"Leonardo da Vinci" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... make herself welcome to the king, her father-in-law, who at that time was very ill indeed, presented him, from time to time, with Italian pictures, knowing that he liked them much, being a friend of the Sieur Raphael d'Urbin and of the Sieurs Primatice and Leonardo da Vinci, to whom he sent large sums of money. She obtained from her family—who had the pick of these works, because at that time the Duke of the Medicis governed Tuscany —a precious picture, painted by a Venetian named Titian (artist ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... miracle and quite a fresh departure for a picture with a reputation earned in a different branch of thaumaturgy. It does not much matter, however, what they thought, for experts in matters of art are the victims of such cast-iron prejudices that if once they fancy they see the influence of Leonardo da Vinci in a picture and take it into their heads that it comes from Piedmont, it will be found the most difficult thing in the world to persuade them that it really was painted in Egypt more than 1000 years ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... world, is really the fifteenth-century work of Leon Alberti working to the order of Giovanni Rucellai—you may see their blown sail everywhere—with that profound and unifying genius which involved everything he touched in a sort of reconciliation, thus prophesying to us of Leonardo da Vinci. For Alberti has here very fortunately made the pointed work of the Middle Age friends with Antiquity, Antiquity seen with the eyes of the Renaissance, full of a new sort of eagerness and of many little refinements. In the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... genius was erected over his remains, as the first great poet that had appeared in England, probably only surpassed in genius by Shakspeare, until the language assumed its present form. He was regarded as a moral phenomenon, whom kings and princes delighted to honor. As Leonardo da Vinci died in the arms of Francis I., so Chaucer rested in his grave near the bodies of those sovereigns and princes with whom he lived in intimacy and friendship. It was the rarity of his gifts, his great attainments, elegant manners, and refined ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... The Queen bought one of his pictures ("Le Psalterion," now at Windsor), and invited him to Balmoral. The heir-apparent, the late King, admired his talent and relished his society. By the clerical world he was especially esteemed, being looked upon as a second Leonardo da Vinci. And, in fine, Dor must be regarded as an anticipator of the Entente cordiale. "Gustave Dor," his compatriots would say, "he is half an Englishman!" Forty years ago our popular favourite might indeed have believed in the fulfilment of his dream. The Thorwaldsen ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... epithet can be properly applied to a book." Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. ****. After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked MY BEAUTY (a foolish name it goes by among my friends)—when he very gravely assured me, that "he had considerable respect for my character and talents" (so he ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... famous pictures here is "Our Saviour disputing with the Doctors," by Leonardo da Vinci. I hardly ever receive pleasure from his pictures; there is a mannerism in all that I have seen that is positively disagreeable to me. How the later artists lost the simple secret of earnest vigor of their predecessors, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Florence is represented by a charming Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci, almost identical with that of the Louvre; and six admirable pictures of Andrea del Sarto. But the one which most attracts and holds all those who regard the Faultless Painter with sympathy, and who admiring his genius regret his errors, is ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... of as coming two hundred years later is Leonardo da Vinci. True he is best known as an artist, but if you read his works you will come to the conclusion that he was the most scientific artist who ever lived. He teaches the laws of perspective (then new), ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of Sforza in Milan in a state of dignified abstraction. His common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety and ingenious anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Durer was his parallel ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... a true knowledge of the inventions and compositions of Rembrandt, it is necessary, in the first instance, to examine those of Albert Durer, the Leonardo da Vinci of Germany. The inventions of this extraordinary man are replete with the finest feelings of art, notwithstanding the Gothic dryness and fantastic forms of his figures. The folds of his draperies are more like creased pieces of paper than cloth, and his representation ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... those enigmatical men, predestined for conquering and circumventing others, the finest examples of which are Alcibiades and Caesar (with whom I should like to associate the FIRST of Europeans according to my taste, the Hohenstaufen, Frederick the Second), and among artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear precisely in the same periods when that weaker type, with its longing for repose, comes to the front; the two types are complementary to each other, and spring from ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... years were to pass before another man was to take up the horse as a serious scientific study; and this was Leonardo da Vinci, a man in many ways very much like Aristotle. The distinguishing feature in these men—the thing that differentiates them from other men—was the great outpouring sympathy with every living creature. Everything they saw was related to themselves—it came very close to them—they wanted to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... studies of that almost abstract, nay, almost cabalistic thing, the science of bodily proportions. It was plain that the mystery of antique beauty—the ancient symmetry, symmetria prisca as a humanist designs it in his epitaph for Leonardo da Vinci—was but a matter of numbers. For a man's length, if he stand with outstretched arms, is the same from finger tip to finger tip as his length when erect from head to feet, namely, eight times the length of his head. Now eight heads, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... for his masters), and who shall say him nay? Ruskin, on the strength of one picture, averred that Tintoretto was the greatest of painters. For William Blake, England's visionary painter, Rubens was an emissary from Satan let loose on this sinful globe to destroy art. And Leonardo da Vinci—what ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... a serene indifference to hubbub. I like Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Balzac, Darwin, and other sages, for having been so concentrated on this or that eternal verity in art or science or philosophy, that they paid no heed to alarums and excursions which were sweeping all other folk off their feet. It is ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... science, of course, was sound, save for a temperamental error: the lack of sufficient imagination to realize the unknown quantity of chance, the inevitable mistake of military scientists who are loath to admit the artist to their counsels, exemplified by men of genius, such as Napoleon and Leonardo da Vinci, who ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... Paris all the masterpieces of Michel Angelo, Guercino, Titian, Paul Veronese, Correggio, Albarro, the two Carracci, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci." [Footnote: This wonderful banner was hung up in the hall of the Directory while the members of the latter were occupying the Luxemburg. It afterward accompanied the three consuls to the Tuileries, and was preserved there in the large reception-room. ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... as Johnson says, "an exaggerated resemblance." Caricature is a likeness having some comical exaggeration or distortion. Now, caricature is a legitimate and potent instrument of humour, which great masters have used with consummate effect. Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, Hogarth, use it; but only at times, and in a subsidiary way. Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, use this weapon not unfrequently; Shakespeare very sparingly; Goldsmith and Scott, I think, almost never. Caricature, the essence ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... The MSS. of Leonardo da Vinci have equally suffered from his relatives. When a curious collector discovered some, he generously brought them to a descendant of the great painter, who coldly observed, that "he had a great deal more in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... vices, vices in good taste, such as those indulged in by Alcibiades and sung by Catullus. Leo X died after having assembled under his reign, which lasted eight years, eight months, and nineteen days, Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Titian, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolommeo, Giulio ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Fifth, on his solemn entry into the city of Nuremberg. It is not necessary to inquire whether these stories are true or false; what is certain is that the inventors did not leave their inventions as a legacy to their fellows. For a like reason Leonardo da Vinci, who busied himself with a mechanism which should enable man to operate wings with his legs, and who left a short treatise on the art of flight, has no place in the history. His mechanism is merely a drawing; his treatise remained in manuscript. The adventurers ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... is supplied with a list of the authorities he should consult for the "History and Progress of his Art." He avoids expatiating on the books purely elementary—"the van of which is led by Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Durer, and the rear by Gherard Lavresse—as the principles which they detail must be supposed to be already in the student's possession, or are occasionally interwoven with the topics of the lectures;" and proceeds "to the historically ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... defects. He examines the countenance of men under the influence of passion; and often catches the most pleasing hints from subjects of turbulence or deformity. Even bad pictures themselves supply him with useful documents; and, as Leonardo da Vinci has observed, he improves upon the fanciful images that are sometimes seen in the fire, or are accidentally sketched ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... word," remarked Wolston: "the celebrated fresco of Leonardo da Vinci, in the refectory of the Dominicans at Milan, is nothing but a confused ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... "If Leonardo da Vinci could have seen this fellow's face just now," thought the artist, "he would not have had to seek so long for his model for the face of Judas. Only for my poniard, my fate would have been settled. This man was ready to ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... seated at her drawing-board, and has turned from the poor coarse hand of some little peasant girl she has called in as a model, to work, but with poor success, after a clay cast of a hand by Leonardo da Vinci, who ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... painters who designed cartoons for tapestries, we find those of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Guido and Giulio Romano, Albert Duerer, Rubens and Van Dyck. Indeed, there is hardly a great name among the painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which has not contributed to the value of the tapestries dating ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... the sake of the intricacy of style, and to save himself the pain of thinking. Mr. Lamb is a good judge of prints and pictures. His admiration of Hogarth does credit to both, particularly when it is considered that Leonardo da Vinci is his next greatest favourite, and that his love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal. His worst fault is an over-eagerness of enthusiasm, which occasionally makes him take a surfeit of his highest favourites.—Mr. Lamb excels ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... to modern times he fails to bring out clearly the decisive steps of its growth. And he does not seem to realise that a man might be "progressive" without believing in, or even thinking about, the doctrine of Progress. Leonardo da Vinci and Berkeley are examples. In my Ancient Greek Historians (1909) I dwelt on the modern origin of the idea (p. 253 sqq.). Recently Mr. R. H. Murray, in a learned appendix to his Erasmus and Luther, has developed the thesis that Progress was not grasped in antiquity (though he makes ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... makers of verse,' they are the twin creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery; and what in my father is the genius of curiosity—the very essence of all scientific genius—in me is the desire for beauty. Do you remember Pater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, 'curiosity and ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... learned from his master to delineating the humblest aspects of modern life. Degas draws not by the masses, but by the character;—his subjects are shop-girls, ballet-girls, and washerwomen, but the qualities that endow them with immortality are precisely those which eternalise the virgins and saints of Leonardo da Vinci in the minds of men. You see the fat, vulgar woman in the long cloak trying on a hat in front of the pier-glass. So marvellously well are the lines of her face observed and rendered that you can tell exactly what ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... and, in spite of a certain incongruity, the whole effect was pleasing and harmonious. The frescoes on the walls were almost obliterated by age, and were partially covered by dull red stuff. Against this latter hung three pictures from the famous Sansevero collection: a Holy Family by Leonardo da Vinci, a triptych by Perugino, and a Madonna by Correggio. Hardly less celebrated, but sharply at odds with the ecclesiastical subjects of the paintings, was the mantle, carved in a bacchanalian ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... murdered people in the Sunday papers. "She is very beautiful...." But he should not have said that. Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, "Well, that's not my idea of beauty, I must say!" and he would stop loving her. But Ellen was saying, "I thought she would be. You know, Richard, you are quite uncommon-looking. But tell me, what is she like?" Of course he might have known she was trying to get at the story. He had ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous men in history—as a man more famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart—because posterity has elected him the member for the Renaissance. Most great artists live in what they did, and by that we know them; but what Leonardo ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... insist on the necessary inferiority of copies to an original, without adverting to the indispensable proviso that the original with which the copies are compared should be the original from which the copies have been taken? May not a copy of Leonardo Da Vinci's 'Last Supper' quite possibly be equal in force and vividness of expression to the original painting by Benjamin West bearing the same name? Might it not be wise to trust rather to an Airy, or a De la Rue, or a Lockyer's account of what he had observed during a solar eclipse than to your ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... best and most upright of men sought, without any scruples whatever, the presence and favors of the Borgias. Pinturicchio and Perugino painted for Alexander VI, and the most wonderful genius of the century, Leonardo da Vinci, did not hesitate to enter the service of Caesar Borgia as his engineer, to erect fortresses for him in the same Romagna which he had appropriated by ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... this earliest of paleontologists studying the fossil-bearing strata of the earth, and drawing from his observations a marvellously scientific induction. Almost two thousand years later another famous citizen of Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, was independently to think out similar conclusions from like observations. But not until the nineteenth century of our era, some twenty-four hundred years after the time of Xenophanes, was the old Greek's doctrine to be accepted by the scientific world. The ideas of Xenophanes ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... looked back on with a purely admiring regret, as perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; the desirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most likely they are the fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the Aeolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with our redundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had been born in the age of Pitt, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... with it; I know not with what accuracy, but Signor Paoli, who has written so well upon Venice, is convinced, and the figure of Apollo is certainly free and fair as from a master's hand. Another picture, a Madonna and Child with two companions, is called a Leonardo da Vinci; but Baedeker gives it to Marco d'Oggiano. There is also a Filippino Lippi which one likes to find in Venice, where the prevailing art is so different from his. One of the most charming things here is a little relief of the manger; as pretty a rendering as one could wish for. Downstairs ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... no one, except Leonardo Da Vinci, in the whole history of our Planet, who gives us quite that sense of a person possessed of some secret illumination not granted to the rest of the world. There is much reassurance in this. More than ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... As someone has called Leonardo da Vinci "the great Italian Yankee," because of his multifarious and ingenious suggestions in the world of material things, so our own Edison may be called "the Yankee Leonardo," for, with a curiosity ranging over the whole world of nature, equal to that of the Italian, and with a fecundity of invention ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... Leonardo da Vinci was, doubtless, his greatest inspiration, and it was from this master-student of nature that the young man learned, with new enthusiasm, the value of going directly to Nature herself. The fruit of this new study is a group ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... Leonardo da Vinci tells us in his celebrated Treatise on Painting that the young artist should first of all learn perspective, that is to say, he should first of all learn that he has to depict on a flat surface objects which are in relief or distant ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... building of suitable works of defence at that neglected point. After that I never saw him again in Dresden; but I presume that he carried out the strategic works entrusted to him by that committee with all the conscientiousness of a Michael Angelo or a Leonardo da Vinci. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... valet-de- place to afflict us with. It is an affliction, however, for which there is no remedy, because you want to see the things, and would be very sorry if you went home without having done so. From Venice we went to Milan to see the cathedral and Leonardo da Vinci's 'Last Supper.' The former is superb, and of the latter I am convinced, from the little that remains of it, that it was the greatest picture the world ever saw. We shall run back to Rome for Holy Week, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... Greek Vases, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, History of Mosaic; Medieval Illumination; Sienese Painters of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries; Florentine Painting; Domestic Architecture of Various Countries; Leonardo da Vinci and His Works; Art of the Netherlands; History of Mural Painting; History and Principles of Engraving; Prints and Their Makers; Chinese and Japanese Art; Colonial Architecture in America; Painting and Sculpture ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Milwaukee is to me! The American is an inartistic race!" But what about the shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens? The shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens will be flirting about on some entirely banal beach—Scarborough or Trouville—and for all he knows or cares Leonardo da Vinci might have been a cabman; and yet the loveliest things in the world are, relatively speaking, at his door! When the European shopkeeper gets as far as Lucerne in August, he thinks that a journey of twenty-four hours entitles him to rank a little lower than Columbus. It was an enormous ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... Florentine painter, and founder of the Florentine school, which ranked among its members such artists as Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci; was the first to leave the stiff traditional Byzantine forms of art and copy from nature and the living model, though it was only with the advent of his great disciple Giotto that art found beauty in reality, and Florence was made to see the divine significance of lowly human worth, at ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... my father, monsieur, and if ever you enter the great hall of the Chateau de Meridor you will see, given in memory of this devotion, the portrait of Francis I., painted by Leonardo da Vinci." ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... his poem in the same diaphanous garment. It is a poem of twilight, of calm, of failure in success. Andrea's pictures are superior technically to those of his great contemporaries—Rafael, Michel Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci—but their imperfect works have a celestial glory, the glory of aspiration, absent from his perfect productions. His work ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... it is known the wider and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that symmetria prisca recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air. By its side, the more obviously "profound" poems, Bishop ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... That day she had seemed a typical tourist—shrill, crude, and gaunt with travel. But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and—which he held more precious—it gave her shadow. Soon he detected in her a wonderful reticence. She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci's, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us, The things are assuredly not of this life; no woman of Leonardo's could have anything so vulgar as a "story." She did develop most wonderfully day ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... He it was that spoke of Wagner as a musical impostor, and of the grinning woman in every canvas of Leonardo da Vinci. I enjoy his 'Angel in the House' so much, because it shows me the sort of a woman I am not and the sort of a woman we modern women are trying to outlive.... Yes, 'the bright disorder of the stars ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of Albert Durer, one of the greatest artists who ever lived. He was a man of universal genius—a painter, sculptor, engraver, mathematician, and engineer. He was to Germany what Leonardo da Vinci was to Italy. His house is wonderfully preserved. You see his entrance hall, his exhibition room, his bedroom, his studio, and the opening into which his wife—that veritable Xantippe —thrust the food that was to sustain him during his solitary hours of labour. I saw his grave, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... learn to conduct himself in accordance with rational and seemly custom, or he must be brought to his senses. When a great man's ways are merely innocently different from those of ordinary people, by all means let him alone. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci used often to buy caged wild-birds from their captors and let them go free. What a lovely and lovable action! He hurt no one; he restored the joy of life to innocent creatures, and no one could find fault with his sweet fancy. In the same way, when Samuel Johnson chose to stalk ponderously ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... two noisy, turbulent, unreasonable, pestilent little democratic cities,—Athens and Florence. Extinguish the architecture and the sculpture, the poetry and the philosophy of Attica; obliterate from the sum of civilization the names of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli,—of Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Michel Angelo,—of Brunetto, Ficino, Politian; and how much diminished will be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world. An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da Vinci would be a more valuable beacon ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Urbino, in 1483. Michael Angelo was born at Florence, in 1564, and united the professions of painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and musician. Besides these there were many other illustrious Italian painters, the principal of whom were Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Correggio, the three Caracci, Guido, Parmegiano, Salvator ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... see the portraits of those artists who have exalted one's ideas of human nature, and shewn what man can perform. Among these worthies a British eye soon distinguishes Sir Joshua Reynolds; a citizen of the world fastens his to Leonardo da Vinci. ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... instructive and encouraging thing in the whole annals of progress to note how the men of the Renascence were able to pick up the threads of the Greeks and continue their work. The texture held good. Leonardo da Vinci, whose birth coincides with the invention of the printing-press, is the most perfect reproduction in modern times of the early Greek sophos, the man of universal interests and capacity. He gave careful and admiring study to ...
— Progress and History • Various
... students from all over Europe, and such men as Linacre and Dr. Caius went down there from England. Raphael was but a young man at the end of the century, but he had done some noteworthy painting before it closed. Leonardo da Vinci was born just about the middle of the century, and did some marvellous work before the end of that century. Michael Angelo was only twenty-five at the close of the century, but he, too, did fine work, even at this early age. Among the other great Italian painters of this century are Fra Angelico, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... which different colours were to be used, thus creating a kind of mechanical harmony. One of his pupils, after trying in vain to use this system, in despair asked one of his colleagues how the master himself used the invention. The colleague replied: "The master never uses it at all." (Mereschowski, LEONARDO DA VINCI).] ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... "affinity'' for the dung-hill, whereas if they had been composed solely of eagles' feathers they would have been attracted to the air. This anecdote furnished Dunbar, the Scottish poet, with the subject of one of his rude satires. Leonardo da Vinci about the same time approached the problem in a more scientific spirit, and his notebooks contain several sketches of wings to be fitted to the arms and legs. In the following century a lecture on flying delivered in 1617 by Fleyder, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Leonardo da Vinci would walk across Milan to change a single tint or the slightest detail in his famous picture ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... is softened by exposure to the air, renders the durability of the statue doubtful." Messer Angelo de Lorenzo Manfidi (second herald) objected because it would break the order of certain ceremonies held in the Loggia. Leonardo da Vinci followed San Gallo; he did not think it would injure the ceremonies. Salvestro, a jeweller, and Filippino Lippi supported Piero di Cosimo, who proposed that the precise spot should be left to the sculptor who ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Refectory of the old Dominican Friary attached to the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, we saw Leonardo da Vinci's famous fresco of the Last Supper. It is on the wall of a large, bare, whitewashed room, this celebrated work being almost the only furniture and decoration. Although in a very bad state of decay and dilapidation, it is yet sufficient to draw hither artists from ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... branch of the study reference must be made to the gestures exhibited in the works of Italian art only modern in comparison with the high antiquity of their predecessors. A good instance is in the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci, painted toward the close of the fifteenth century, and to the figure of Judas as there portrayed. The gospel denounces him as a thief, which is expressed in the painting by the hand extended and slightly curved; imitative of the pilferer's act in ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... both of us found something to admire in these stern drawings. The Transfiguration is a more spirited copy than most that I have seen, though the principal figure seems never to be quite well copied. Here is a Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci and one from Correggio. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been happily working. She has failed; but that has not clouded joy nor ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... in the convent parlor, where Dionea appeared, rather out of place, an amazing little beauty, dark, lithe, with an odd, ferocious gleam in her eyes, and a still odder smile, tortuous, serpentine, like that of Leonardo da Vinci's women, among the plaster images of St. Francis, and the glazed and framed samplers before the little statue of the Virgin, which wears in summer a kind of mosquito-curtain to guard it from the flies, who, as you know, are creatures ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... was represented in a stronger light. In the Palazzo Borghese, I chiefly admired the following pieces: a Venus with two nymphs; and another with Cupid, both by Titian: an excellent Roman Piety, by Leonardo da Vinci; and the celebrated Muse, by Dominechino, which is a fine, jolly, buxom figure. At the palace of Colorina Connestabile, I was charmed with the Herodias, by Guido Rheni; a young Christ; and a Madonna, by Raphael; and four landscapes, two by Claude Lorraine, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... city of Florence must often have been an engaging subject. Think of what Florence was at this time, and how an artist must have thrilled at its very name! Beautiful as a flower, with her marble palaces, her fine churches, her lily-like bell-tower! What a charm was added when within her walls Leonardo da Vinci was painting, Michael Angelo carving, Savonarola preaching. In the early years of Raphael's apprenticeship, the voice of the preacher had been silenced, but still, "with the ineffable left hand," Da Vinci ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... horizons through the Crusades and voyages of discovery. Dante was not only the greatest poet of his time, but an astronomer; Petrarch was geographer and cartographer, and, at the end of the fifteenth century, with Paolo Toscanelli, Lucca Baccioli, and Leonardo da Vinci, Italy was beyond all comparison the first nation in Europe ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... aged domestic had known from a child was in want and exile. The pictures were eagerly bought by a foreign collector named Duart. The proceeds gave poor Villiers bread; but the noble works of Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, and others, were lost for ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... saying as eagerly as they could all the delightful thoughts which came crowding to the utterance, than in pondering whether they were worthy of admiration. In the annals of the Renaissance one gets almost weary of the records of brilliant persons, like Leo Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, who were architects, sculptors, painters, musicians, athletes, and writers all in one; who could make crowds weep by twanging a lute, ride the most vicious horses, take standing jumps over the heads of tall men, and who were, moreover, so ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fall into sick fancies of excitement, and by abuse of wild analogies lose the vital art of balance and sane comparison. Only the greatest minds, endowed as it were with some divine genius of extrication, may dare to practise the two together. So Leonardo da Vinci drove inference and intuition abreast without disaster, and gathered from purple distances of thought their wildest and most splendid flowers. To him, as has been well said, philosophy was something giving strange swiftness and double sight, clairvoyant of occult gifts in common or uncommon ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... wisdom of the eternal. This task, preventive not remedial, is her characteristic one. Is it not worth while to remember that the great religious leaders have generally ignored contemporary social problems? So have the great artists who are closely allied to them. Neither William Shakespeare nor Leonardo da Vinci were reformers; neither Gautama nor the Lord Jesus had much to say about the actual international economic and political readjustments which were as pressing in their day as ours. They were content to preach the truth, sure that it, once ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... deepens the farther and interior horizon with most men,—whether it is the atmosphere of one's own identity still warming and enriching it, or whether the orbed course of time has dropped the earthy part away, and left only the sunbeams falling there. But Leonardo da Vinci supposed that the sky owed its blue to the darkness of vast space behind the white lens of sunlit air; and perhaps where the sea presents through the extent of its depth, as it slips over into other hemispheres, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... sorrow. Here she is represented in her later state of reconciliation, enthroned as the glorified mother of all things. The delicate plaiting of the tunic about the throat, the formal curling of the hair, and a certain weight of over-thoughtfulness in the brows, recall the manner of Leonardo da Vinci, a master, one of whose characteristics is a very sensitive expression of the sentiment of maternity. It reminds one especially of a work by one of his scholars, the Virgin of the Balances, in the Louvre, a picture which has been thought to represent, under a veil, the blessing of universal ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... world is now so old, so many eminent men have lived and thought for thousands of years, that there is little new to be discovered or expressed. Even my theory of colors is not entirely new. Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, any many other excellent men, have before me found and expressed the same thing in a detached form: my merit is, that I have found it also, that I have said it again, and that I have striven to bring the truth once more into ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... man gave us a key to heaven. That man opened its infinite book, and we now read it, and he did more good than all the theologians that ever lived. I have not time to speak of the others—of Galileo, of Leonardo da Vinci, and of hundreds of others that ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... does not encourage tourist or artist to insist on setting up standards of his own against it. Begun in 1507, it was finished in 1517. The dome of Saint Peter's at Rome, over which Bramante and Raphael and Michael Angelo toiled, was building at the same time; Leonardo da Vinci was working at Amboise; Jean Bullant, Pierre Lescot, and their patron, Francis I, were beginning their architectural careers. Four hundred years, or thereabouts, separated the old spire from the new one; and four hundred more ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... tendency of scientific thought had been, for a considerable period before the time of Bacon, turned in the direction which he, perhaps, did more than any other single investigator to follow out and confirm. Leonardo da Vinci, the completest and most comprehensive genius of Modern Italy, had anticipated, by more than a century, several of the prominent features of the Baconian system. Too little of Leonardo's scientific writings has been published to furnish material ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... unto God." It ought to be a wondrous inspiration to know this; that even the lowliest things we do for Christ are pleasing to him. We ought to be able to do better, truer work, when we think of his gracious acceptance of it. It is told of Leonardo da Vinci, that while still a pupil, before his genius burst into brilliancy, he received a special inspiration in this way: His old and famous master, because of his growing infirmities of age, felt obliged to give up his own work, and one day bade Da Vinci finish for him a picture which ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller |
