The Vitruvian Man is a drawing drawn by Leonardo da Vinci around 1490-92 as an illustration for a book dedicated to the works of Vitruvius, and placed in one of his journals. It depicts the figure of a naked man in two superimposed positions: with arms and legs spread apart, inscribed in a circle; with spread arms and legs brought together, inscribed in a square. The figure and its explanations are sometimes called canonical proportions.
This is not just one of the most well-known drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, but the most widely publicized image in the media. It is often found in various teaching aids, used in commercials and posters, even flashes in the cinema - it is enough to recall the ambiguously accepted by the public and criticism of The Da Vinci Code. This fame is due the highest quality image and its significance for modern man.
"Vitruvian Man" is both a masterpiece of fine art and the fruit of scientific research.
This drawing was created as an illustration for Leonardo's book dedicated to one of the works of Vitruvius, the famous Roman architect. Like Leonardo himself, Vitruvius was an extraordinarily gifted man with broad interests. He knew mechanics well and possessed encyclopedic knowledge. Leonardo's interest in this extraordinary person is understandable, since he himself was a very versatile person and was fond of not only art in its various manifestations, but also science. 
Execution of the drawing
The drawing is made with a pen, ink and watercolor using a metal pencil, the dimensions of the drawing are 34.3x24.5 centimeters. It is currently in the collection of the Accademia Gallery in Venice.
Vitruvian Man. Drawing drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.
The role of the "Vitruvian Man" in the development of art and the flowering of the Italian Renaissance is extremely great.
. After the fall of the Roman Empire, numerous knowledge previous generations O human proportions and body structure were lost and gradually forgotten. IN medieval art images of people differed sharply from those that were in antiquity. Leonardo was able to demonstrate how the divine plan is actually reflected in the structure of the human body. His drawing became a model for artists of all times. Even the great Le Corbusier used it to create his own creations that influenced the architecture of the entire 20th century. Due to the symbolism of the image, many consider it a reflection of the structure of the entire universe (the navel of the figure is the center of the circle, which evokes associations with the center of the universe).
A drawing is both a scientific work and a work of art
, he also exemplifies Leonardo's interest in proportions.Proportions of the human body
According to Leonardo's accompanying notes, it was created to determine the proportions of the (male) human body, as described in the treatises of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, who wrote the following about the human body
In addition to its enormous historical and scientific significance, the "Vitruvian Man" also carries a significant aesthetic load. The drawing is made with thin precise lines, ideally conveying human forms. The image created by Leonardo is very expressive and memorable. It is hardly possible to find a civilized person who has not seen this image and does not know its author.
By 1514 - 1515 refers to the creation of the masterpiece of the great master - "La Gioconda".
Until recently, it was thought that this portrait was painted much earlier, in Florence, around 1503. They believed the story of Vasari, who wrote: “Leonardo undertook to complete for Francesco del Gioconde a portrait of Monna Lisa, his wife, and after working on it for four years, left it unfinished. This work is now with the French king in Fontainebleau. By the way, Leonardo resorted to the following trick: since the Madonna Lisa was very beautiful, while painting the portrait, he kept people who played the lyre or sang, and there were always jesters who kept her cheerful and removed the melancholy that is usually reported painting to performed portraits.
This whole story is wrong from start to finish. According to Venturi, "Monna Lisa, later Gioconda, was the creation of the fantasy of the novelist, Aretin biographer, George Vasari." Venturi in 1925 suggested that the Gioconda is a portrait of the Duchess of Costanza d "Avalos, the widow of Federigo del Balzo, sung in a short poem by Eneo Irpino, which also mentions her portrait painted by Leonardo. Costanza was the mistress of Giuliano Medici, who, after marriage with Philibert of Savoy gave the portrait back to Leonardo.
At the very Lately Pedretti put forward a new hypothesis: the Louvre portrait depicts the widow of Giovanni Antonio Brandano named Pacifica, who was also the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici and gave birth to his son Ippolito in 1511.
Be that as it may, the Vasarius version is doubtful because it does not explain in any way why the portrait of Francesco del Giocondo's wife remained in Leonardo's hands and was taken by him to France.
2. Lady with an ermine ca. 1488-1490
Oil on panel.
54.8 x 40.3 cm
Czartory Museum, Krakow, Poland
"Lady with an Ermine" is the immortal seventeen-year-old Cecilia Gallerani, the favorite of Lodovico Sforza. Daughter of the 15th century. Cunning enchantress. Favorite of the Milanese palace. Tender and wise, bashful and frivolous, she appears before us. Simple and complex. Mysteriously attractive, with an almost static face, she still has a magnetism of extraordinary, hidden movement. But what gives the appearance of a young lady this magical liveliness? Smile. She barely touched the corners of her chaste lips. She hid in the slightly swollen girlish dimples near her mouth and, like lightning, flashed in response in dark, dilated pupils, covered with rounded, onion-shaped eyelids. Take a closer look at the subtle, spiritual features of the “Lady with an Ermine”, her posture, full of dignity, her strict but elegant clothes, and the Renaissance with its magnificent creations will instantly appear before you. masters of genius arts. Cecilia Gallerani. She, like a small planet, reflected the radiance of the cruel, ugly and beautiful, unique XV century.
3. Fresco The Last Supper 1494 -1498
Oil and tempera on plaster.
460 x 880 cm
Santa Maria del Grazia, Milan, Italy
From left to right, a table with food stretches across the entire width of the picture. At the table facing us in groups of three sit twelve characters with Christ in the center. The apostles are talking animatedly. What are they talking about and what is the picture about? From the testimony of Ammoreti, it should be concluded that the painting "The Last Supper" was completed in 1497. Unfortunately, Leonardo da Vinci painted it with paints, some of which turned out to be very fragile. Already fifty years after the end, the picture, according to Vasari, was in the most miserable state. However, if at that time it was possible to fulfill the desire of King Francis I, expressed sixteen years after the completion of the painting, and, breaking down the wall, transfer the painting to France, then perhaps it would have been preserved. But this could not be done. In 1500, the water that flooded the meal completely ruined the wall. In addition, in 1652 a door was broken in the wall under the face of the Savior, which destroyed the legs of this figure. The painting was unsuccessfully restored several times. In 1796, after the French crossed the Alps, Napoleon gave a strict order to spare the meal, but the generals who followed him, ignoring his order, turned this place into a stable, and later into a storage place for hay .
4. Portrait of Ginevra de Benci c. 1475 - 1478
Tempera and oil on panel
38.1 x 37 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington
This painting, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, depicts a young lady in a mountainous landscape, with reflections from the river playing on it. There are different points of view regarding the identification of the person being portrayed; opinions of experts on the dating of this work are also divided. Some attribute it to the first Florentine period of Leonardo's work, others, on the contrary, to the Milanese. Most researchers adhere to the hypothesis that Ginevra Benci is represented in the portrait (her name is hinted at by juniper branches, ginepro, which are visible in the background of the composition). It was made in the period when Leonardo freed himself from student dependence on the art of Verrocchio, that is, around 1475.
5. Portrait of a musician 1485-1490
Oil on panel.
43 x 31 cm
Ambrosiano Library, Milan, Italy
The portraits attributed to Leonardo contain common features: their background is darkened, the half-figured image of the model, usually in a three-quarter turn, helps to present her to the viewer in all her individuality. The names of those portrayed are unknown, despite the best efforts of art historians to reveal them, and despite documentary evidence of the master's activities. A number of Leonardo's portraits are associated with the atmosphere of the Sforza court, where the glorification of the individual, reflecting the glory of the court, played a decisive role. The purity of the forms, the dignity of the poses, combined with a keen insight into the character of the model, bring the artist's portraits closer to the most advanced achievements in art for that time. this genre art - with the works of Antonello da Messina. They go far beyond the memorative formalism of the masters of the 15th century, developing a type of portrait that embodies the state of mind of a character and makes it possible to significantly deepen the characterization of the image. In the so-called Portrait of a Musician from Ambrosiana in Milan - his model is sometimes identified with the regent of the Milan Cathedral, Francino Gaffurio, but in fact it is just a young man with a leaf. music paper. We can also distinguish some geometrism in the transfer of plastic volumes that betray the Tuscan influence. A cap on the head and a mass of curly hair form two hemispheres on the sides of the face; the sharpness of the contours and chiaroscuro already testify to the master's acquaintance with the Lombard traditions and portraits of Antonello da Messina. Heavily restored, rewritten and perhaps even left unfinished, albeit at a fairly advanced stage of work, this is the only one in Leonardo's male portrait- if it is really made by the artist himself - depicts a person with an intelligent and firm look. Without being carried away by the rhetorical glorification of the individual, Leonardo conveys in the inner light of the face and gaze of the person being portrayed his inherent moral strength.
6. Madonna with a flower ( Madonna Benois) 1478 - 1480
Oil transferred from board to canvas
48x31.5 cm
Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia
The young painter Leonardo da Vinci, who had just completed his studies, painted this picture in Florence in the late seventies of the fifteenth century. She was accepted with enthusiasm, many copies were made, and at the beginning of the sixteenth century ... they were lost.
Three hundred years later, a troupe of itinerant actors toured in Astrakhan. One of the servants of Melpomene offered the local admirer of the muses and the richest of the merchants of the city, Alexander Sapozhnikov, to buy a picture darkened from old age, painted on a board. The deal went through.
Many years later, his granddaughter Maria got married. The creation of an unknown Italian was also attached to the luxurious addition, which at first few people paid attention to. It is not known what would have happened to him if the successful architect and future president of the Academy of Arts Leonty Benois (the son of an even more famous architect) had not become the husband of Maria Alexandrovna, and if his younger brother was not famous artist, art critic and organizer of the association "World of Art" Alexander. “Hearing the persistent requests of Brother Leonty and his wife,” he recalls, “I had to stay in Berlin. The fact is that they instructed me to show the painting they own to the famous Bode. "(We note in parentheses that Bode is one of the main authorities on history European art, director of the Berlin State Museums). He was absent, but there were several world-class specialists in the museum. Their sentence was harsh: the painting is not a work of Leonardo, rather, it was written by one of his fellow students in the workshop of Verrocchio. Later, Bode himself confirmed this conclusion.
For a whole year, "Madonna" from the Sapozhnikovs' house lay in Alexander Nikolayevich's Parisian apartment, and then he was taken back to St. Petersburg and returned to the owners. However, after eight years (this was already in 1914), when he was in the hustle and bustle associated with the preparation of the Russian exhibition in Paris, he was given business card with the name of one of the Berlin specialists: "Professor Moller Walde".
“I didn’t have time to agree to accept it,” said Alexander Benois, “as his own persona flew at me with a cry: “Now I am firmly convinced that your Madonna is Leonardo!” Immediately, without sitting down, not letting me come to my senses, red with excitement, he began to pull out from a huge, tightly stuffed briefcase a pile of photographs of those undoubted drawings by Leonardo, which were in his eyes (and in fact) confirmation of his confidence in the authorship of the great master.
Benois refused the offer to sell the masterpiece to Berlin museums, transferring it to the collection Imperial Hermitage. There the picture is to this day, known to the whole world under the name "Madonna Benois".
7. Madonna in the grotto 1483-1486
Oil on panel (transferred to canvas)
199 x 122 cm
Louvre, Paris, France
The painting was intended to decorate the altar (the frame for the painting was a carved wooden altar) in the Immacolata Chapel of the Church of San Francesco Grande in Milan. On April 25, 1483, members of the Brotherhood of the Holy Conception commissioned paintings (the central composition is the Madonna and Child, the side compositions are Musical Angels) by Leonardo, who was entrusted with the execution of the most important part of the altar, as well as the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis. Currently, art historians are of the opinion that both canvases on an identical subject, of which one is kept in the Louvre and the other in the National Gallery in London, are variants of a painting made for the same purpose. A signature Madonna on the Rocks from Paris (Louvre) originally adorned the altarpiece of the Church of San Francesco Grande; perhaps it was given by Leonardo himself to the French king Louis XII as a token of gratitude for mediating in the conflict between customers and artists over payment for paintings. It was replaced in the altar by a composition now in London. For the first time, Leonardo was able to solve the problem of merging human figures with the landscape, which gradually occupied a leading place in his artistic program.
8. John the Baptist 1512
Oil on panel
69 x 57 cm
Louvre, Paris
It can be thought that the artist's first idea was to portray the evangelizing angel, if only this is consistent with a strange figure that evokes in the viewer a feeling of embarrassment rather than enthusiastic amazement. We can discern in it the same spirit of irony that is characteristic of the Mona Lisa, but there is no landscape on which this irony could be projected, reflecting more complex connections between man and nature. Because of this, John the Baptist makes a strange, even ambiguous impression on the viewer. Meanwhile, the picture certainly belongs to the circle of Leonardo's works, and in its design is one of the most innovative, since in the figure of St. John the master synthesized his search for means of expressing feelings and human nature as a whole. Overloaded with symbolism and illusions, this image seems to exist on the verge of mystery and reality.
9. Leda with a swan 1508 - 1515
Oil on panel.
130 x 77.5
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy
Mona Lisa was created at a time when Leonardo Vinci was so absorbed in the study of the structure female body, anatomy and problems associated with childbearing, that it is almost impossible to separate his artistic and scientific interests. During these years, he sketched a human embryo in the uterus and created the last of several versions of the painting "Leda" on the subject ancient myth about the birth of Castor and Pollux from the union of the mortal girl Leda and Zeus, who took the form of a swan. Leonardo was engaged comparative anatomy and was interested in analogies between all organic forms.
10. Self-portrait 1514 - 1516
Red sanguine (chalk).
33.3x21.3cm
National Gallery in Turin, Italy
TO recent years life is the Turin self-portrait of Leonardo.
And Lomazzo’s description apparently also refers to this self-portrait: “His head was covered with long hair, his eyebrows were so thick and his beard was so long that he seemed to be a true personification of noble learning, which the druid Hermes and the ancient Prometheus had already been before.”
Ancient biographers of Leonardo da Vinci describe his appearance in the most attractive features:
According to Vasari:
"With the brilliance of his appearance, which showed the highest beauty, he returned clarity to every saddened soul."
According to Anonymous:
“He was handsome, proportionately complex, graceful, with an attractive face. He wore a red cloak that reached to his knees, although long clothes were then in vogue. A beautiful beard fell down to the middle of the chest, curly and well combed.
BES Brockhaus and Efron:
"Vinci was handsome, beautifully built, possessed a huge physical strength, was versed in the arts of chivalry, horseback riding, dancing, swordsmanship, etc."
Sourced from abc-people.com
Whoever saw "live" drawings by Leonardo da Vinci will understand my love for them! This is the delight and ecstasy of the skill of the great painter! And the drawings themselves are completely living faces, heads, images ... They breathe, they get excited from your look, they are real! Which is amazing!
Take a look and pay attention to the material that Leonardo used to create this magic:
"Sketch of a girl's head", 1470-78. Pen, ink, paper. Uffizi Gallery Florence, Italy.
"Portrait of Isabella de Este (d Este)". 1499. Charcoal, black chalk and pastel, paper. Louvre, Paris.
Leonardo calls the new technique of this image colorire a secco (dyeing in a dry way) and identifies it with pastel.
"Girl's Head" 1483. Silver pencil on brownish prepared paper. Turin (Biblioteca Reale), Italy.
"Sketch of the head of Leda" (one of the many sketches for the painting "Leda and the Swan" 1510-15. Borghese Gallery (Borghese), Rome, Italy).
"Sketch of a woman's head" (to the painting "Madonna Litta"). 1490. Silver pencil on greenish prepared paper. Louvre, Paris.
"Sketch of the head of St. Anna" (for the painting "St. Anna with Mary and the Christ Child"). 1490. Silver pencil on greenish prepared paper.
"The head of a woman" (this drawing is associated with the painting "Madonna with a spindle"). 1501. Silver pencil, red chalk on pink prepared paper. Gallery (dell Accademia), Venice, Italy.
"Beggar". 1490. Silver pencil on prepared paper. Louvre, Paris.
Profile of an Elderly Man. 1495. Pen and ink on prepared paper. Windsor, Windsor Castle.
"The head of a man and a lion." 1503-1505. Red and white chalk on pink colored paper. Windsor, Windsor Castle.
Leonardo was of the opinion that a person's face shows his character, and he put a lot of effort into illustrating this.
"Old and young". 1495-1500. Red chalk. Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.
"Old Warrior" 1472. Metal pencil (Metalpoint) on prepared paper. British Museum, London, England.
"Head of a Man" 1503-1505. Red chalk on paper. Accademia Gallery, Venice, Italy.
"Portrait of a gypsy (grotesque)". 1500-1505. Black chalk. Oxford.
This is the largest known drawing by Leonardo. It is believed that it depicts a gypsy baron. Puncture marks indicate that the drawing was being prepared for transfer to canvas.
"Seated old man" Pen, ink, paper. Windsor, Windsor Castle.
"St. James the Elder" (Sketch for "The Last Supper"). 1495. Red chalk, pen and ink. Windsor, Windsor Castle.
St. James in the original has a beard and more long hair, in the drawing, Leonardo, as always, tried to express his opinion: the face reflects the character. Next to the portrait is an architectural sketch. It is typical for an artist to write down ideas on any piece of paper.
"Madonna and Child with St. Anne and John the Baptist". Pastel. National Gallery, London.
"Self-portrait". 1514 - 1516. Red sanguine (chalk). National Gallery in Turin, Italy.
And my favorites!
"Girl with disheveled hair (La Scapigliata)". 1508.
"Woman's head". Metropolitan Museum, USA.
In the Renaissance, there were many brilliant sculptors, artists, musicians, inventors. Leonardo da Vinci stands out from their background. He created musical instruments, he owns many engineering inventions, wrote paintings, sculptures and much more.
His external data is also striking: high growth, angelic appearance and extraordinary strength. Let's get acquainted with the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, a brief biography will tell his main achievements.
Facts from the biography
He was born near Florence in the small town of Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a famous and wealthy notary. His mother is an ordinary peasant woman. Since his father had no other children, at the age of 4 he took little Leonardo to him. The boy showed an extraordinary mind and friendly character from the very beginning. early age and he quickly became a family favorite.
To understand how the genius of Leonardo da Vinci developed, a brief biography can be presented as follows:
- At the age of 14, he entered the workshop of Verrocchio, where he studied drawing and sculpture.
- In 1480 he moved to Milan, where he founded the Academy of Fine Arts.
- In 1499, he leaves Milan and begins to move from city to city, where he builds defensive structures. In the same period, his famous rivalry with Michelangelo begins.
- Since 1513 he has been working in Rome. Under Francis I, he becomes the court sage.
Leonardo died in 1519. As he believed, nothing of what he started was completed to the end.
creative way
The work of Leonardo da Vinci, whose brief biography was outlined above, can be divided into three stages.
- Early period. Many works of the great painter were unfinished, such is the "Adoration of the Magi" for the monastery of San Donato. During this period, the paintings “Madonna Benois”, “Annunciation” were painted. Despite his young age, the painter has already demonstrated high skill in his paintings.
- The mature period of Leonardo's creativity flowed in Milan, where he planned to make a career as an engineer. The most popular work written at this time was The Last Supper, at the same time he began work on the Mona Lisa.
- IN late period creativity, the painting "John the Baptist" and a series of drawings "The Flood" were created.
Painting has always complemented science for Leonardo da Vinci, as he sought to capture reality.
inventions
The contribution to science of Leonardo da Vinci cannot be fully conveyed by a short biography. However, the most famous and valuable discoveries of the scientist can be noted.
- He made the greatest contribution to mechanics, this can be seen from many of his drawings. Leonardo da Vinci explored the fall of the body, the centers of gravity of the pyramids, and much more.
- He invented a car made of wood that was powered by two springs. The mechanism of the car was provided with a brake.
- He came up with a spacesuit, fins and a submarine, as well as a way to dive to depth without using a spacesuit with a special gas mixture.
- The study of dragonfly flight has led to the creation of several variants of wings for humans. The experiments were unsuccessful. However, then the scientist came up with a parachute.
- He was engaged in developments in the military industry. One of his proposals was chariots with cannons. He came up with a prototype of an armadillo and a tank.
- Leonardo da Vinci made many developments in construction. Arched bridges, drainage machines and cranes are all his inventions.
There is no other person in history like Leonardo da Vinci. That is why many consider him an alien from other worlds.
Da Vinci's Five Secrets
Today, many scientists are still puzzling over the legacy left by the great man of the past era. Although Leonardo da Vinci should not be called that, he predicted a lot, and foresaw even more, creating his unique masterpieces and striking with the breadth of knowledge and thought. We offer you five secrets of the great Master, which help to lift the veil of secrecy over his works.
Encryption
The master encrypted a lot so as not to present ideas open, but to wait a bit until humanity “ripens, grows up” to them. Equally good with both hands, da Vinci wrote with his left, the smallest font, and even from right to left, and often in mirror image. Riddles, metaphors, rebuses - this is what is found on every line, in every work. Never signing his works, the Master left his signs visible only to an attentive researcher. For example, after many centuries, scientists discovered that looking closely at his paintings, you can find the symbol of a bird taking off. Or the famous "Madonna Benois", found among itinerant actors who carried the canvas as a home icon.
Sfumato
The idea of scattering also belongs to the great mystifier. Take a closer look at the canvases, all objects do not reveal clear edges, it’s like in life: the smooth flow of some images into others, blurring, dispersion - everything breathes, lives, awakening fantasies and thoughts. By the way, the Master often advised to practice in such a vision, peering into water stains, mud flows or hills of ash. Often, he specially fumigated the working premises with smoke in order to see in the clubs what is hidden beyond the bounds of a reasonable look.
Look at famous painting- "Mona Lisa" smile different angle sometimes gentle, sometimes a little arrogant and even predatory. The knowledge gained through the study of many sciences gave the Master the opportunity to invent perfect mechanisms that are only becoming available now. For example, this is the effect of wave propagation, the penetrating power of light, oscillatory motion ... and a lot of things still have to be analyzed not even by us, but by our descendants.
Analogies
Analogies are the main thing in all the works of the Master. The advantage over accuracy, when a third follows from two conclusions of the mind, is the inevitability of any analogy. And in quirkiness and drawing absolutely mind-blowing parallels to da Vinci, there are still no equals. One way or another, all of his works have some ideas that are not consistent with each other: the famous illustration " golden ratio" - one of them. With limbs apart and divorced, a person fits into a circle, with closed limbs into a square, and slightly raising his hands into a cross. It was such a kind of "mill" that gave the Florentine sorcerer the idea of creating churches, where the altar is placed exactly in the middle, and the worshipers stand in a circle. By the way, the engineers liked the same idea - this is how the ball bearing appeared.
counterpost
Definition means the opposition of opposites and the creation of a certain kind of movement. An example is the sculptural image of a huge horse in Corte Vecchio. There, the legs of the animal are located precisely in the contraposto style, forming a visual understanding of the movement.
incompleteness
This is perhaps one of the Master's favorite "tricks". None of his works are finite. To complete is to kill, and da Vinci loved each of his offspring. Slow and meticulous, the hoaxer of all time could make a couple of brush strokes and go to the valleys of Lombardy to improve the landscapes there, switch to creating the next masterpiece device or something else. Many works were spoiled by time, fire or water, but each of the creations, at least something meaningful, was and is “incomplete”. By the way, it is interesting that even after damage, Leonardo da Vinci never corrected his paintings. Having created his own paint, the artist even deliberately left a “window of incompleteness”, believing that life itself would make the necessary adjustments.
What was art before Leonardo da Vinci? Born among the rich, it fully reflected their interests, their worldview, their views on a person, on the world. Artwork was based on religious ideas and themes: affirmation of those views on the world that the church taught, depiction of plots from sacred history, instilling in people a sense of reverence, admiration for the "divine" and the consciousness of their own insignificance. The dominant theme also determined the form. Naturally, the image of the "saints" was very far from the images of genuine living people, therefore, schemes, artificiality, and staticness dominated in art. The people in these paintings were a kind of caricatures of living people, the landscape is fantastic, the colors are pale and inexpressive. True, even before Leonardo, his predecessors, including his teacher Andrea Verrocchio, were no longer satisfied with the template and tried to create new images. They have already begun searching for new methods of representation, began to study the laws of perspective, thought a lot about the problems of achieving expressiveness of the image.
However, these searches for something new did not give great results, primarily because these artists did not have a sufficiently clear idea of the essence and tasks of art and knowledge of the laws of painting. That is why they fell now again into schematism, now into just as dangerous for genuine art naturalism, copying individual phenomena of reality. The significance of the revolution made by Leonardo da Vinci in art and in particular in painting is determined primarily by the fact that he was the first to clearly, clearly and definitely establish the essence and tasks of art. Art should be deeply vital, realistic. It must come from a deep, thorough study of reality and nature. It must be deeply truthful, must depict reality as it is, without any artificiality or falsehood. Reality, nature is beautiful in itself and does not need any embellishment. An artist must carefully study nature, but not for blind imitation of it, not for simple copying of it, but in order to, having understood the laws of nature, the laws of reality, create works; strictly comply with these laws. To create new values, the values of the real world - this is the purpose of art. This explains the desire of Leonardo to link art and science. Instead of simple, random observation, he considered it necessary to systematically, persistently study the subject. It is known that Leonardo never parted with the album and entered drawings and sketches into it.
They say that he loved to walk the streets, squares, markets, noting everything interesting - people's postures, faces, their expressions. Leonardo's second requirement for painting is the requirement for the veracity of the image, its vitality. The artist must strive for the most accurate transmission of the real in all its richness. In the center of the world stands a living, thinking, feeling person. It is he who must be portrayed in all the richness of his feelings, experiences and actions. For this, it was Leonardo who studied human anatomy and physiology, for this, as they say, he gathered peasants he knew in his workshop and, treating them, told them funny stories to see how people laugh, how the same event causes different impressions in people. If before Leonardo there was no real man in painting, now he has become dominant in the art of the Renaissance. Hundreds of drawings by Leonardo give a gigantic gallery of types of people, their faces, parts of their bodies. Man in all the variety of his feelings and actions is the task artistic image. And this is the strength and charm of Leonardo's painting. Forced by the conditions of the time to paint mainly on religious subjects, because his customers were the church, feudal lords and wealthy merchants, Leonardo imperiously subordinates these traditional subjects to his genius and creates works of universal significance. Madonnas painted by Leonardo are, first of all, an image of one of the deepest human feelings- feelings of motherhood, mother's boundless love for the baby, admiration and admiration for him. All his Madonnas are young, blooming, full of life women, all the babies in his paintings are healthy, full-cheeked, playful boys, in whom there is not a single gram of “holiness”.
His apostles in The Last Supper are living people different ages, social status, different nature; in appearance they are Milanese artisans, peasants, and intellectuals. In striving for the truth, the artist must be able to generalize the individual he has found, he must create the typical. Therefore, even drawing portraits of certain historically known people, such as, for example, Mona Lisa Gioconda - the wife of a ruined aristocrat, the Florentine merchant Francesco del Gioconda, Leonardo gives them, along with individual portrait features, typical, common to many people. That is why the portraits painted by him outlived the people depicted on them for many centuries. Leonardo was the first who not only carefully and carefully studied the laws of painting, but also formulated them. He deeply, like no one before him, studied the laws of perspective, the placement of light and shadow. All this was necessary for him to achieve the highest expressiveness of the picture, in order, as he said, "to catch up with nature." For the first time, it was in the works of Leonardo that the picture as such lost its static character, became a window to the world. When you look at his picture, the feeling of what is painted, enclosed in a frame, is lost and it seems that you are looking through an open window, revealing to the viewer something new, unseen. Demanding the expressiveness of the picture, Leonardo resolutely opposed the formal play of colors, against the passion for form at the expense of content, against what so vividly characterizes decadent art.
The form for Leonardo is only a shell of the idea that the artist must convey to the viewer. Leonardo pays a lot of attention to the problems of the composition of the picture, the problems of placing figures, and individual details. Hence the composition, so beloved by him, of placing figures in a triangle - the simplest geometric harmonic figure - a composition that allows the viewer to capture the whole picture as a whole. Expressiveness, truthfulness, accessibility - these are the laws of the present, truly folk art, formulated by Leonardo da Vinci, the laws that he himself embodied in his brilliant works. Already in its first big picture Leonardo's "Madonna with a Flower" showed in practice what the principles of art he professed meant. Striking in this picture, first of all, is its composition, the surprisingly harmonious distribution of all the elements of the picture, which make up a single whole. The image of a young mother with a cheerful child in her arms is deeply realistic. The deeply felt blue of the Italian sky through the window slit is incredibly skilfully conveyed. Already in this picture, Leonardo demonstrated the principle of his art - realism, the image of a person in the deepest accordance with his true nature, the image is not an abstract scheme, which taught and what medieval ascetic art did, namely, a living, feeling person.
These principles are even more clearly expressed in Leonardo's second major painting, The Adoration of the Magi, 1481, in which it is not the religious plot that is significant, but the masterful depiction of people, each of whom has his own, individual person, his posture, expresses his feeling and mood. Life truth is the law of Leonardo's painting. The most complete disclosure of the inner life of a person is its goal. In The Last Supper, the composition is brought to perfection: despite a large number of figures - 13, their placement is strictly calculated so that all of them as a whole represent a kind of unity, full of great inner content. The picture is very dynamic: some terrible news communicated by Jesus struck his disciples, each of them reacts to it in his own way, hence the huge variety of expressions of inner feelings on the faces of the apostles. Compositional perfection is complemented by an unusually masterful use of colors, the harmony of light and shadows. The expressiveness, the expression of the picture reaches its perfection thanks to the extraordinary variety of not only facial expressions, but the position of each of the twenty-six hands painted in the picture.
This record of Leonardo himself tells us about the careful preliminary work that he carried out before painting the picture. Everything is thought out in it to the smallest detail: postures, facial expressions; even such details as an overturned bowl or knife; all this in its sum constitutes a single whole. The richness of colors in this picture is combined with the subtle use of chiaroscuro, which emphasizes the significance of the event depicted in the picture. The subtlety of perspective, the transfer of air, colors make this picture a masterpiece of world art. Leonardo successfully solved many problems facing artists at that time, and opened the way further development art. By the power of his genius, Leonardo overcame the medieval traditions that weighed on art, broke them and discarded them; he managed to expand the narrow framework that limited the creative power of the artist by the then ruling clique of churchmen, and show instead of a beaten gospel stencil scene a huge, purely human drama, to show living people with their passions, feelings, experiences. And in this picture, the great, life-affirming optimism of the artist and thinker Leonardo again appeared.
Over the years of his wanderings, Leonardo painted many more paintings that received a well-deserved world fame and recognition. In "La Gioconda" the image is deeply vital and typical. It is this deep vitality, the unusually relief transfer of facial features, individual details, costume, combined with a masterfully painted landscape, that gives this picture a special expressiveness. Everything in her - from the mysterious half-smile playing on her face to calmly folded hands - speaks of a great inner content, a great spiritual life of this woman. Leonardo's desire to transmit inner world in external manifestations spiritual movements are expressed here especially fully. An interesting painting by Leonardo "The Battle of Anghiari", depicting the battle of cavalry and infantry. As in his other paintings, Leonardo sought here to show a variety of faces, figures and poses. Dozens of people depicted by the artist create an integral impression of the picture precisely because they are all subject to a single idea underlying it. It was a desire to show the rise of all the forces of a person in battle, the tension of all his feelings, brought together to achieve victory.
Leonardo da Vinci italian painter, sculptor, architect, scientist and engineer. The founder of the artistic culture of the High Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci developed as a master, studying with Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. The methods of work in the workshop of Verrocchio, where artistic practice was combined with technical experiments, as well as friendship with the astronomer P. Toscanelli, contributed to the emergence scientific interests young da Vinci. IN early works(the head of an angel in Verrocchio's Baptism, after 1470, the Annunciation, circa 1474, both in the Uffizi; the so-called Benois Madonna, circa 1478, State Hermitage, St. Petersburg) artist, developing the traditions of art Early Renaissance, emphasized the smooth volume of forms with soft chiaroscuro, sometimes enlivened faces with a barely perceptible smile, achieving with its help the transfer of subtle states of mind. Recording the results of countless observations in sketches, sketches and field studies performed in various techniques(Italian and silver pencils, sanguine, pen, etc.), Leonardo da Vinci achieved, sometimes resorting to an almost caricatured grotesque, sharpness in the transfer of facial expressions, and physical features and the movement of the human body of young men and women brought into perfect correspondence with the spiritual atmosphere of the composition.
In 1481 or 1482, Leonardo da Vinci entered the service of the ruler of Milan, Lodovico Moro, acting as a military engineer, hydraulic engineer, and organizer of court holidays. For over 10 years he worked on the equestrian monument of Francesco Sforza, the father of Lodovico Moro (a life-size clay model of the monument was destroyed when Milan was taken by the French in 1500). During the Milan period, Leonardo da Vinci created the “Madonna in the Rocks” (1483-1494, Louvre, Paris; the second version is about 1497-1511, the National Gallery, London), where the characters are presented surrounded by a bizarre rocky landscape, and the finest chiaroscuro plays a role spirituality emphasizing the warmth of human relations. In the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, he completed the wall painting “The Last Supper” (1495-1497; due to the peculiarities of the technique used during the work of Leonardo da Vinci on the fresco - oil with tempera - it was preserved in a badly damaged form; restored in the 20th century ), which marks one of the pinnacles of European painting; its high ethical and spiritual content is expressed in the mathematical regularity of the composition, which logically continues the real architectural space, in a clear, strictly developed system of gestures and facial expressions of the characters, in the harmonious balance of forms.
As an architect, Leonardo da Vinci designed various options of the “ideal” city and the projects of the central-domed temple, which had a great influence on the contemporary architecture of Italy. After the fall of Milan, Leonardo da Vinci's life passed in incessant moving (1500-1502, 1503-1506, 1507 - Florence; 1500 - Mantua and Venice; 1506, 1507-1513 - Milan; 1513-1516 - Rome; 1517-1519 - France) . In his native Florence, he worked on the painting of the Great Council Hall in the Palazzo Vecchio “The Battle of Anghiari” (1503-1506, not finished, known from copies from cardboard), standing at the origins of European battle genre new time. In the portrait of "Mona Lisa" or "La Gioconda" (circa 1503-1505, Louvre, Paris), he embodied the lofty ideal of eternal femininity and human charm; an important element of the composition was a cosmically vast landscape, melting into a cold blue haze. TO late works Leonardo da Vinci includes projects for the monument to Marshal Trivulzio (1508-1512), the altarpiece “Saint Anna and Mary with the Christ Child” (circa 1507-1510, Louvre, Paris), completing the search for a master in the field of light aerial perspective and the harmonic pyramidal construction of the composition, and “John the Baptist” (circa 1513-1517, Louvre), where the somewhat sugary ambiguity of the image indicates an increase in crisis moments in the artist’s work.
In a series of drawings depicting a universal catastrophe (the so-called cycle with the “Flood”, Italian pencil, pen, circa 1514-1516, Royal Library, Windsor), reflections on the insignificance of man in front of the power of the elements are combined with rationalistic ideas about the cyclic nature of natural processes. The most important source for studying the views of Leonardo da Vinci are his notebooks and manuscripts (about 7 thousand sheets), excerpts from which were included in the “Treatise on Painting”, compiled after the death of the master by his student F. Melzi and which had a huge impact on European theoretical thought and artistic practice. In the dispute between the arts, Leonardo da Vinci gave the first place to painting, understanding it as a universal language capable of embodying all the diverse manifestations of the rational principle in nature. The appearance of Leonardo da Vinci would be perceived by us one-sidedly, without taking into account the fact that his artistic activity was inextricably linked with scientific activity. In essence, Leonardo da Vinci represents in its way the only example of a great artist for whom art was not the main business of life.
If in his youth he paid primary attention to painting, then over time this ratio changed in favor of science. It is difficult to find such areas of knowledge and technology that would not be enriched by his major discoveries and bold ideas. Nothing gives such a vivid idea of the extraordinary versatility of Leonardo da Vinci's genius as many thousands of pages of his manuscripts. The notes contained in them, combined with countless drawings that give Leonardo da Vinci's thoughts a plastic materialization, cover all being, all areas of knowledge, being, as it were, the clearest evidence of the discovery of the world that the Renaissance brought with it. In these results of his tireless spiritual work, the diversity of life itself is clearly felt, in the knowledge of which the artistic and rational principles appear in Leonardo da Vinci in an indissoluble unity.
As a scientist and engineer, he enriched almost all areas of science of that time. Leonardo da Vinci, a prominent representative of the new natural science based on experiment, paid special attention to mechanics, seeing in it master key to the secrets of the universe; his brilliant constructive guesses were far ahead of his contemporary era (projects of rolling mills, machines, a submarine, aircraft). The observations he collected on the influence of transparent and translucent media on the coloring of objects led to the establishment of scientifically based principles of aerial perspective in the art of the High Renaissance. Studying the device of the eye, Leonardo da Vinci made the right guesses about the nature of binocular vision. In anatomical drawings, he laid the foundations of modern scientific illustration He also studied botany and biology. And as a contrast to this complete higher voltage creative activity - life destiny Leonardo, his endless wanderings, connected with the impossibility of finding favorable conditions for work in what was then Italy.
Therefore, when the French king Francis I offered him a position as a court painter, Leonardo da Vinci accepted the invitation and arrived in France in 1517. In France, during this period, especially actively attached to the culture Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci was surrounded at court with universal reverence, which, however, was more of an external character. The artist's strength was running out, and two years later, on May 2, 1519, he died in the castle of Cloux (near Amboise, Touraine) in France. Tireless experimental scientist and brilliant artist, Leonardo da Vinci became a universally recognized symbol of the Renaissance. History of the birth of the Italian Renaissance.
