In 1761, Sulzer began work on his General Theory of the Fine Arts, which was originally planned as a revision of Jacques Lacombe's Dictionnaire portraitif des beaux-arts (1752) but became a vehicle for the statement of Sulzer's own general views about aesthetics and the moral significance of art as well an outlet for his vast learning and energy.
It is a thrilling narrative told with empathy and vast learning, rich with images that reinvigorate figures as familiar as Lincoln: "Whitman felt it would take four different sorts of genius -- Plutarch, Aeschylus, Michelangelo and Rabelais -- to truly sketch Lincoln's portrait".
Companies like Google, eBay, Salesforce.com and Amazon consider their vast learning in managing operational complexity in an SOA world to be both a competitive advantage and a barrier to entry.
Or the vast learning center that would make Paterson the educational hub of the East Coast?
Even his closest disciples found his anthropological and historical approach too sweeping to satisfy their scientific requirements, though they admired his vast learning and original insights.
His vast learning allowed him to vary his poses and style so often that the well-known remark of Thomas Gainsborough, "Damn him, how various he is!" is entirely understandable.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69 1536), the most famous and important of the Northern or Christian humanists, used his vast learning and his satiric pen to question the practices of the church.
These books, however, illustrate another side of his thought, based on the conviction that Homer was perfectly acquainted with the geography of the Mediterranean area and that the correct critical interpretation would reveal his vast learning.
Moreover, the contradictions in Busoni -- between showiness and contemplation, composition and recomposition (of operatic hit tunes as well as Bach), vast learning and narrow concentration, experiment and tradition -- became Sorabji's own, and he adopted the Busoniesque persona of the sage who dispenses arcane knowledge from the piano bench.
