Wikipedia:Peer review/Leonardo da Vinci/archive2

Leonardo da Vinci

• Previous Peer review

I am requesting a peer review because I am planning to work on the article and I want to know what the Wikipedia community wants improved in it. I hope that it eventually will become a featured article.--Natl1 (Talk Page) (Contribs) 22:24, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Review by Awadewit

This is a very good start to a hard article. Here are my suggestions.

• Infobox: Is it correct to list his nationality as "Italian" since there was no Italy at that time? Would it be more correct to say he was Florentine?
• The list after polymath seems a little long. For example, I doubt "scientist" can legitimately be included and "architect" seems redundant since "engineer" is included.
• the man with the most diversely prodigious talent ever to have lived - perhaps "one of the people" - also "diversely prodigious" is awkward
• There are a lot of awkwardly worded sentences in this article. Most are run-ons or have awkwardly placed clauses. Here are some examples:

Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper occupying unique positions as the most famous, the most illustrated and most imitated portrait and religious painting of all time, only approached in fame by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam.- almost a run-on

As a fourteen-year-old apprentice Leonardo would have been trained in all the countless skills that were employed in a traditional workshop in which the artists were regarded primarily as craftsmen and only a master such as Verrocchio had social standing.

Leonardo’s early works begin with the Baptism of Christ in conjunction with Verrocchio.

The thing that makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely-set figures, superimposed, because Mary, is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne, and leaning forward to support the Christ Child as he plays (rather roughly) with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. - (don't start with "The thing")

The journals are written mostly in mirror-image cursive, the reason probably his left-handedness which makes it difficult to push a quill pen from left to right across a page.

• What did the hawk omen mean to Leonardo?
• Vasari tells the story of how a local peasant requested that Ser Piero ask his talented son to paint a picture on a round plaque. - tell the reader who Vasari is - this is the first we hear of him
• "Florence — Leonardo's artistic and social background" seems a little listy even though it is in prose. Try to tie the paragraphs together more and make a case to the reader for why you are including them.
• These painting are famous for a variety of qualities which were to be interminably discussed and speculated about by connoisseurs and critics, imitated by students, and gazed at day after day by the public in thousands. - this sounds unencyclopedic
• Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. - sounds like he wasn't a scientist - Scientific Revolution wasn't really until the seventeenth century
• The list of quotes in the "Legend" section should either be worked into a narrative about Leonardo's legacy or deleted.
• I think that there needs to be more of an artistic legacy section - who did he influence and how?
• I haven't seen "section references" before, but I've only been seriously reviewing for about three months. I would assume that it is better to cite each piece of information specifically and I can guess that at FAC they might have a problem with these section references (they seem firm about inline citations over there), but perhaps I am wrong about that. Several sections have no references at all. That will eventually be a problem when you go for FA.
• I noticed some British spellings and some American spellings. The editors should pick one style.
• I noticed some first-person "we" constructions. These are apparently frowned upon at wikipedia.
• Sometimes painting titles are not italicized.
• When you decide to go for FA, you will want to prune the "external links" and the "see also." Awadewit 07:46, 6 March 2007 (UTC)