Contemporary reverence for da Vinci is more about our age than his oeuvre

It opens with a display of treatises and often exquisite drawings by other Tuscan artist-engineers, including Francesco di Giorgio Martini, that show da Vinci was far from unique in combining technology with painting—and that some of his peers managed to get a lot more built or printed than he did. “And if he hadn’t studied anatomy, he wouldn’t have been able to paint the most enigmatic smile in the history of painting,” says Fiorenzo Galli, the director-general of the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. Even Professor Kemp, who has spent a lifetime studying da Vinci’s achievements, hesitates to go that far, stressing instead the Tuscan master’s huge influence on other painters.

Source: www.economist.com