Word: leonardo
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...nature of reality: by the fact that, as a Greek sophist put it, you cannot step into the same river once, for it changes as the foot enters. Monet's Giverny paintings make up the most sustained and intelligent meditation on transience by a great artist since-what? Leonardo's water drawings? Probably, for although Monet's fellow impressionists also predicated their images on the moment, none of them was able to go so far in the direction of displaying reality as a collection of tiny, discrete stillnesses. Monet constructed a unified light, meaning and mood...
...made in Alexandria in the late 3rd century A.D. Called a portrait of "Gennadios most accomplished in the musical art," and rendered with innumerable scratches of a needle on a sheet of gold leaf, it presents a young man who, from his curly hair, might be a cousin of Leonardo's boyfriend Salai. It is not, of course, the only masterpiece of portraiture in the show. The tradition of the Roman portrait bust was kept and amplified among patrician families. The show is also exceptionally rich in objets de luxe, ranging from a golden Aphrodite set on a lapis lazuli...
...great elephant," Leonardo da Vinci wrote, "has by nature qualities which rarely occur among men: namely probity, prudence, and the sense of justice and of religious observance." Later zoologists in Africa have noticed more human traits in Loxodonta africana -long childhoods and close nuclear families, high intelligence and a habit of wrecking their environment and destroying their own food supply. The suicide ground of the retreating herds of African elephants has been, for the past quarter-century, the Tsavo National Park in Kenya, a place ringed by political (and thus, from the elephants' point of view, irrational) boundaries. This...
Mark Brower Leonardo...
There remains a widespread tendency among the uptight to protect tender minds by censoring sources of information concerning the magnitude of sexual variation in the world at large, and historic figures in particular. A recent Italian television series on the life of Leonardo DaVinci provides an example of how history is managed. One episode concerned the young DaVinci and his friends being hauled in before the local inquisition. The English narration as seen in America described the case as "heresy," thereby protecting our American sensibilities from the dreadful historic facts of his well known homosexuality...