Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was a notary’s illegitimate son from a Tuscan village who trained in Verrocchio’s workshop, served the Sforza in Milan, the Borgia, the Medici and Francis I, and painted the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. He filled thousands of pages with mirror writing and drawings on anatomy, water, flight, optics, war engines and the structure of everything he saw, and published nothing. The Notebooks the lists assign are selections from what survives, and the passages on painting as a science and on the eye are the closest thing to his philosophy. Vasari said heaven sometimes sends one man who is the whole of humanity.