The article seeks to chart the creative influence exerted by Leonardo da Vinci on Giorgione and Titian. Central to the argument is the conception of the maniera moderna as formulated by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists. Giorgione’s stylistic debt to Leonardo has been recognised since Vasari and remains a topic of scholarly contention. I attempt to resituate it in terms of Leonardo’s evolving conception of – and resistance to – the notion of art as self-expression, proposing Giorgione’s art as one that embraces embodied experience through means devised by the Tuscan master to represent nature dispassionately. Titian’s relationship to Leonardo has been afforded less attention, though I argue that it is just as fundamental and emerges first through his drawings. The unprecedented boldness of his early work on paper is hard to imagine without Leonardo’s example and anticipates his groundbreaking approach to painting. Leonardo’s innovations catalysed a development in Titian that would lead to their radical inversion – a high point of a maniera moderna that he had intuited and resisted.