Quotes

Like most artist-craftsmen of his era, he did not sign his work. Although he copiously documented trivial items in his notebooks, including the amount

Leonardo had also been wrestling with the question of why the sky appears blue, and around that time he had correctly concluded that it

Instead, Leonardo’s studio was like a shop in which he devised a painting and his assistants worked with him to make multiple copies. This

One approach is connoisseurship, the ability of a true art expert with a refined eye to discern paintings by the master. Unfortunately, connoisseurship over

While in Milan in 1507, Leonardo met a fourteen-year-old named Francesco Melzi Leonardo was then fifty-five, and he had no son or heir. Young

Leonardo needed an extension of his leave from Florence because he had not finished all of the projects the king wanted. Florence’s leaders acquiesced

perspectives. He freely admitted that he preferred the chisel to the brush. “I am not in the right place, and I am not a

The subject assigned to Michelangelo was another of Florence’s rare battlefield victories, this one over Pisa in the Battle of Cascina in 1364. Like

By 1500 the two artists were back in Florence. Michelangelo, then twenty-five, was a celebrated but petulant sculptor, and Leonardo, forty-eight, was a genial

What began as a portrait of a silk merchant’s young wife became a quest to portray the complexities of human emotion, made memorable through