Leonardo Arrives in Milan

1482

The Florentine painter and restless polymath left Lorenzo de Medici's court for the military patronage of Ludovico Sforza in Milan, bringing unfinished commissions, notebooks crammed with anatomical sketches, and a silver lyre shaped like a horse's head that he played with virtuoso skill. He would spend seventeen years in Milan, producing the Last Supper, the colossal clay Sforza horse model, and thousands of pages of scientific observation that no contemporary would ever read.