Think Like Da Vinci: 7 Easy Steps to Boosting Your Everyday Genius. Michael Gelb
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Название: Think Like Da Vinci: 7 Easy Steps to Boosting Your Everyday Genius
Автор: Michael Gelb
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Общая психология
isbn: 9780007380619
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Leonardo’s precocious talents drew the attention of Verrocchio’s prime patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Il Magnifico. Leonardo was introduced to the extraordinary milieu of philosophers, mathematicians, and artists cultivated by Lorenzo. There is some evidence that during the period of his apprenticeship, the young Leonardo lived in the Medici home.
After six years with Verrocchio, Leonardo was admitted to the Company of St. Luke, a guild of apothecaries, physicians, and artists headquartered in the Ospedale Santa Maria Nuova, in 1472. It is likely that he took the opportunity, provided through the location of the guild, to deepen his study of anatomy. The most educated guessers assign his anatomically outstanding evocation of St. Jerome in the Vatican Gallery and his Annunciation in the Uffizi to this period.
Verrocchio’s bust of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Il Magnifico.
The Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci. The misty background, detailed botanical studies, and luminous curly hair are early trademarks of the maestro’s style.
We can imagine Leonardo in his late teens and early twenties, strolling the streets of Florence in his silk leggings, his long auburn-blond curls cascading over the shoulders of his rose-colored velvet tunic. Vasari extolled “the splendor of his appearance, which was extremely beautiful, and made every sorrowful soul serene.” Renowned for his physical grace, beauty, and talents as a storyteller, humorist, conjurer, and musician, Leonardo probably spent a fair amount of his youthful time enjoying life. But this lighthearted period came to an abrupt close when shortly before his twenty-fourth birthday, he was arrested and brought before a committee of the Florentine government to answer charges of sodomy. One can imagine the traumatic effect upon someone so sensitive of being accused of what was then a capital crime and being held in jail. As he noted, “The greater the sensibility the greater the suffering … much suffering.”
Although the charges were eventually dismissed due to insufficient evidence, the seeds of Leonardo’s departure from Florence had been sown. Nevertheless, he did receive a number of commissions in the next few years including a few from the Florentine government. By far his most significant work of this first Florentine period is The Adoration of the Magi for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto.
In 1482 Leonardo moved to Milan. Working under the patronage of Ludovico “the Moor” Sforza, Leonardo created his masterpiece, The Last Supper. Painted on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie from 1495 to 1498, Leonardo’s Last Supper captures, with stunning psychic force, the moment that Christ proclaims, “One of you shall betray me.” Christ sits alone, resigned and serene, at the center of the table as the disciples explode in turmoil around him. Yet in a geometrically perfect composition, the disciples counterbalanced – left and right, higher and lower – in four groups of three, Leonardo brings the uniqueness of each soul to life. Christ’s tranquillity, conveyed through Leonardo’s seamless sense of order and perspective, contrasts with the surrounding human emotion and chaos to yield a moment of transcendence unparalleled in the history of art. Although the painting has deteriorated considerably, despite, and in some cases because of, attempts at restoration, it remains, in the words of art historian E. H. Gombrich, “one of the great miracles of human genius.”
St. Jerome by Leonardo da Vinci. This painting was discovered in the nineteenth century. It was in two pieces, one of which was being used as a tabletop.
Bernard Berenson, the art critic who introduced the word connoisseur into the English language, called Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi (left) “truly a great masterpiece” and added, “Perhaps the quattrocento produced nothing greater.” Preparatory work for the Adoration below.
The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Imagine looking at this painting through the eyes of the monks who commissioned it. “Never before,” comments art historian E. H. Gombrich, “had the sacred episode appeared so close and so lifelike.”
Leonardo da Vinci: Study for the Sforza equestrian monument.
When he wasn’t charming Ludovico’s court or creating transcendent paintings, Leonardo was busy with studies of anatomy, astronomy, botany, geology, flight, and geography and plans for inventions and military innovations. He also received an important commission from the Moor to build an equestrian monument honoring his father, Francesco Sforza, the previous grand duke of Milan. After exhaustive researches into the anatomy and movement of horses, Da Vinci crafted a plan to create what critics agree would have been the greatest equestrian statue ever produced. After more than a decade of work Leonardo constructed a model twenty-four feet high. Vasari wrote that “there was never a more beautiful thing or more superb.” Leonardo calculated that casting this masterpiece would require more than eighty tons of melted bronze. The bronze, unfortunately, was not forthcoming, as Ludovico needed it to build cannons to stave off invaders. He failed, and in 1499 the French overwhelmed Milan and drove Sforza into exile. In a historical act of bad taste and barbarism that ranks with the Ottoman army’s blowing the nose off the Sphinx, and the Venetian fleet’s landing a mortar projectile on the Parthenon, the French archers destroyed the model horse by using it for target practice.
“About the horse I will say nothing for I know the times.” – From Leonardo’s letter to Ludovico on learning that the bronze for the monument would not be supplied.
Ludovico’s defeat meant that Leonardo was without a patron or a home. He found his way to Florence in 1500 and the next year he unveiled his preparatory drawing for The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John, commissioned by the Servite Friars. Describing the public reaction, Vasari writes that the painting “not only filled every artist with wonder, but when it was set up … men and women, young and old, flocked for two days to see it, as if in festival time, and they marveled exceedingly.” Although Leonardo never completed the painting for the Servites, his drawings formed the basis of a later work, the exquisitely tender Virgin and Child with St. Anne, now in the Louvre.
In 1502 Leonardo shifted his attention from the sublime evocation of divine femininity to take up an appointment as chief engineer to the infamous commander of the papal armies, Cesare Borgia. He traveled extensively for the next year, making six remarkably accurate maps of central Italy for his new patron. Despite his access to Leonardo’s maps and military innovations, Cesare saw his battlefield fortunes wane. The Signoria of Florence sent Niccolò Machiavelli to advise Borgia in his struggles, but the great strategist was unable to prevent the collapse of Borgia’s forces. Machiavelli did, however, befriend Leonardo during this period, a friendship that set the stage for the maestro to receive an important commission from the Signoria of Florence after his return in April 1503.
Ludovico “the Moor” Sforza, regent of Milan and patron of Leonardo.
Leonardo’s СКАЧАТЬ