Word: leonardo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...worst enemy of truth, according to Boorstin, is to keep knowledge secret. Warlike states, monopolistic guilds, and closemouthed alchemists all conspired to leave outsiders in the dark. Even Leonardo da Vinci held back the progress of anatomy by keeping to himself his detailed drawings and studies of the human body. "...Despite his consummate art, his industry, and his unexcelled powers of observation, Leonardo added only to his own knowledge, and little or nothing to the anatomical knowledge of his time. Nor were his own observations enriched as they might have been. For, as we shall see, the public forum...
...flipped a switch and Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece was suddenly projected, in garish colors, on a ten-foot television screen. "But I thought the Mona Lisa was a painting," objected one astonished tourist. "Not any more," responded the guide. "We feel that if videotape had been around in Leonardo's time, he would have used it." The tour moved on. "On the next screen we have the fabulous Winged Victory...
...through Aspen's packed music tent last week (and not only because of the 30° F weather) when Peter Blake, chairman of the department of architecture and planning at Catholic University of America, showed slides of the future as envisioned in the past. The "ideal cities" of Leonardo da Vinci or Etienne-Louis Boullée, although devoid of people, were at least images of fantastic beauty. The modern future, as imagined by Antonio Sant Elia in 1914, Ludwig Hilberseimer in 1928 and Le Corbusier in 1934, has a nightmarish, totalitarian quality, akin to George Orwell...
...reproduction, one painting of Wood's, American Gothic: he with the pitchfork and faded bibbed overalls, she of the dowdy mien and disapproving eye, in front of that white frame house. For the mass audience it was the most famous painting in the world. The runner-up was Leonardo's Last Supper; and after that, what? The Mona Lisa? The Washington portrait by Peale? It hardly matters; the pre-eminence of American Gothic as a popular icon has not been challenged in several generations, since Wood painted it in 1930. Its fame sank Wood's reputation...
...arduous and news of other countries was the most expensive commodity in Europe, Holbein was a completely international man: he worked in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and, especially, England. His work, despite its powerful integrity of style, was open to all kinds of influence: portrait proto types ranging from Leonardo to Titian, the work of the Fontainebleau mannerists, Quinten Massys, English court miniaturists, Darer and Mathi as Grünewald. It seems to range backward and forward in time, a web of discreet allusions that seldom rise to open quotation. Thus in drawing Cecily Heron, the youngest daughter...