Lives of the Artists , Volume 1. For example, he was the first person to study the flight of birds scientifically. Living in the city of one of Italy's greatest art patrons, Lorenzo de Medici, Leonardo seems never to have found favor at court. In , when the French conquered Lombard and Milan, the two left the city together, heading for Mantua. That this horror of inflicting pain was such as to lead him to be a vegetarian is to be inferred from a reference which occurs in a letter sent by Andrea Corsali to Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici , in which, after telling him of an Indian race called Gujerats who neither eat anything that contains blood nor permit any injury to any living creature, he adds 'like our Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo's balanced compositions and idealized figures became standard features of later Renaissance art.