Word: leonardo
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...York's Metropolitan Museum, the drawings of Leonardo...
...were the three greatest draftsmen in the history of Western art? There would be room for argument at the lower end of the ranking (Dürer? Raphael? Ingres?). But of the first two there can be little doubt. One was Michelangelo; the other was Leonardo da Vinci. The bastard son of a Florentine notary, Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. Almost from the moment that he emerged from Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s and began his long, peripatetic and disappointed life among the courts of Rome, Milan, France and his home town, Florence...
...still seems epic to us. There can never be another Leonardo, because no man today can even hope to encompass as many of the available facts about the natural world and its contents within the frame of 20th century knowledge as Leonardo gathered within the frame of his own time. Such a man, today, would necessarily be the victim of specialization. But Leonardo knew more than anyone else in the late 15th century about statics, dynamics, hydraulics, geology, paleontology, optics, aerodynamics and anatomy. In the realms of craftsmanship, from the construction of domes and earthworks to the casting of cannon...
Most museum exhibits specialize in product. Visitors want to see the telephone Bell invented, not the goofs and failures that came before. They are interested in the paintings artists create, not--with the rare exception of a Leonardo da Vinci--in the sketches discarded in the process. Viewers want to see polished statues and coronation gowns, not chips of marbk or a seamstress's needle and thread...
Rudofsky has titled his show, and also his new Anchor Press/Doubleday book, Now I Lay Me Down to Eat, which turns out to be a reference to the Last Supper. Leonardo, it seems, had it wrong. Instead of a symmetrically arranged sitdown affair, the meal was a recumbent Passover Seder. As practicing Jews, Jesus and his disciples would have dined while stretched out on couches, reclining to the left-the Passover expression of freedom. Moreover, says Rudofsky, they would have done so without the noisy clatter of silverware...