As an adolescent, Leonardo entered the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the most important artists working in Florence. Such workshops were not narrowly specialized.

They produced floats for parades, large and small paintings, and sculpture. They even sometimes carried out engineering projects. The workshop was a site of eclectic production. In part, Leonardo’s wide-ranging interests and abilities derived from the eclecticism imparted by the workshop culture of his time.

Yet Leonardo also attempted to bridge the worlds of handwork and learning. His efforts as an adult to learn Latin are evident on some of the sheets of his notebooks. He was able to access at least some aspects of Latin learning because the gap between some ”mechanical arts” such as painting and sculpture and the world of learning was beginning to close. From the early fifteenth century, painting in Florence and elsewhere had developed a geometric technique known as perspective, making it a mathematical art. A learned humanist, Leon Battista Alberti, had written Latin treatises on painting, sculpture, and architecture, and had dedicated an Italian version of his treatise on painting to Filippo Brunelleschi, sculptor, goldsmith, and architect of the famous dome of the Florentine cathedral.

The development of a cultural movement called “humanism” facilitated the growing proximity of these arts and learned culture. Humanism embraced the subjects of moral philosophy, rhetoric and history. Although most humanists were skilled Latinists, they often worked not in the universities but in the city-states. They served princes and oligarchs as secretaries, diplomats and civil servants. The rulers who were patrons of the humanists also employed artists such as Leonardo. The courts of Renaissance rulers were places where skilled craftsmen and learned humanists and scholars were able to intermingle and communicate.

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