Word: leonardos
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Throughout his life Leonardo da Vinci was plagued by a sense of failure, incompletion and time wasted. His favorite phrase, unconsciously repeated in whole or in part whenever he scribbled something to see if a newly cut pen was working, was "Tell me, tell me if anything got finished." And indeed very little did. His big projects for sculpture were never completed--the huge clay model for one of them, meant to commemorate his patron Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, ended up a shapeless mound, shot to pieces by occupying French archers. His big mural commemorating a Florentine victory...
...remember Leonardo as a painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect and scientist. Yet if one is to judge by the self-advertising letter he sent to Sforza in Milan in 1481, he didn't rate his skills that way. Before anything else, he listed his strategic ingenuity: he could design portable bridges, drain moats, bombard strongholds, design and cast siege cannon, make fireproof ships, and so on and on. Not until item No. 10, the last on his list, did he get around to saying that in painting too he could "do everything possible as well as any other." There may have...
Three things, however, can be said without hesitation about Leonardo. The first is that he was not a "Renaissance man." He did not typify his time. Many artists in the Renaissance worked, as Leonardo did, in a wide variety of media: drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture and so forth. None, however, not even the great Leon Battista Alberti, had Leonardo's astounding and insatiable curiosity about the makeup and governing laws of the physical world or spent so much time and energy speculating about them...
This is simply a fact, and anyone lucky enough to be in the vicinity of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art over the next nine weeks (through March 30) can readily check it out. "Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman" opened last week, with nearly 120 drawings and a single barely unfinished painting, the Vatican's anguished St. Jerome Praying in the Wilderness. Assembled from collections all over Europe, Britain and the U.S., it is a prodigious curatorial achievement by Carmen Bambach and George Goldner, curator and chairman, respectively, of the Metropolitan's Department of Drawings and Prints. (Hercules...
...third thing is that Leonardo was one of the least transparent artists who ever lived and, given the enormous losses and gaps in what we know about him, it is futile to hope that any exhibition could sum him up. He was conflicted, contradictory, almost incredibly hard to get at, to or around. It is not true, however, that his famous backward writing was an attempt to shield the secrets of his researches from prying eyes. This aspect of the Leonardo "mystery" is not a mystery at all, because he was left-handed, and it was natural...