Abstract
This piece examines the audacious dismissal of Leonardo da Vinci in Samuel Beckett's Three Dialogues with George Dialogue alongside the Parisian re-evaluation of Leonardo's work in the 1940s; a re-evaluation partly prompted by Gallimard's publication of Les carnets de Léonard de Vinci (1942). It argues that B's critique of Leonardo and the Italian masters is imbricated in contemporary debates on the relationship between painting and the impossible that emerged between the Flemish painter and writer, Jean de Boschère, and the French literary critic, Maurice Blanchot; a debate which Beckett himself appears to have encountered in Blanchot's Faux Pas (1943).
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