Salieri, on Mozart, from the movie, “Amadeus”:
” Extraordinary! On the page it looked
nothing. The beginning simple, almost
comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and
basset horns - like a rusty
squeezebox. Then suddenly - high
above it - an oboe, a single note,
hanging there unwavering, till a
clarinet took over and sweetened it
into a phrase of such delight! This
was no composition by a performing
monkey! This was a music I’d never
heard. Filled with such longing,
such unfulfillable longing, it had
me trembling. It seemed to me that I
was hearing a voice of God.
But why?
Why? Would God choose an obscene
child to be His instrument? It was
not to be believed! This piece had
to be an accident. It had to be!”
Those two excerpts share some similarity in their description of a genius. Of course one was written by a 20th century playwright and the other by a man who was an artist himself, a friend of Michelangelo, and whose life in the 16th century overlapped with the life of the man he was writing about. Apparently Vasari did not see any of the “obscene child” aspect in Leonardo either.