Word: leonardo
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...Leonardo in those days was a handsome young demigod, so strong that he could break horseshoes with his bare hands. In any group he would have been the center; it was his misfortune to become the center of a group which numbered several effeminates. At 24 he was indicted for sodomy. He was acquitted, but only after a relentless inquisition...
Lost in the Vaults. Restless and unhappy, Leonardo turned to study and speculation. He deserted Florence for Milan, left Milan for Mantua, tried Florence and Milan again, then Rome and finally France. Time & again he proposed to his patrons works of such colossal size that they could be executed only in the vaults of Leonardo's own vast imagination. It seemed almost as if he wanted his projects to be refused, so that he could go on brooding over more of them...
...from his dreams Leonardo wrung some amazing realities. He took up military engineering, and invented prototypes of the machine gun, the tank, the explosive shell, the submarine. Turning to municipal planning, he conceived a city with two-level highways. He designed the first power loom, the first rolling mill, the first differential gear, the first picture projector. His studies in anatomy, hydraulics, mechanics, optics carried him centuries ahead of his day. Even his amusements made history: he invented a musical instrument that anticipated the harpsichord; he improved the printing press, rigged a style of oil lamp that was used until...
Even when Leonardo turned his attention to painting, the picture was often brought to nothing by his passion for tinkering. The grand mural depicting the Battle of Anghiari was completely lost because an experimental lacquer, one of Leonardo's latest notions, dissolved. The Last Supper early began to fade, partly because Leonardo chose to use an experimental tempera. Of all his paintings, only two or three, including the Mona Lisa, survive relatively unimpaired...
Journey for Nothing. Leonardo comforted himself with violent denunciations of the world, expressed in some of the most savage cartoons ever drawn, and in cruel diatribes in his notebooks. "There are men," he would burst out, "who de serve to be called nothing else than passages for food, augmenters of filth, and fillers of privies!" He never married. He hated the ties of family. When his half-brother wrote him of the birth of a son, Leonardo congratulated him on "having provided yourself with an active enemy whose one desire will be for the freedom which cannot be his until...