Leonardo Da Vinci
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The Grotesque Side of Leonardo da Vinci March 20, 2023
Leonardo da Vinci comments in his notebooks that while few are trained in judging portraits, everyone feels entitled to criticise actual people: “whether someone is a hunchback (gobbo), or has one shoulder higher or lower than the other, or too big a...
Was Leonardo's Mother Enslaved? March 17, 2023
An Italian author conducting research for a work of historical fiction about the life of Leonardo da Vinci has uncovered a document suggesting that Leonardo’s mother Caterina—whose background and biography have long been points of scholarly contentio...
Classical Raphael July 26, 2022
Raphaelaphael Santi (1483–1520), along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, is one of the three artistic titans of the Italian High Renaissance. Yet unlike the other two, he hasn’t gotten the widespread admiration in the United States that he des...
Dürer the Engraver July 19, 2022
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), a universal genius of the kind we now call a “Renaissance man” in the same way as Leonardo da Vinci, has maintained his high status since his death, even if Kenneth Clark in his Civilisation could fairly ridicule the egoti...
The Art of Business July 19, 2022
Artists need buyers, and patrons need artistic objects that reflect their status. Historically, the great patrons have been powerful individuals in societies whose dynamism created surplus wealth: Lorenzo de’ Medici for Leonardo da Vinci in Renaissan...
Art, Performance Art, and Climate Activism July 18, 2022
Last week, members of the climate activist group Just Stop Oil glued their hands to the frame of an early 16th-century copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in London’s Royal Academy of Art. They painted “No New Oil” under the painting and said...
The Strange Journey of a Da Vinci May 13, 2022
Although Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” is the artist’s most famous painting, it may not be his most intriguing, accomplished or beautiful. It may not even be his best portrait. A strong contender in that last category is “Lady With an Ermine” (ca. 1490), wh...
A Gallery of Know-It-Alls March 22, 2021
Epistemology, the theory and study of knowledge and how it is acquired, is unsatisfactory on the subject of the polymath, or the person of extraordinarily wide-ranging knowledge. Nor is it very helpful about what is required to be learned, or culture...
How to Be a Genius January 29, 2021
Don’t get me wrong – yes, I’m a professor at Yale University, but I’m no genius. When I first mentioned to our four grown children that I was going to teach a new course on genius, they thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. ‘You, you...
Masters of None November 06, 2020
Academics like few things more than to complain about the state of their profession. A recurrent gripe is that their fields have descended into hyper-specialisation, with an overload of knowledge – books, articles and now various forms of digital mat...
