His lack of a formal education was no handicap, either. It also saved him from becoming a notary, a profession closed to sons born out of wedlock. Being illegitimate was no great stigma: it meant he grew up with two mothers (which Freud thought explained a lot). Gay, vegetarian, flamboyant in dress (with a preference for pink), erratic in his work habits and astute when it came to self-promotion, Leonardo would have felt at home among the hipsters of today.

Photograph: History Archive/REX Shutterstock But did multitasking prevent him achieving more? On the one hand, the Renaissance Man to whom maths and science were as important as painting on the other, the artist who “left posterity the poorer” ( Kenneth Clark’s phrase) by pursuing hobbies – engineering, architecture, pageantry, military strategy, cartography, etc – on which his talents were wasted. On the one hand, the lofty genius who wouldn’t kowtow to affluent patrons on the other, the feckless fantasist who failed to fulfil his commissions. The story encapsulates contrasting versions of Leonardo that have been in play ever since Vasari extolled him in his Lives of the Artists. Even then, he didn’t come up with the goods. Pushy to the end, she changed tack and asked him for a painting of Jesus instead.

With promises he’d get round to it eventually, Leonardo kept her dangling for another three years. “Mathematical experiments have absorbed his thoughts so entirely that he cannot bear the sight of a paintbrush,” Isabella was told. The friar met Leonardo in Florence but found his lifestyle “irregular and uncertain” and couldn’t pin him down. I n 1501, desperate for Leonardo to paint her portrait, the immensely rich Isabella d’Este employed a friar to act as go-between.

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