A Treatise on Painting

From these considerations on the Renaissance, of which Leonardo was one of the most original figures, it will not be useless to draw some consequences. And the most evident is this: that men of talent are not enough to save nations when the guiding moral principle of human actions is lost. "We have lost the true names of things original Latin: "Vera rerum nomina amisimus." A famous lament from Cato the Younger, as recorded by the historian Sallust, regarding the breakdown of Roman civic morality.," cried Cato in the Roman Senate when Catiline was finding apologists; and the same could be said of 16th-century Italy, when a savior was hoped for in Cesare Borgia The Machiavellian prince and son of Pope Alexander VI, known for his ruthless attempts to carve out a state in central Italy.. When the notions of good and evil are corrupted, the anarchy of minds paves the way for the anarchy of facts. And to this anarchy of facts, the sword of Charles V The Holy Roman Emperor whose troops famously sacked Rome in 1527, marking the end of the High Renaissance's political independence. put an end. — One can also deduce this: that a civilization does not regain its strength except by returning to the principle that generated it. The Renaissance sought to evoke, at least in its forms, pagan civilization while forgetting Christianity; for this reason, its work proved fruitless in producing great effects, nor was it defended against the uncivilized force that oppressed it. The nations that embraced the Reformation emerged from the struggle more tempered and stronger than we Latins, because the civilization they established was fundamentally Christian. It is useless to quibble over facts; our civilization, founded on Christianity, can do nothing but flourish or perish with it.

Returning now to the principle from which our words began, we observe that Leonardo da Vinci, within the Renaissance, represents the divination of the future; in this sense, he is perhaps the greatest genius of that marvelous century. For even if he, too, had to bend to the moral miseries of the time—painting portraits of the women loved by Sforza Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan and Leonardo's long-time patron. and assisting the enterprises of "Il Valentino" Cesare Borgia, who employed Leonardo as a military engineer.—he preserved in his soul a virtue that raised him above the greater part of his contemporaries.

If the renaissance The original uses the word "risorgimento," which here refers generally to the cultural "rebirth" of the era rather than the 19th-century political movement., at least in its outward form, presents itself to us as a joyous carnival of princes, politicians, poets, and artists,