The highest IQ artists and painters in history

Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Rembrandt have figures from Cox's 1926 study, which rated documented early achievement in every field. Leonardo's notebooks, filled with engineering, anatomy and optics, give an unusually rich record; most painters left far less. For artists born after 1850, such as Picasso, Kahlo and Dalí, the numbers are editorial markers with very low confidence.

Visual-spatial ability is a real part of intelligence and a large part of modern nonverbal tests. But painting also depends on hand skill, long apprenticeship and an eye for what to leave out. That makes an artist's estimate one of the least certain on the site, and the ranges on these profiles are wide for that reason.

Polymaths rank highest. Leonardo and Michelangelo were engineers, anatomists, architects and poets as well as painters, and the breadth of their documented work drives their estimates. Painters known only for painting sit lower, even when their art is just as great.

The Dutch and Italian masters who left almost no writing, such as Vermeer and Caravaggio, carry the widest uncertainty. Their pictures show exceptional visual analysis, especially of light, but there is almost nothing else to go on.

Modern artists are judged on documented intellectual range as much as on art. Picasso's restless reinvention and Dalí's interest in science and psychology inform their markers; Van Gogh's letters, among the most eloquent ever written by a painter, inform his.

Visual reasoning tests ask you to see how shapes, positions and shading change across a grid. Artists train that kind of looking for years. The comparison is loose, but it is one reason a visual IQ test is a natural way to see how your own eye for structure stacks up.