Art & Creativity Quote by Leonardo da Vinci

A Renaissance multitasker is drawing a border around his turf. Leonardo’s line isn’t a casual dig at poets; it’s a declaration of jurisdiction from a man who treated painting as a form of knowledge. In his world, depiction isn’t decorative. It’s a way of thinking with the eyes, of making claims about anatomy, light, proportion, and the measurable laws governing the visible. If you believe truth is something you can test with observation, then the painter - especially one obsessed with optics and dissection - starts to look like a scientist with better branding. The poet, by contrast, works through description that arrives secondhand, filtered through language’s ambiguities and the reader’s imagination. That’s not an aesthetic complaint; it’s an epistemological one.

The cleverness is how he splits reality in two and assigns each half a “proper” medium. Painting wins the visible because it can simulate presence. Music wins the invisible because it’s pure structure without a referent: it can move directly into mood, time, and metaphysical ache. Poetry gets squeezed between them, guilty by association with both but master of neither. The subtext is competitive and a little insecure: Leonardo elevates painting by comparing it upward (to music’s spiritual authority) and downward (against poetry’s allegedly inferior mimesis).

Context matters: this is the paragone era, when artists argued like lawyers about which art was noblest. Leonardo’s intent is strategic - to lift painting from craft to liberal art - and he does it by turning sensory perception into a hierarchy with himself near the top.