Pablo Picasso was an amazing and prolific painter.
However, unlike Michelangelo, who was also an accomplished poet, or Leonardo, who dabbled brilliantly in the fields of science, math, philosophy, and music, Picasso’s genius in painting did not overlap into other fields.
For example, when he tried his hand at writing plays, he took just four days to create a self-conscious, surrealistic bomb called Desire Caught by the Tail, which contains such lines as
“We sprinkle the rice powder of angels on soiled bedsheets. Tum the mattresses through blackberry bushes. With all power the pigeon flocks dash into the rifle bullets.” At the end of the play, all of the characters die from the fumes emitted from frying potatoes.
Luckily, Picasso quickly abandoned his literary pretensions and went back to what he did best.
As a result, although the dilettante Renaissance boys frittered away their time with sonnets and impossible-to-build submarines and omithopters, Picasso slaved in his studio to create a record number of artistic works, more than 20,000 in his 91 years.
In quantity, at least, Leonardo and Michelangelo were mere dabblers.
