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Updated: May 15, 2025
The group of three wondrous creatures, at once men, fish, and gods, is as grand and even more fantastic than Leonardo's Battle of the Standard: a Triton, sturdy and muscular, with sea-weed beard and hair, wheels round his finned horse, preparing to strike his adversary with a bunch of fish which he brandishes above him; on him is rushing, careering on an osseous sea-horse, a strange, lank, sinewy being, fury stretching every tendon, his long-clawed feet striking into the flanks of his steed, his sharp, reed-crowned head turned fiercely, with clenched teeth, on his opponent, and stretching forth a truncheon, ready to run down his enemy as a ship runs down another; and further off a young Triton, with clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard, vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity, unaccountably antique.
The plates of the muscles are remarkably good, more correct, though not better perhaps, on the whole, than some of Leonardo's. The next, in 1559, is recorded by Plater in his autobiography, who gave a public dissection during three days in the Church of St. Elizabeth. Vesalius had no idea of a general circulation.
These kindly-intended words only aggravated the object to whom they were addressed, and she turned away hastily to the shade of the thick vegetable growth, where he lost sight of her figure among the branches and leaves, while he walked on with the English officer and his people over the ground they had just passed, towards Don Leonardo's.
How, in this way, the clear purpose was overclouded, the fine chaser's hand perplexed, we but dimly see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leonardo's life is deepest here. But it is certain that at one period of his life he had almost ceased to be an artist.
All these things, of course, together with the long lines of little gray houses in Camden Town, long lines of carts with bobtail horses rattling over Blackfriars' Bridge, long smells drifting behind taxicabs all these things were as delightful and as stimulating to the soul as the clouds that trailed the heavens, the fronds of the lilac, and Leonardo's Cartoon in the Diploma Gallery.
His immobility, his admiration, can only be understood by other souls open to ideal beauty, to the ineffable joy of beholding art made perfect; such as these can stand for whole hours before the Antiope Correggio's masterpiece before Leonardo's Gioconda, Titian's Mistress, Andrea del Sarto's Holy Family, Domenichino's Children Among the Flowers, Raphael's little cameo, or his Portrait of an Old Man Art's greatest masterpieces.
Above all, he must always have horses in his stables, for he loved them more than human beings. Many were the plans and projects which the Duke entrusted to Leonardo's care, but of all that he did, two great works stand out as greater than all the rest.
Perugino is a good man and a good painter, I will not deny that but Leonardo's horses!" Raphael threw aside his pencil and hastily rose. "Where now?" asked his friend; "whither art thou going so hastily?" "To Florence," exclaimed Raphael. "And what carries you so suddenly?"
It is hard not to connect with these designs of the elder, by-past master, as with its germinal principle, the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo's work. Besides, the picture is a portrait.
A note in one of Leonardo's manuscripts speaks of twenty-four Roman subjects, probably small decorative groups in camaieu, painted on the vaulting of these rooms, and gives the exact cost of the blue, gold, and enamel employed, but all trace of these decorations has vanished.
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