Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 7, 2025
The critic may say he has seen them all before, he knows them off by heart; but then so does he know Raphael's infants, and Botticelli's madonnas, and Fra Angelico's angel trumpeters, and Vecelli's blue hills, and Robusti's doges, and Lionardo's smiling, enigmatic ladies. He does not say he is tired of these, but that is only his eternal affectation.
I have written, in connection with Lionardo's 'Jaconde' and Raphael's 'Fornarina, of Titian's 'Bella Donna. He has various 'Bellas, but, as far as I know, this is the 'Bella Donna, 'a splendid, serious beauty, in a red and blue silk dress, in the Sciarra Gallery, Rome.
We are disagreeably reminded by every portion of the surface that Lionardo's subtle play of tones and modulated shades, those sfumature, as Italians call them, which transfer the mystic charm of nature to the canvas, were as yet unknown to the great draughtsman. There is more of atmosphere, of colour suggestion, and of chiaroscuro in the marble tondi described above.
The semi-scientific impulse to extend man's mastery over nature, the magician's desire to penetrate secrets, which so powerfully influenced the development of Lionardo's genius, seems to have overcome the purely æsthetic instincts of Alberti, so that he became in the end neither a great artist like Raphael, nor a great discoverer like Galileo, but rather a clairvoyant to whom the miracles of nature and of art lie open.
Michelangelo's style of design is that of a sculptor, Andrea's of a colourist, Lionardo's of a curious student, Raffaello's of a musician and improvisatore. These distinctions are not merely fanciful, nor based on what we know about the men in their careers. We feel similar distinctions in the case of all great draughtsmen.
Milan, it is true, produced a brilliant school of sculptors, and the Certosa of Pavia is a monument of her spontaneous artistic genius. But in painting, until the date of Lionardo's advent, she achieved little. See Vol. I., Age of the Despots, pp. 182-188, for the constitutional characteristics of Florence and Venice; and Vol.
But there is Dürer's "Knight and Death," his greatest plate; and if I had Lionardo's "Medusa" here, which he painted when only a boy, you would have seen how he was held by the same chain. And you cannot but wonder why, this being the melancholy temper of the great Greek or naturalistic school, I should have called it the school of light.
If, however, he had confined his activity to the production of works equal to the "Cenacolo," we should have missed the most complete embodiment in one personality of the twofold impulses of the Renaissance and of its boundless passion for discovery. Lionardo's turn for physical science led him to study the technicalities of art with fervent industry.
The great statue of "David," the two unfinished medallions of Madonna in relief, the "Holy Family of the Tribune" painted for Angelo Doni, and the Cartoon of the "Battle of Pisa" were now produced; and no man's name, not even Lionardo's, stood higher in esteem thenceforward.
Some notion of its size may be derived from what we know about the material supplied for Lionardo's Cartoon. This, say Crowe and Cavalcaselle, "was made up of one ream and twenty-nine quires, or about 288 square feet of royal folio paper, the mere pasting of which necessitated a consumption of eighty-eight pounds of flour, the mere lining of which required three pieces of Florentine linen."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking