Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1977 Sep
Contents
guarded. Its colors have suffered a strange change as if bathed in undersea light, but the lady still glows with an inner radiance. She is both troubling and serene-ultimate proof of her creator's ability to work near miracles by rivaling nature, his own definition of the artist's goal, the capturing of a beauty, as 19th-century critic Walter Pater described it, "wrought out from within upon the flesh...." IN THIS TIME Leonardo also made many sketches for a painting, since lost, of Leda nestling naked in the swan's curved wing with a coyly bent body and a smile of secret complicity. It is a curious theme for a man without any apparent sexual interest in women, beautifully executed, but chilling in its lack of sensuality. Michelangelo never transferred his cartoon to the Council Chamber wall. Leonardo did, or at least, he began to. Forgetting the fate of his "Last Supper" (or perhaps not yet aware of it), he again used an oil paint for greater freedom and brighter hues. It is said that he was inspired by a painting method described by Pliny the Elder more than 14 centuries before. Leonardo's use of oil worked well enough on the trial panel-the small original painting-but on the wall itself the paint soon began to flake and run. The work was doomed, another masterpiece lost. Heartsick, beaten, he did what he usually did in the face of defeat: He turned from art to one of his many other fields of interest. In this case, his old love-flight-once more seized his fancy. His knowledge grew beyond the limits of his time and approached the understanding that much later gave men wings. There is the single reference to an attempt that failed. Be that as it may, his efforts brought him no satisfaction, only the certainty that he himself would never fly or witness manned flight. One great failure had followed another. Leonardo could not bear to remain on the scene of his humiliation. With the Florentine Council's permission, he left to spend three months in Milan, entering the service of the French governor. He took the "Mona Lisa" with him, and his notebooks, and Salai. The French treated Leonardo with more consideration than had his compatriots. With the help of the king's regent and later the French king himself, he extended his three month stay to seven years, during which he returned only briefly to Florence and did nothing whatever to complete the "Battle of Anghiari" (for which he had received pay ments). The city of the Renaissance had little left to offer the man of the Renaissance who had been its child and its champion. In Milan he joined Ambrogio de Predis to produce a second version of the "Virgin of the Rocks." Then the master turned his brooding mind to studies so profound as to answer questions yet unasked. He became even more engrossed in his anatomical stud ies, viewing man as a machine and a work of art. He would disclose all the secrets of the body by combining science and art to create a work beyond the capacity of any other hu man being. The treatise would be the greatest accomplishment of his life. OME OF HIS DRAWINGS were both beautiful and precise and did, indeed, present new knowledge. Then, he turned to the stars and from their lofty perspective looked down with disdain upon the mortal mechanism that is man. In his celestial en chantment he came to question the Biblical age of the earth, the account of the Flood, and to view the earth as a living organism, liken ing its rivers to the flow of blood. This was dangerous thinking, challenging the church's concept of man as the center of all things and the result of recent and special creation. In an age in which such ponderings might fall under the definition of heresy, Leonardo confided them only to his note books. So he lived on-a sage, skillful old man-tolerated and sometimes applauded. When Rome attacked in 1513 and drove out his friends the French, he left, too-for Rome. Even a preliminary design reflects the glory of Leonardo's talents. In this "Virgin and Child with St. Anne," without the use of color, he achieved an arresting three-dimensional effect by employing chalk and tempera shading, or sfumato. In other versions he tried balanc ing the figures in different ways. In the final painting, now in the Louvre, the Christ Child reaches toward a lamb, a design praised by hard-to-please Florentine contemporaries. National Geographic,September 1977 326
Links
Archive
1977 Oct
1977 Aug
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page