelling—a social triad made of people, one to another and in their environments.

Nous avons tendance à voir les artistes comme des créateurs isolés, enfermés dans leur mansarde, attendant patiemment que l’inspiration vienne. Mais comme le laissent transparaître les carnets de Léonard et le processus de création de son Homme de Vitruve, la création artistique est pour lui une affaire collégiale.

During the period when he was probing the human body, Leonardo was also studying the body of the earth. True to form, he made analogies between the two. He was skillful at discerning how patterns resonate in nature, and the grandest and most encompassing of these analogies, in both his art and his science, was the comparison between the body of man

Leonardo would make Florence his base for most of 1500 to 1506, boarding comfortably with his entourage at the church of Santissima Annunziata. In many ways, it would be the most productive period of his life. There he began two of his greatest panel paintings, the Mona Lisa and Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, as well as an image of Leda and the

In order to make money, Leonardo at times helped his apprentices produce pieces as if on an assembly line, as had been the practice in Verrocchio’s studio.

Leonardo was not always a giant. He made mistakes. He went off on tangents, literally, pursuing math problems that became time-sucking diversions. Notoriously, he left many of his paintings unfinished, most notably the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, and the Battle of Anghiari. As a result, there exist now at most fifteen pai