Dragon Striking down Lion - by Leonardo da Vinci

Courtesy of LeonardoDaVinci.net

Dragon Striking down Lion gives us once more the scope of Leonardo's imagination. Without it he would never have been able to invent so many machines centuries ahead of his time. Thanks to his "sacrilegious" dissections, his studies of heartbeats and the working of muscles are still valid today. But Leonardo could also conjure up what he had never seen: he gave a detailed account of the Deluge for the use of diligent young painters; in a letter to the traveller, Benedetto Dei, a forerunner of the modern journalist, he gave a minute description of a giant.