SOURCE: “Leonardo da Vinci” in Four and Twenty Minds, selected and translated by Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1922, pp. 15-25.

In the following essay, Papini reviews Leonardo's accomplishments and comments that although Leonardo was a scientist, his achievement in this area is often exaggerated, and that his philosophy “does not amount to much.”

“Philosophieren ist vivificieren.” 

—Novalis

I

Historians affirm with a surprising unanimity that in the Year of Grace 1452 there was born in the town of Vinci a child who received the fair name of Leonardo, and became famous throughout Italy and beyond the Alps. And they go on to tell how he was taken to Florence and apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio, how he began to paint with marvelous skill, how he went to the court of Milan—and many other things which the reader surely knows much better than I. If he doesn...