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(this post was reblogged from nybooks)
Leonardo knew too much for a painter. It seems that painting his beautiful heads, he couldn’t free himself from the thought of the skull, the brain, the network of veins, of everything he learned from the autopsy of corpses. Shouldn’t a painter know only the skin of the world? At every step, Leonardo the painter was ambushed by Leonardo the anatomist. And hence the sad wisdom and the melancholy of knowledge in his paintings.
Zbigniew Herbert, Leonardo’s Disquiet (via nybooks)
