Word: leonardo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...apparent contradiction which Dean Rusk resolved for the Rhodes scholarship committee - "The eagle on the Great Seal has two claws, one with an olive branch and the other with arrows" - brings to mind an identical contradiction in the life of that universal genius Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was a peace-loving man and of great heart and charity. He could not bear to see trapped animals, and he bought caged birds only to set them free. Yet he devised horrible means of wiping out the enemy. He reconciled the contradiction in this pregnant aphorism: "When besieged by ambitious tyrants...
...Leonardo's "horrible means of wiping out the enemy...
...barely squeeze through. Some paintings lie higgledy-piggledy on tables and shelves Bronze statues are strewn about, cloaked in spider webs. There are works by Jan Brueghel Lucas Van Leyden, Jan van de Velde and Lucas Cranach the Elder. One portrait of a woman is believed to be by Leonardo da Vinci. One of the rarest items is the brooding portrait of a man (see color), attributed-rightly or wrongly-to the 15th century artist Jean Fouquet...
They are not the work of crackpots but of reputable men, some of them geniuses. Leonardo himself designed an "ideal city," and Piranesi planned a "cultural center" of moats and courtyards that seemed to fit inside each other like Chinese boxes. More recently, the visionaries have been apt to reflect Le Corbusier's warning that "the problem of the century is the problem of the city." Dismayed by blight and overcrowding, Kiyonori Kikutake designed a city over water consisting of a huge floating deck that would be pierced by great concrete cylinders lined with dwellings. Buckminster Fuller planned...
...Unlike Leonardo and Piranesi, contemporary architects are not inhibited by technological restrictions. Even their most outrageous architectural fantasies are usually technically possible. But for them, the question of what to build has taken precedence over problems of how to build. Says Arthur Drexler, director of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art: "Social usage determines what is visionary and what is not. Visionary projects cast their shadows over into the real world of experience, expense and frustration. If we could learn what they have to teach, we might exchange irrelevant rationalizations for more useful critical standards. Vision...