I Am an Art God I Am Da Vinchi
This year marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death. Widely considered i of the greatest polymaths in homo history, Leonardo was an inventor, creative person, musician, builder, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, historian and cartographer.
Though his artistic output was small, Leonardo'due south affect was great, reflecting his deep knowledge of the body, his extensive studies of calorie-free and the man face, and his sfumato (Italian for "smoky") technique, which allowed for incredibly lifelike images. Leonardo regarded artists every bit divine apprentices, writing "We, past our arts, may be called the grandsons of God."
Twenty-first-century scholars at MIT ranked him the 6th most influential person who ever lived. Like Rembrandt and Michelangelo, he is so renowned that he is known by only his first name. Yet despite his fame, there are things nigh Leonardo that many people today find surprising.
Shady parentage
Leonardo was born out of matrimony on April xv, 1452. His male parent, Piero, was a wealthy notary, and his mother, Caterina, was a local peasant girl. Although the circumstances of his nascence would place Leonardo at a disadvantage in terms of didactics and inheritance, biographer Walter Isaacson regards it as a terrific stroke of luck. Rather than being expected to go a notary like his father, Leonardo was instead free to develop the full range of his genius. People surmise that information technology also imbued him with a special sense of urgency to establish his own identity and prove himself.
Physical beauty
Leonardo created some of the world'due south near beautiful works of art, including the "Last Supper" and the "Mona Lisa." In his own day, he was known as an exceptionally bonny person. One of Leonardo's biographers describes him equally a person of "outstanding physical beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did." A contemporary described him as a "well proportioned, graceful, and good-looking man" who "wore a rose-pink tunic" and had "beautiful curling pilus, carefully styled, which came down to the middle of his breast." Leonardo is thought to accept entered into long-term and possibly sexual relationships with two of his pupils, both artists in their ain right.
From scraps to notebooks
The paintings by and large attributed to Leonardo number fewer than 20, while his notebooks incorporate over 7,000 pages. They're the best source of knowledge about Leonardo, housed today in locations such as Windsor Castle, the Louvre and the Spanish National Library in Madrid. Their diverse content ranges across drawings – about famously, Vitruvian Man – notes of things he wanted to investigate, scientific and technical diagrams and shopping lists. They contain perhaps the well-nigh remarkable monument to human curiosity and creativity e'er produced by a single person. Yet when Leonardo penned them, they were just loose pieces of newspaper of different types and sizes. His friends bound them into "notebooks" just after his death.
Outsider's education
As a effect of his illegitimacy, Leonardo received a rather rudimentary formal education consisting primarily of business organization arithmetics. He never attended university and sometimes referred to himself every bit an "unlettered human." Yet his lack of formal schooling also freed him from the constraints of tradition, helping to instill in him a conclusion to question authority and identify greater reliance on his own experience than opinions expressed in books. As a result, he became a immediate observer and experimenter, uninterested in serving as a mouthpiece for the classics.
Prolific procrastinator
Although Leonardo's mind was extraordinarily fertile, he was also an inveterate procrastinator and fifty-fifty quitter. He often took months or years to begin work on commissions, sometimes keeping patrons at bay with lofty pronouncements regarding his creative process. A giant equestrian statue for the duke of Milan, requiring 70 tons of bronze to bandage, might have been his grandest piece of work – if information technology had ever been completed. All the same a decade afterward the 1482 commission, Leonardo had produced only a clay model which was after destroyed when invading French soldiers used it for target practice.
Rivalrous motivations
Leonardo'southward life overlapped those of two other Renaissance giants – Michelangelo and Raphael – but information technology was Michelangelo who stoked an intense rivalry. The contrast between the two men could inappreciably have been sharper. Leonardo was elegant and evinced little involvement in matters religious, while Michelangelo was deeply pious yet neglectful of his advent and hygiene. Michelangelo created some of the greatest paintings in history, including the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and many considered his "David" the greatest sculpture e'er produced, a triumph he lorded over his older rival.
Regal gentleman
Soon after Male monarch Francis I of France captured Milan in 1516, Leonardo entered his service, spending the terminal years of his life in a house near the royal residence. When death came to Leonardo on May two, 1519 at the age of 67, it is said that the king, who loved to listen to Leonardo talk so much that he was hardly ever apart from him, cradled his caput as he breathed his last. Years later, reflecting on his friendship with the peachy man, King Francis said, "No human being possessed such a knowledge of painting, sculpture, or architecture every bit Leonardo, simply the same goes for philosophy. He was a great philosopher."
Skyrocketing value
In November 2017, one of the paintings attributed to Leonardo, "Salvator Mundi" ("Savior of the Earth"), set the tape for the most expensive painting always sold, fetching The states$450 1000000. Painted in oil on walnut in well-nigh 1500, it depicts Jesus offering a benediction with his correct hand while belongings a crystalline orb that appears to correspond the cosmos in his left. The painting had suffered from neglect and poor restorations and was long assumed to be the piece of work of i of Leonardo's students, selling equally recently as 2005 as part of the manor of a Billy Rouge businessman for less than $10,000. Its electric current whereabouts are unknown.
I of a kind, admired then and now
Just a half-century after Leonardo's death, the biographer Vasari beautifully summed up his enduring significance:
"In the normal course of events many men and women are born with remarkable talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a unmarried person is marvelously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such affluence that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from homo skill."
Five hundred years later Leonardo's death, these words all the same ring true.
Source: https://theconversation.com/8-things-you-may-not-know-about-leonardo-da-vinci-on-the-500th-anniversary-of-his-death-109318
Post a Comment for "I Am an Art God I Am Da Vinchi"