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Updated: May 15, 2025
Leonardo never mentions her, yet one writer has attempted to show that the rare beauty of that mysterious face shown in so many of Leonardo's pictures was modeled from the face of his mother. No love-story comes to us in Leonardo's own life he never married. Ventura suggests that "on account of his birth, he was indifferent to the divine institution of marriage." But this is pure conjecture.
Time has dealt hardly with the paint, and one has to study minutely before Medusa's horrors are visible. Whether Leonardo's or not, it is not uninteresting to read how the picture affected Shelley when he saw it here in 1819: ... Its Horror and its Beauty are divine.
This is a picture by Luini right here the Madonna of the Rose-Trellis. The Madonna is strikingly like Leonardo's ideal in the long, slender nose, the rather pointed chin, the dark, flowing hair, and, above all, in the evidence of some deep thought. If it were Leonardo's, there would be, with all this, a faint, subtile smile. See the treatment of light and shade, so delicate, and yet so strong.
For him the artist also must relate himself directly to the visible world, in which is the only inspiration; to accept any formula is to see with dead men's eyes. That has been said again and again by artists, but not with Leonardo's mystical and philosophical conviction.
In none of these, except perhaps in Leonardo's, was there implied any criticism of war, or any sense that it is an abnormal activity of man. The men who take part in it are just men fighting; they are not men seen differently because they are fighting, or in any way robbed of their humanity because of their inhuman business.
Then began the rivalry between Leonardo and Michael Angelo, which lasted during the remainder of Leonardo's life. With all their admiration of each other's genius, their mutual frailties prevented any real good-will on either side. Leonardo, during his stay at Florence, painted the portrait of Ginevra Benci, the reigning beauty of her time.
And to-day, in spite of the common ruin which has overwhelmed the palaces and churches of Lodovico's fair duchy, the armorial bearings of his consort may still be seen painted in the lunette above the Cenacolo, as if the duke wished Leonardo's great painting to be especially associated with her beloved memory; while not only in the Castello of Milan, but on the site of ducal castles and villas throughout the Milanese, blocks of stone and marble carved with the initials of Lodovico and Beatrice are constantly brought to light.
No one can say what turn the conversation might have taken, had not the grandmother's eye fell on an indifferent copy of Leonardo's celebrated picture of the Last Supper, receiving at the same time a printed explanation, one got up by some local antiquary, who had ventured to affix names to the different personages of the group, at his own suggestion.
In a little shabby, chilly corridor adjoining is a fresco of Leonardo, a Virgin and Child with the <i>donatorio</i>. It is very small, simple and faded, but it has all the artist's magic, that mocking, illusive refinement and hint of a vague <i>arriere- pensee</i> which mark every stroke of Leonardo's brush. Is it the perfection of irony or the perfection of tenderness?
But in this Baptism the pupil had surpassed the master; and Verrocchio turned away as one stunned, and as if his sweet earlier work must thereafter be distasteful to him, from the bright animated angel of Leonardo's hand.
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