Why does Leonardo da Vinci continue to have such a hold on our imaginations? Perhaps part of his attraction is that he seems to perfectly exemplify the popular notion of the Renaissance Man. How extraordinary, we think, that he was an inventor, a portrait painter, an anatomist and a botanist, artist and scientist. At least two things are wrong with this notion. One, he was not alone in his multifaceted abilities; it was more common for an artist of his time to undertake at least two or three of these endeavors than it was to specialize in one. But just as important, art and science during the Renaissance were not separated by the chasm that they are now. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self,” Kerry James Marshall . The two most common lighting conditions when painting outside are direct sunlight and a cloudy sky and both influence the qualities of the cast shadow edge. Direct sunlight gives us a hard light source that creates clearly visible shadows and produces a hard crisp edge to the cast shadows. A cloudy sky gives us a soft light source which gives much subtler shadows with soft blurry edges.