Join this video lecture to think outside the box about Leonardo da Vinci’s creativity. Open your mind to considering such unsettling questions as: What if Leonardo wasn’t as original as we usually think he was? What if he learned more from his predecessors and contemporaries than we thought? What if he didn’t even apprentice with Andrea del Verrocchio but was hired as an assistant with skills already honed in a rival workshop? What if we dispense with all the legends and simply look at what Leonardo’s earliest paintings, drawings, and scant written documentation allow us to imagine are the true origins of his genius?

Gary M. Radke is Professor Emeritus of Art History at Syracuse University, where he directed the Florence Graduate Program in Renaissance Art and was named Meredith Professor for Teaching Excellence. His publications on Italian medieval and Renaissance art range from a book on the thirteenth-century papal palace in Viterbo to essays on the patronage of nuns in Renaissance Venice. He curated major loan exhibitions throughout the United States on Italian Renaissance sculptors Lorenzo Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia, Andrea del Verrocchio, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci. His widely distributed college textbook on Italian Renaissance art, co-authored with John Paoletti, appeared in four editions and in Spanish and Chinese translations. Gary is past president of the Italian Art Society and a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
In retirement Professor Radke and his wife Nancy have settled into an historic home in Savannah, Georgia, where Gary is now a trustee of the Historic Savannah Foundation and chair of its Architectural Review Committee. He continues to write scholarly articles and enjoys lecturing in Italy for various cultural groups.