Art: The Apocalypse on a Postcard

At New York's Metropolitan Museum, the drawings of Leonardo

Who were the three greatest draftsmen in the history of Western art? There would be room for argument at the lower end of the ranking (Dürer? Raphael? Ingres?). But of the first two there can be little doubt. One was Michelangelo; the other was Leonardo da Vinci. The bastard son of a Florentine notary, Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. Almost from the moment that he emerged from Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s and began his long, peripatetic and disappointed life among the courts of Rome, Milan, France and...

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