Ezra Pound, in his essay “The Renaissance,” writes: “The first step in a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing” (214). Pound suggests that a renaissance artist needs to develop his own “table of values” from his great predecessors — values that he likens to a painter’s palette of pure colors which an artist can “make out [his] own spectrum or table” (215). While Pound was hoping to foster a twentieth-century renaissance, his words seem equally as applicable to the artists of the Italian Renaissance. Renaissance artists renewed the work of the classical, pagan tradition of Greece and Rome and combined it with what they learned from the Christian Middle Ages, and with a syncretism unique to the Renaissance, made something new that was supported and validated by tradition. What came out of this tradition during the Renaissance may be illuminated by the great “renaissance men” of the time like Leonardo, who, in his Notebooks, suggests a new art based on the pragmatic and verifiable, i.e., “true science” away from the religion and superstition of the Christian middle ages to observable, empirical truth and a trust in the capacities of humanity.

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