Tag: Groundbreakers

My groundbreakers tag illustrates people throughout history who have made significant contributions in their chosen fields. They are all fascinating souls!

While in Milan, I had the opportunity to visit Leonardo 1452-1519 at the Palazzo Reale, an exhibition devoted to the genius of the Renaissance artist and inventor. The notebooks were as powerful as the paintings on view, and I took my time studying them as I walked through the intimately scaled rooms. I left the museum feeling as if an electrical current was sizzling through me so I decided to have lunch at the quiet café tucked into the palace to process all I had seen.

It was a beautiful spring afternoon so I dined al fresco thinking about how I had a visual frame of reference for the machinations of his mind, which made the act of reading da Vinci’s chapter of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, in which he highlights a large number of art’s groundbreakers, so much more satisfying. The quirky details in the profile had me laughing aloud, unexpected considering how seriously I view the legacy of this mental giant.

The story about da Vinci’s quest to fashion a dragon he could use as a model for a painting, which he’d concocted by combining the body parts of lizards and insects he’d chopped up and reconfigured, concludes with the fact that it took him so long to complete the painting the stench emitting from the dead animals in his studio was unbearable to most visitors, an odor he’d hardly noticed because he was so involved in the creative process! I feature many groundbreakers under this tag so I if you enjoy stories about them, I hope you’ll stop by.