Like most able men who have had to educate themselves the hard way, Charlemagne felt strongly the value of education, and in particular he saw the im… - Kenneth Clark

As for the Messiah, it is, like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, one of those rare works that appeal immediately to everyone, and yet is indisputably a masterpiece of the highest order.

If one wants a symbol of Atlantic man, as opposed to Mediterranean man, a symbol to set against the Greek temple, it is the Viking ship. The Greek temple is solid, static, crystalline; the Viking ship is light, mobile, and voyaging, floating like a water lily.

To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth's bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers.