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Article: THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment and Design
- Article from:
- The Sunday Telegraph London
- Article date:
- September 17, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2006 The Sunday Telegraph London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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'Truly marvellous and celestial was Leonardo,' proclaimed Giorgio
Vasari, his first biographer, 'and in learning and in the rudiments
of letters he would have made great proficience, if he had not been
so variable and unstable, for he set himself to learn many things,
and then after having begun them, abandoned them.'
Vasari's thumbnail portrait of the quintessential Renaissance man,
in The Lives of the Artists, conveys better than any other document
the mixture of wonderment and exasperation that Leonardo da Vinci was
capable of inspiring in his contemporaries.
On the one hand, Vasari sang the praises of Leonardo's
incomparable intellect: 'He was the first, though but a youth, who
suggested ...