By that he is trained; by that his work is distinguished
from the mere exclamation of wonder. He is not content to applaud; he
must also worship, and make his offerings in his worship; and they are
the best he can do. It was not only the shepherds who came to the birth
of Christ; the wise men came also and brought their treasures with them.
And the art of mankind is the offering of its wise men, it is the
adoration of the Magi, who are one with the simplest in their worship--

Wise men, all ways of knowledge past,
To the Shepherd's wonder come at last.

But they do not lose their wisdom in their wonder. When it passes into
wonder, when all the knowledge and skill and passion of mankind are
poured into the acknowledgment of something greater than themselves,
then that acknowledgment is art, and it has a beauty which may be envied
by the natural beauty of God Himself.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous men in history--as a man
more famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart--because
posterity has elected him the member for the Renaissance. Most great
artists live in what they did, and by that we know them; but what
Leonardo did gets much of its life from what he was, or rather from what
he is to us. Of all great men he is the most representative; we cannot
think of him as a mere individual, eating and drinking, living and
competing, on equal terms with other men. We see him magnified by his
own legend from the first, with people standing aside to watch and
whisper as he passed through the streets of Florence or Milan. "There he
goes to paint the Last Supper," they said to each other; and we think of
it as already the most famous picture in the world before it was begun.
Every one knew that he had the most famous picture in his brain, that he
was born to paint it, to initiate the High Renaissance; from Giotto
onwards all the painters had been preparing for that, Florence herself
had been preparing for it. It makes no difference that for centuries it
has been a shadow on the wall; it is still the most famous painting in
the world because it is the masterpiece of Leonardo. There was a fate
against the survival of his masterpieces, but he has survived them and
they are remembered because of him. We accept him for himself, like the
people of his own time, who, when he said he could perform
impossibilities, believed him.