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he saw was painted, and was beating a retreat when Leonardo stopped him and said, ‘This work has served its purpose; take it away as it has produced the effect intended.’” Ser Piero did take it away, and went and bought another piece of wood with a heart pierced by a dart painted on it. This he gave to a very satisfied peasant, while he sold Leonardo’s painting for 100 ducats. This story shows us an important part of Leonardo’s science of art—a close look at things in nature (like the lizards, newts and other animals he kept in his workroom) can provide the artist with the raw material for his paintings. These may be fantastic, like the monster that he painted, but they may also tell us a great deal more about nature itself. Leonardo and Verrocchio

A statue of the young Leonardo da Vinci in Florence. Contemporary accounts described Leonardo as being finely built, strong, and handsome.

began the search for this artistic representation of the “truth” by exploring two fields of human knowledge, human anatomy and perspective. Anatomy is the study of the structure of the body. Perspective is the study of how three- dimensional objects can be represented on a two-dimensional surface (e.g. a drawing on a sheet of paper), so that it shows how an onlooker would have seen the object from any given point.

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