the High Renaissance. He did not know Leonardo--da Vinci died when Vasari was 7 years old--and as with many of his accounts, the stories he tells and the details of the lives of the painters have come down to him from earlier times primarily in the broad stream of the oral tradition of the period. One of the things that is apparent in these anecdotes is that the author presents a vast stock of tales about artists that are clearly of interest to the public:
This means that evidently even the peculiarities of artists, their deviations from normal bourgeois behavior, were noticeable to contemporaries and appeared remarkable and that the unusual aspects of the artist's personal behavior, if not of his productions, made an impression even on the simple bourgeois and kept alive the names of the heroes of such anecdotes.
Vasari details the range of Leonardo's interests by noting that he was a painter, a sculptor, an architect, a geometrician, a designer of machines. It is interesting that in stating that Leonardo should have concentrated on one thing, Vasari selects as that one thing his study of science rathe
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