And it does not take a Freud to understand that sexual drives can be sublimated into ambition and other passions. Leonardo said so himself. “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.
“Whoever does not curb lustful desires puts himself on the level of beasts.”
Acuity perspective is related to what Leonardo called aerial perspective: things become blurrier in the distance not only because their details disappear as they become smaller but also because the air and mists soften distant objects.
“Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he told the duke, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”
It is important, Leonardo wrote, to “have a movement of a person’s limbs appropriate to that person’s mental movements.”
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