Sublime

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 was also influenced by Verrocchio’s primary commercial competitor in Florence, Antonio del Pollaiuolo.

When Leonardo first came to Milan in 1482, he had hopes of working primarily as a military and civil engineer, as he had proposed in his letter to the de facto duke, Ludovico Sforza. That did not happen. Most of his work for the court during the ensuing decade was as a theatrical impresario, then as the sculptor of the unfinished horse monument and

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

Leonardo got to pursue, in a leisurely and broad fashion, all of his curiosities and passions at the Melzi villa. Though he no longer had access to human corpses, he dissected animals, including the rib cages of oxen and still-beating hearts of pigs. He completed his geology writings in the Codex Leicester, analyzing the nearby rock formations and