With fifty thousand people, Florence must have been an impressive sight for a young man like Leonardo arriving from Vinci. “Nothing more beautiful or more splendid than Florence can be found anywhere in the world,” the scholar Leonardo Bruni had declared in about 1402. Fifty years later, a Florentine merchant, taking stock of his hometown, believed it even more resplendent than in Bruni’s day, with beautiful new churches, hospitals, and palaces, and with prosperous citizens sauntering through the streets in “expensive and elegant clothing.” Florence at this time could boast fifty-four dealers in precious stones, seventy-four goldsmith shops, and eighty-three silk-weaving firms. There was, the merchant acknowledged, a further attraction: the astonishing proliferation of Florence’s architects, sculptors, and painters.  Highly conspicuous by the time Leonardo arrived in Florence were frescoes, statues, and buildings by men like Giotto, Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Donatello, and Lorenzo Ghiberti.

King, Ross (2012-10-30). Leonardo and the Last Supper (pp. 23-24). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.