But as Lester demonstrates through a wide-ranging reconstruction of the intellectual milieu of Renaissance humanism, Leonardo lived at a time when ancient texts commanded profound respect, and mastery of their nuances was considered an unequivocal sign of accomplishment.
So far as we are concerned, if the fault that we are underlings lies "not in our stars but in ourselves", we are surely capable, unless our national character has undergone some profound metamorphosis, of resuming mastery of our fate.
In Camões a profound Classical education combined with perfect mastery of poetic technique and a lifetime of varied experience to produce in sonnets, eclogues, odes, elegies, and canções (songs) the greatest poetry of the Portuguese language.
Conrad has a remarkable ability to concisely frame a sentence, (that in itself can be profound), but when you combine Conrad's mastery of grammar with his themes, ideas and landscapes, his little novel is thick with "close writing".
There is something profound and poignant in these struggles, which illustrate one of the fundamental tasks of babyhood: the mastery of the physical environment.
But the control, the mastery of half-tones, and the profound seriousness of her playing of Schubert's chords, especially memorable in The Inn, was music-making of the highest order.
This included the lovely evenness of the singer's light baritone, his controlled mastery of dynamic range and his unaffectedly profound colouring of text, as well as Huber's limpidly thoughtful piano playing.
It is rather in his broad and profound knowledge of the teachings of the ancient and medieval philosophers, his mastery of their science, his commitment to the ultimate accord between their true teachings and the correctly interpreted teachings of the Torah, and his life-long effort to interest his fellow Jews in science and philosophy and to make their teachings available to them.
Isolationism is strong in the Tea Party, where mistrust of executive power is profound and where being able to see Russia from your front yard counts as mastery of international affairs.
Mastery of material was secondary.
