Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci opens the epoch of “universal geniuses” – those who were great in many things at once: a great painter, and engineer, and mechanician, and carpenter, and musician, and mathematician, and anatomist, and inventor.
In his own eyes, he was first and foremost an engineer. His contemporaries admired his musical gift. He was also called a sorcerer and an Italian Faust, a devil’s servant and a most divine soul. Only one thing is clear about him: the founder of the High Renaissance art, Leonardo was a rare example of the unimaginable resources of the human spirit.
Was he really a magician? Or, maybe, rather a divine mind? Both the heritage and the personality of Leonardo remain as yet cloaked in mystery, however great effort has been made to perceive them. Perhaps we should seek a clue to Leonardo’s phenomenon in music?