I don't think the hacker/painter correlation is far off the mark. We might not know of many painters who can hack but I think the idea might better be illustrated by someone who could be best described as a "Hacker" in his day.
Leonardo had lots of attributes you could ascribe to modern day Hackers:
- inately curious (how else would you work out how the human heart valves worked or the observation that the hardening and constriction of the minute capillaries in old people (compared to young babies) has something to do with
death. Something that modern science had to re-discover.
- wrote excessively in notebook diaries on ideas and creations he was working on. (I've seen a sample of these diaries as part of the Royal Library collection. Images of cross sections from human skulls to yet to be born in-eutero.)
- sketched out his ideas as a combination of pictures and words (using silverpoint on vellum: a prepared animal hide covered with ground up animal bones and glue. then built upon these prior ideas as finished works)
- emperical in outlook and willing to try new ideas: that is he observed what worked and not just theorised or accepted common wisdom. A good example of this can be found in the paint composition of "The Last Supper". Leonardo decided "fresco" didn't allow him to express his painterly style, shunned the conventional and tried "fresco" over "gesso" (gypsum). In this case it failed miserably. But this ability to experiment also allowed Leonardo to
master oils. The results of this stable medium you can see today in "La Gioconda" in the Louvre in Paris.
- exhibited unnatural powers of concentration (shunning food, rest and drink for instance during the painting of "The Last Supper".)
- mastery of numerous different technologies
The key bit that most people might not realise is that for Leonardo, painting was his technological multiplier. Leonardo expressed his sketches as drawings and words and presented finished ideas in paint. It is through the act of painting that we
recognise the most famous painting of the Renaissance. I think the key to understanding the relationship between hackers and painters is that the expression of the intangible thought through art is what matters. Painting and drawing of ideas is to Leonardo as Macs are to modern day hackers. The product might be different but in the end both, modern Hacker and Leonardo as painter create new,
seemingly intangible things from pure thought. I'm not surprised pg went to study in Florence. What does surprise me is why it took so long to realise that it was not
the location that elevated Leonardo but the "tech revolution" of the time, painting.