LEONARDO DA VINCI. (D.Field), PB

Leonardo Da Vinci patrons might find his failures to complete a commission exasperating, just as we may share their regrets at the perfectionism which made it difficult for him to bring a work of art to a successful conclusion, but contemporaries generally had no doubts about the genius of Leonardo da Vinci. Naturally, in that era of classical revival, he was often compared with the great scholars of ancient Greece, with Archimedes, Pythagoras, and most of all, perhaps, with Plato, whose figure in Raphael's famous painting of the School of Athens is generally believed to be modeled on the venerable Leonardo.