Word: leonardo
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...Luca della Robbia, Benvenuto Cellini. However, while the retreating Germans had destroyed five of the six bridges over the Arno, they had left the oldest and most valued of all, the legendary Ponte Vecchio (see cut). Built in 1345, its roofed street was a promenade for Dante, Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci; in modern times, jewelry shops have succeeded its Renaissance goldsmiths. Over the bridge runs a covered passageway connecting the Uffizi Gallery with the Pitti Palace Museum...
...doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in love. . ." Leonardo's first patron was Lorenzo de' Medici, lavish ruler of Florence. But Leonardo served himself miserably: he was ridden by a perfectionism which prevented him from finishing a work. Even the patient Lorenzo finally let his artist go-to Milan, where he served the great Duke Ludovico Sforza. There Leonardo ranged through "interior decoration, gadget design, city planning, court painting and sculpture. His painter's mind was increasingly and almost ruinously engaged by intellectual curiosity about the physical world. Leonardo ended by turning from art to science...
Inefficiency Expert. The almost patho logically detached Leonardo also served the most bloodthirsty power politician of the Renaissance period - Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI. Leonardo was Borgia's military engineer, with no inter est whatever in politics. There exist some remarkable maplike bird's-eye views of the Italian terrain which Leonardo drew for Borgia's ill-fated campaigns...
Late in his life, Leonardo spent two un happy years in Rome. He found it increasingly difficult to finish work, and impossible to compete with such productive paint ers as Michelangelo and Raphael. Finally Leonardo's health began to fail; his right hand became paralyzed. At 64, he took his intimate friend, Francesco Melzi, and two servants to the Court of Frangois I at Tours. Leonardo died in France...
Recently a genealogist toiled down the generations of the master's family and found a living collateral descendant, a peasant trudging behind his oxen in Italian fields. His name: Leonardo da Vinci...