Word: leonardo
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With 163 drawings, it is the biggest Leonardo show ever, and has already drawn 36,000 visitors. Chronologically, the drawings run from studies of lilies done in 1478, when Leonardo was an apprentice in Verocchio's Florentine workshop, to the coarse drawings probably done after 1516, when he had moved to France and, in his 60s, had suffered a paralysis of his working arm. Most important, the exhibition encompasses the extraordinary diversity of Leonardo's interests and achievements. Armaments, navigation, map making, mathematics, anatomy, botany, astronomy-his investigations into all of them are graphically annotated. The continual restlessness...
...Patience. It is hard to imagine a man with a clearer eye or a more far-ranging mind. Leonardo might stop work on a painting to dissect a cadaver and make meticulous studies of its musculature so that he could better understand the twist of a body or the shape of an arm. He took as his province the total knowledge of mankind (which was then manageable), and painting was only a part of it. Even when he was famed the length and breadth of Italy and crowned heads and prelates were besieging him for paintings, he pronounced himself...
Legacy and Vision. Leonardo seemed to feel something like a passion for his human subjects only when he happened to view them with disgust or satirical malice. He was powerfully attracted by strange faces and would sometimes follow some chance passer-by all day long in order to memorize his countenance. His pen caricature of five grotesque heads shows five prototypes of stupidity, cruelty, narrow-mindedness, arrogance and rage...
Latter-day biographers, including Britain's Sir Kenneth Clark, have presumed that Leonardo was a homosexual, citing as part of their evidence the equivocal smile of the Mona Lisa and the faintly cold, faintly remote quality of his drawings...
...Leonardo was supremely a man of infinite possibilities-so many that only a fraction of them were ever realized. He should have devoted himself to painting, say the painters. To engineering, say the engineers. To city planning, say the planners. To anatomy, say the anatomists. His drawings most completely preserve and record what he dreamed and was. His legacy, his inspiration and his exasperating, incomplete genius are all there...