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he had been promoted to what he considered the ideal job: ingeniarius ducalis, engineer-architect to Duke Sforza of Milan.
    Never had he enjoyed such financial stability. The duke gave him an entire wing of an old palace, opening onto the cathedral square, as a comfortable home and workshop. He also gave him precious land for a vineyard. Leonardo could finally think about building his own house. For now he supported a household of a dozen or so students, servants, and friends. His workshop was a hive of activity, buzzing with apprentices, with Leonardo as a gentle father figure.
    Best of all, he had plenty of spare time and the free run of the excellent library at the university. He had access to scholars and librarians. Some professors became his friends.
    He was far from wealthy, but now he did have money to buy books. He owned more than most scholars, including Ptolemy’s Cosmography . (It was Ptolemy who, in the second century, cemented the theory—still held in Leonardo’s lifetime—that Earth was the center of the universe.)
    Around this time, Leonardo informally adopted a ten-year-old boy he nicknamed Salai, or Demon. No one else liked the boy—he stole, lied, and constantly embarrassed Leonardo, who wrote, “He eats as much as two boys and causes as much trouble as four.” He might have started out as a servant—peasant children entered service at ten. But to Leonardo he also served as a model, a pupil and assistant, and a companion—almost a son, and someone to indulge. Whatever his faults, Salai stayed with him for almost thirty years.
    During his time in Milan, Leonardo was laboring on one of his most famous masterpieces, The Last Supper, painted on the wall of the dining room in a monastery. He would paint for days without eating or drinking. Or he might show up to study the mural for many hours, make one brush stroke, then take off. Two years passed. Eventually he finished, but alas, his experimental use of oil paints on the dry plaster wall was unsound. The mural began deteriorating during his own lifetime.
    Leonardo also devoted years of intense study to the duke’s favorite project, the twenty-four-foot-high bronze horse. Leonardo even dissected horses to study their anatomy. He became probably the world’s foremost expert on horses. And he was fascinated by the technological difficulty of creating a horse that big. But the bronze creature never got built.
    We know that by now he was wrapped up in scientific investigations.
    He became lifelong friends with Luca Pacioli, author of the first printed algebra book. A mathematician, Franciscan monk, and fellow disciple of Alberti, Pacioli was one of the most respected intellectuals in Italy and an important influence on Leonardo. Leonardo sought tutoring in math—never his best subject—from Pacioli. Math was changing at its most basic level. People were switching from the limited system of Roman numerals (no zero, no fractions) to the Arabic system, which we still use today.
    Pacioli also helped with Leonardo’s study of the Greeks—Archimedes, and also Euclid, whose ancient works in geometry were available in Italy. It was Euclid who had worked out the principles that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, and that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
    Leonardo repaid Pacioli’s help many times over. He later illustrated the monk’s most celebrated work, Divina Proportione, which built on the five complex geometric shapes in nature as defined by Plato.
    Leonardo preferred to keep his scientific work secret. Pacioli was one of the few people Leonardo trusted enough to show his notebooks. Work on the meticulously illustrated notebooks was an ongoing nightly activity. Leonardo was beginning to organize them by themes—the first was to be optics, his theories about the eye and how we see.
    There was just so much to be learned, so much to discover. “Obstacles cannot crush me,” he proclaimed with resolve. “He who is