# data[].attributes.body
Současné umění ;-)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Chemistry Gallery | Hlavní Město Praha | Galerie

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Chemistry Gallery je mladá dynamická kreativní instituce určená pro seriózní komerční a odbornou prezentaci děl současných mladých umělců jak z České republiky, tak ze zahraničí. The Chemistry Gallery. Hala 40, Holešovická tržnice, Bubenské nábřeží 306/13, 170 00 Praha 7
Po - Pá: 11:00 - 19:00
So: 14:00 - 19:00

# data[].attributes.body
English fantasy illustrator and conceptual designer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Brian Froud (born 1947) is an English fantasy illustrator. He is most widely known for his 1978 book with Alan Lee, and as the conceptual designer of the Jim Henson films The Dark Crystal and . According to , Froud is "one of the most pre-emiminent visualizers of the world of faerie and folktale".

Froud's most recent work has been developing the 2019 web television series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.

Froud was born in Winchester, England in 1947. An only child, he grew up in rural Hampshire before moving to Kent. In 1967 he enrolled as a painter at Maidstone College of Art, where he graduated with a first class honors diploma in Graphic Design in 1971.

After graduating, Froud spent five years working as a commercial illustrator in Soho, London before moving to Chagford, Devon in 1975. Between 1972 and 1976, he illustrated four books by children's author Margaret Mahy and Are All the Giants Dead? by Mary Norton. In 1976, Froud was featured in Once Upon a Time: Some Contemporary Illustrators of Fantasy, a survey of modern British illustrators. In 1977, an anthology of his artwork, The Land of Froud, was published.

In collaboration with his friend and fellow artist Alan Lee, Froud created the 1978 book , an illustrated compendium of faerie folklore. The idea for the book had come from publisher Ian Ballantine, who had been inspired by the success of the 1977 Dutch-authored book . Faeries reached number four on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and by 2003 had sold over five million copies. It was the basis of a 1981 animated short film of the same name.

Froud's artwork in Once Upon a Time and The Land of Froud brought him to the attention of Jim Henson, who sought out Froud to collaborate on his all-puppetry film The Dark Crystal. Froud served as the conceptual designer of The Dark Crystal, released in 1982. The same year, his concept art for the film was published in the companion book The World of the Dark Crystal. Froud was also the conceptual designer for Henson's next feature film, , released in 1986, as well as for the pilot episode of Henson's television series The Storyteller, first aired in 1987. Following his collaborations with Henson, Froud's filmography continued; as a designer for the 1989 Japanese animated film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland; as a visual consultant on the 2000 American animated film The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus and P. J. Hogan's 2003 live-action film Peter Pan; and as a concept artist on the 2016 Disney film Pete's Dragon.

In the late 1980s, Froud formed an artistic-literary partnership with Terry Jones, who was a screenwriter on Labyrinth. Together they produced The Goblins of Labyrinth (1986), a companion book containing Froud's concept art for the film, and subsequently a number of non- Labyrinth-related books about fairies and goblins. Their Lady Cottington series parodied the Cottingley Fairies phenomenon. For his artwork in the first book of the series, Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book (1994), Froud won the Hugo Award for Best Original Artwork and the Chesley Award for Best Interior Illustration.

In 1991, Froud created over 50 paintings and drawings for his Faerielands series, a collaborative project in which he invited four fantasy authors - Charles de Lint, Patricia A. McKillip, Terri Windling and Midori Snyder - to choose their favourite of his pieces and write stories to go with them, based on the premise that "Faerie, inextricably bound as it is to nature and natural forces, is gravely threatened by the ecological crises that human beings have brought to our world". The resulting novels were to be published by Bantam Books. However, only de Lint's The Wild Wood and McKillip's Something Rich and Strange were published in 1994 under the banner "Brian Froud's Faerielands" before the project was cancelled.

By 2003, Froud had sold over eight million large-format books of his paintings of fairies.

Froud returned to working with the Jim Henson Company as the primary conceptual designer of the 2019 Netflix series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, a prequel to The Dark Crystal.

Froud is married to Wendy Froud ( née Midener), a puppet-maker and sculptor whom he met at the Jim Henson Studios in 1978 while working on The Dark Crystal. The couple married on 31 May 1980, in Chagford. Their son Toby portrayed the infant of the same name in Labyrinth at the age of one, and later became a puppeteer and creature fabricator, working alongside his parents on The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance as design supervisor.

Through his son, Froud has one grandson, Sebastian.

Froud's artwork frequently draws upon fairy tales and European folklore. His paintings of fairies are known for recontexualising Victorian and Edwardian-era beliefs about fairies.

Among Froud's major influences are the 19th and early 20th-century illustrators Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, and Richard Dadd. Froud cites the early influence of Rackham, "in particular, [Rackham's] drawings of trees that had faces", as sparking his interest in illustrating fairy tales, and describes having had a love of nature from childhood that has informed his style. He is frequently inspired by the landscape of Dartmoor. Other influences Froud cites include the Robinson brothers ( Thomas, Charles and William), the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and Northern European art from the 1500s and 1600s. He was fascinated by Greek, Druid, Celtic and German 15th-century history and mythology. Froud's work has also been influenced by Arthurian legend, "com[ing] from Glastonbury as a sacred centre". Jeremiah Horrigan of the Poughkeepsie Journal wrote that Froud's style "echoes not only the great 19th century illustrators he reveres, but also harbors a wealth of elements ranging from Medieval to ancient Celtic and Nordic folk art."

Romeo and Juliet (1971)

The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate (1972)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1972)

Ultra-violet catastrophe!, or The unexpected walk with Great-Uncle Magnus Pringle (1975)

Are All the Giants Dead? (1975)

The Wind Between the Stars (1976)

The Land of Froud (1977)

Master Snickup's Cloak (1978)

The World of the Dark Crystal (1982)

Goblins: Pop-up Book (1983)

The Goblins of Labyrinth (1986) (reissued in abridged form as The Goblin Companion: A Field Guide to Goblins (1986)

The Dreaming Place (1990)

Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book (1994)

Quentin Cottington's Journal of Faery Research: Strange Stains and Mysterious Smells (1996)

Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Journal (1998)

Good Faeries/Bad Faeries (1998)

The Faeries' Oracle (2000)

Lady Cottington's Fairy Album (2002)

The Runes of Elfland (2003)

Goblins! (2004)

The Secret Sketchbooks of Brian Froud (2005)

Chelsea Morning (2005)

Brian Froud's World of Faerie (2007)

Heart of Faerie Oracle (2010)

How to See Faeries (2011) - With John Matthews

Faeries' Tales (2014)

Brian Froud's Faerielands series

In 1979, Froud was nominated for the British Fantasy Award for Best Artwork for Plate 12 of his 1977 book, The Land of Froud. For his 1978 book with Alan Lee, Faeries, Froud won second place in the 1979 Locus Award for Best Art Book (Froud has been a runner up four times through to 2015). Faeries was also nominated for the 1979 Balrog Award for Best Professional Publication. The same year, Froud was also runner up for the Locus Award for Best Artist (he has been a runner up four times through to 1999).

Four years later, Froud was a nominee at the 1983 Hugo Awards in the category of Best Non-Fiction Book for The World of the Dark Crystal, for which Froud was the illustrator in a partnership with writer J. J. Llewellyn. The World of the Dark Crystal won fifth place in the 1983 Locus Award for Best Nonfiction/Reference Book. The same year, Froud was also nominated for the Balrog Award for Best Artist.

Froud was honoured by the World Fantasy Convention with a nomination for the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist in 1991, and again four years later.

In 1995, Froud won the Hugo Award for Best Original Artwork for his illustrations in Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, a collaboration with writer Terry Jones. The book also won the Chesley Award for Best Interior Illustration, and Froud was also nominated that year for the Chesley Award for Artistic Achievement. For The Wise Woman, Froud won a certificate in the 1995 Spectrum Award for Best Book.

For his illustrations in Terry Windling's novel, The Wood Wife, Froud was nominated for the BSFA Award for Best Artwork in 1998. The following year, for his artwork in Good Faeries/Bad Faeries, another collaboration with Windling, Froud won his second Chesley Award for Best Interior Illustration (he has been a finalist six times through to 2008).

In 2001, Froud, along with his wife, was awarded the Inkpot Award.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brian Froud (born 1947) is an English fantasy illustrator. He is most widely known for his 1978 book with Alan Lee, and as the conceptual designer of the Jim Henson films The Dark Crystal and . According to , Froud is "one of the most pre-emiminent visualizers of the world of faerie and folktale".

# data[].attributes.headline
Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu (GAVU Cheb)

# data[].attributes.subject
Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu (GAVU Cheb)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Galerie výtvarného umění v Chebu - GAVU.cz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Mimořádně rozsáhlý několikapodlažní bytový interiér je založen na principu tzv. Raumplanu, čímž je ojedinělý a v regionu zcela unikátní. Koncepcí představuje završení řady bytových interiérů, navržených v letech 1907-32 v Plzni Adolfem Loosem. Dispoziční řešení má přímou návaznost na Müllerovu vilu v Praze, která bezprostředně předcházela a na obou úpravách se podíleli autoři ze stejného okruhu i shodné provádějící firmy. Semlerův byt doplňuje Müllerovu vilu do unikátní dvojice. Odlišuje se přizpůsobením danostem staršího objektu (vytváří vilu v domě) i rozdílným detailním řešením navrženým Heinrichem Kulkou, Loosovým spolupracovníkem a pokračovatelem. Na rozdíl od Müllerovy vily jde o práci až do současnosti prakticky neznámou širší veřejnosti. Objekt, který vznikl jako úřednický bytový dům Škodových závodů, získala v roce 1932 rodina Oskara Semlera a jeho část upravila na své reprezentační rodinné sídlo.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mimořádně rozsáhlý několikapodlažní bytový interiér je založen na principu tzv. Raumplanu, čímž je ojedinělý a v regionu zcela unikátní. Koncepcí představuje završení řady bytových interiérů, navržených v letech 1907-32 v Plzni Adolfem Loosem. Dispoziční řešení má přímou návaznost na Müllerovu vilu v Praze, která bezprostředně předcházela a na obou úpravách se podíleli autoři ze stejného okruhu i shodné provádějící firmy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nejstarší kulturní instituce v ČR, která spravuje největší a nejvýznamnější uměleckou sbírku na našem území.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
kresba rudkou, mužský akt od Annibale Carracciho, 16. století

Kresba je výsledkem činnosti, řadící se k výtvarnému umění. Patří k nejstarším výtvarným projevům člověka (jeskyně Altamira, Lascaux), a je např. jedním ze způsobů kvalifikovaného zobrazení trojrozměrného námětu (objektu..) na dvojrozměrné médium, jedná-li se o zachycení skutečnosti. Kresba má informační hodnotu, ale bývá i pouhým sebevyjádřením autora.

Autor kresby může být označen za kreslíře nebo kresliče (pro technický výkres).

Součásti kresby

tužka - skica uspořádání vnitřku letounu

Kresba vzniká za využití kresebných (kreslících) pomůcek. Většinovým výrazovým prostředkem kresby je lineární stopa - čára nebo linie, taky bod i celá plocha. Pro její vytváření se používají běžně dostupné pomůcky, např. tužky, pastelky, voskové tužky, pastely, voskové pastely, fixy, rudky, lisované nebo přírodní uhly, olůvka (dříve), pera a tuš. Při použití uhlu či rudky je potřebné výslednou kresbu ošetřit, tzv. zafixovat (fixativem). Někteří malíři kombinují uhel s pastelem, právě pro tyto jejich vlastnosti (lze je rozmazávat a vytvářet měkké přechody). Pro kresbu tuší, nebo inkoustem, se používá vyměnitelné pero s násadkou, dále technická (redispera), či kaligrafická pera, v minulosti se využíval i husí brk, nebo např. exotické bambusové či rákosové pero.

Malé množství materiálu (tuhy..), které se při kreslení uvolňuje z použité pomůcky (tužky..) na podklad (čtvrtku..), za sebou zanechává viditelnou stopu (čáru..). Jako podklad pro kresbu se nejčastěji používá papír (dříve i pergamen, papyrus..), dále karton, kůže(?), desky a mnohé další. Papír se rozlišuje podle rozměru, gramáže, bělosti, volumenu atd., známe papír ekologický, křídový a další. Dočasně mohou být, jako podklad kresby, využívány také tabule. Význam (pro výslednou kresbu) mají i fyzikální vlastnosti podkladu, tzn. je-li suchý, mokrý, mastný, drsný, sametový, lesklý, hladký..

Druhy kresby

Grifonáž je bezděčná, intuitivní kresba na okraji papíru. Systém čar, tvořený pomocí podvědomí, se označuje jako automatická kresba. Rychlá, zkratkovitá kresba, zachycující jen obrysově okamžitý nápad či situaci, se nazývá náčrt, o trochu více propracovanější je skica. Podle modelu se provádí tzv. studijní kresba. Pro následnou práci s náročnějšími materiály (omítka, dřevo) se využívá přípravná kresba, která je poté na podklad přenášena. Umělecká kresba je volnou tvorbou autora. Samostatným druhem zkratkovité kresby je karikatura.

Za kresbu lze označit i první výsledky setkání dítěte s tužkou či pastelkou. Dětská kresba je diagnostickým nástrojem a může mít mnoho vypovídajících hodnot. Odborní psychologové dovedou na základě dětského kresebného projevu určit stupeň vývoje dítěte, případnou vývojovou odchylku nebo potíže, které dítě v životě provázejí.

Kresbou bývá nazýváno, jako způsob veřejného vyjadřování, i graffiti, nicméně to je spíše malba.

tužka, akvarel, tuš, studie hlavy - Josef Čapek

Techniky kresby

Častým, ale ne rozlišujícím, znakem kresby je použití jedné barvy (většinou černé), obraz vytvořený pomocí čar (šrafování) a pouze částečné pokrytí podkladu.

Techniky lze rozdělit na mokré, suché a kombinované. Mokrá, kdy se provádí kresba tuší, inkousty, fixy, tekutou barvou, tj. tekutinu - vodu (líh) obsahujícími kreslícími pomůckami. Za suchou kresbu se označuje kresba tužkou, rudkou, uhlem, pastelem, pastelkou atd. Složitější jsou techniky kombinované, kresby, nanášené do vlhkého podkladu, např. v minulosti hojně užívaná tzv. lavírovaná kresba, kdy jsou obrysy kresby tuší rozmývány pomocí mokrého štětce, někdy i namočeného do řídké, tekuté barvy. Dále je to kolorovaná kresba, tj. kresba, kde jsou plochy vymalovány barvou (jedná se už o efekt, podobný akvarelu). Proškrabávaná kresba vzniká použitím ostrého hrotu, kterým se do tuší natřeného voskového podkladu proškrabává námět.[1]

Kresba může být (podle smyslu a účelu) samostatným výtvarným dílem. Většinou jsou ale pomocí kresby vytvářeny základní studie, při nichž si např. malíř, sochař či architekt (ale i řemeslník) zkouší a ujasňuje svůj záměr, nápad, kompozici a další aspekty připravovaného výrobku, nebo uměleckého díla, reliéfu, sochy, malby či architektonické realizace. Kresba je základem malířské tvorby, ale i dalších odvětví, návrhářství módy nevyjímaje. Kresba je umělci hojně užívána také ke studiu, při zaznamenávání děl jiných umělců, jako základu své vlastní umělecké tvorby. Postupně začala být kresba chápána i jako svébytné umělecké dílo, přesto je dodnes (nejen) výtvarníky užívána hlavně k přípravným studiím. Již od dob renesance se kresba stala vyhledávaným sběratelským artiklem, nejen jako samostatné dílo, i jako součást díla jiného, např. kresby na předsádkách knih.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kresba je výsledkem činnosti, řadící se k výtvarnému umění. Patří k nejstarším výtvarným projevům člověka (jeskyně Altamira, Lascaux), a je např. jedním ze způsobů kvalifikovaného zobrazení trojrozměrného námětu (objektu..) na dvojrozměrné médium, jedná-li se o zachycení skutečnosti. Kresba má informační hodnotu, ale bývá i pouhým sebevyjádřením autora.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
田島大介 Daisuke Tajima. 2,563 likes · 1 talking about this. https://www.instagram.com/tiendao06/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Vladivoj Kotyza: Zjevování světa | Západočeská galerie v Plzni

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
48 nápadů na nástěnce Kresba | kresby, kreslení, skicování

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Od kresby po kreslení, na Pinterestu najdete, co hledáte!

# data[].attributes.body
Mikoláš Aleš, Viktor Barvitius, Josef Bekel, Josef Berger, Václav Berger, Josef Bergler, Jan Adolf Brandeis, Zdenka Braunerová, Václav Brožík, Jaroslav Čermák, Bedřich Havránek, Josef Hellich,Emil Holárek, Vojtěch Hynais, Antonín Chittussi, Václav Jansa, Karel Javůrek, Felix Jenewein, František Kupka, Antonín Lhota, Antonín Mánes, Josef Mánes, Quido Mánes, Luděk Marold, Julius Mařák, Vincenc Morstadt, František Nadorp, Josef Navrátil, Martin Neureuter, Karel Novotný, Jan Nowopacký, Soběslav Pinkas, Karel Postl, Jan Preisler, Antonín Pucherna, Hanuš Schwaiger, Antonín Slavíček, Karel Svoboda, Max Švabinský, Martin Tejček, František Tkadlík, Josef Tulka, Joža Uprka, Gustav Watzek, František Zvěřina, Josef Zwettler, František Ženíšek

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dům umění města Brna Mistři české kresby

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Albín Brunovský (25 December 1935, Zohor, Czechoslovakia - 20 January 1997, Bratislava, Slovakia) was a Slovak painter, graphic artist, lithographer, illustrator and pedagogue, considered one of the greatest Slovak painters of the 20th century.

Design of 1980's emission of Czechoslovak banknotes

Albín Brunovský was born in Zohor, Czechoslovakia on Christmas Day, 25 December 1935. Brunovský started his early career in art by working on stage set and poster design. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava under Prof. Vincent Hložník from 1955 to 1961.

The Hloznik School was well known for its high artistic and technical preparation in graphic arts and its humanist perspective. For the founder, as for many of his students, Goya's great graphic cycle "The Horrors of War" served as a pattern or model. Brunovský himself lectured at that Academy from 1966 to 1990.

In 1981 he was appointed a professor, creating his own engraving school several years later. Brunovský's work often mirrored that of the modern movement, citation art. Brunovský was also the designer of the last series of Czechoslovak banknotes. His illustrations were primarily for children's books.

Albín Brunovský was repeatedly awarded at the Bratislava Illustration Biennial. In 1967, he was a co-founder of the international exhibition of original illustrations for children's books, the Bratislava Illustration Biennial, within which he founded and led the UNESCO - BIB workshop for illustrators from developing countries. A. Brunovský represents the imaginative position of illustration. His work is characterized by a sense of detail and miniature drawing, which results in ornamentalization, often creating a decorative image.

Over the course of his career, Brunovsky experimented with various graphic techniques and was highly influenced in his subject matter by poetry and literature, as well, of course, as by other artists. While at school he used the techniques of woodcuts and linocuts. Soon after, however, he began experimenting with "scraper" and chalk lithography. Etching were the characteristic mode of his graphic art work during the mid-1960s. He was, however, a painter too. Many of his illustrations were done in watercolor and he eventually began to paint major works.

As his mastery of various techniques evolved over time, so too did his vision as an artist. When he was young, Brunovsky exhibited surrealistic tendencies-defined as a tendency to individualism and absurdity and the unchecked play of the subconscious. Later his work became more evaluative and critical of Man in relation to himself and society.

I have such a creative program that pushes me to work. My pictures are simply doing with me what they want. Sometimes I don't feel like working. But when I come to my studio and I notice, that one work is not ready and the other one hopeless, I go and sit next to them for a while and suddenly I realise that there is evening. And in this way every morning I let myself to be pleasantly abused by my paintings that allow me to dream. (Albín Brunovský)

[Slovak talent of the communist era] "grew in the vegetables" (Albín Brunovský) [ he uses] "nature and its elements to depict the reality of dreams" (Albín Brunovský)

The Meeting of Numismatists

A Lady with a Hat

Vernissage in Nature

illustrations of "Modrá kniha rozprávok" - The Blue Book of Fairy Tales

Czechoslovak banknotes

seven pictures on walnut woods in the lobby of the new building of the National Council of the Slovak Republic

^ Ludmila Peterajova, "Introduction" to Albin Brunovsky (translator Till Gottheinerova), (Tatran, Bratislava, 1990), p. 16.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Albín Brunovský (25 December 1935, Zohor, Czechoslovakia - 20 January 1997, Bratislava, Slovakia) was a Slovak painter, graphic artist, lithographer, illustrator and pedagogue, considered one of the greatest Slovak painters of the 20th century. Albín Brunovský was born in Zohor, Czechoslovakia on Christmas Day, 25 December 1935.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Self portrait by Henry Justice Ford, c. 1938

Henry Justice Ford (1860-1941) was a prolific and successful English artist and illustrator, active from 1886 through to the late 1920s. Sometimes known as H. J. Ford or Henry J. Ford, he came to public attention when he provided the numerous beautiful illustrations for Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, which captured the imagination of a generation of British children and were sold worldwide in the 1880s and 1890s.

After education at Repton School and Clare College, Cambridge - where he gained a first class in the Classical Tripos in 1882 - Ford returned to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art and later, at the Bushey School of Art, under the German-born Hubert von Herkomer.

In 1892, Ford began exhibiting paintings of historical subjects and landscapes at the Royal Academy of Art exhibitions. However it was his illustrations for such books as The Arabian Nights Entertainments (Longmans 1898), Kenilworth (TC & EC Jack 1900), and A School History of England by C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling (Clarendon Press 1911) that provided Ford with both income and fame.

The Princess Imprisoned in the Summerhouse from Andrew Lang's The Green Fairy Book

His parents were Katherine Mary Justice and William Augustus Ford; his paternal grandfather was George Samuel Ford, a well known bill discounter. His father (a solicitor by profession) and many of his family were cricketers. His father wrote a number of articles and books on the subject, and Ford's brother, Francis Ford (1866-1940), played for England in an Ashes series in Australia.

At the age of 61, Ford surprised his friends by marrying a woman some thirty-five years younger. She was Emily Amelia Hoff (née Rose), a widow whose first husband had been killed in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915. Following the marriage in Kensington Register Office in February 1921, Henry and Emily Ford settled down in Bedford Gardens, Kensington for several years and, in 1927, the couple adopted a child, June Mary Magdelene Ford. The seated model in Henry Justice Ford's painting 'Remembering Happier Things', now in the collection of the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery, Bournemouth, bears a strong resemblance to Ford's wife, Emily.

His love of the game led Henry Justice Ford to play cricket regularly with the playwright J. M. Barrie's Allahakbarrie Cricket Club. This in turn led to Ford providing the well-known map of Kensington Gardens in Barrie's The Little White Bird. He also designed the costume for the character of Peter Pan when Barrie's play was staged in the West End for the first time in 1904. Ford's wide-ranging interests brought him into contact and friendship with many well-known figures of his time, including the writers P. G. Wodehouse, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and A. E. W. Mason.

Hares-Stryker, Caroline (2009). "Doing Justice to Henry: a biographical study of Henry Justice Ford". Studies in Illustration. Imaginative Book Illustration Society. 43 (Winter).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Henry Justice Ford (1860-1941) was a prolific and successful English artist and illustrator, active from 1886 through to the late 1920s. Sometimes known as H. J. Ford or Henry J.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 - 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and palaeontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works comprise a contribution to later generations of artists matched only by that of his younger contemporary Michelangelo.

Born out of wedlock to a successful notary and a lower-class woman in, or near, Vinci, he was educated in Florence by the Italian painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. He began his career in the city, but then spent much time in the service of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Later, he worked in Florence and Milan again, as well as briefly in Rome, all while attracting a large following of imitators and students. Upon the invitation of Francis I, he spent his last three years in France, where he died in 1519. Since his death, there has not been a time where his achievements, diverse interests, personal life, and empirical thinking have failed to incite interest and admiration, making him a frequent namesake and subject in culture.

Leonardo is identified as one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art and is often credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. Despite having many lost works and fewer than 25 attributed major works - including numerous unfinished works - he created some of the most influential paintings in the Western canon. The is his best known work and is the world's most famous individual painting. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time and his Vitruvian Man drawing is also regarded as a cultural icon. In 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed in whole or part to Leonardo, was sold at auction for US$450.3 million, setting a new record for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction.

Revered for his technological ingenuity, he conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, a ratio machine that could be used in an adding machine, and the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. Some of his smaller inventions, however, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, but he did not publish his findings and they had little to no direct influence on subsequent science.

Early life (1452-1472)

Birth and background

Leonardo Da Vinci's baptism record

Leonardo da Vinci, properly named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ("Leonardo, son of ser Piero from Vinci"), was born on 15 April 1452 in, or close to, the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, 20 miles from Florence. He was born out of wedlock to Piero da Vinci (Ser Piero da Vinci d'Antonio di ser Piero di ser Guido; 1426-1504), a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi ( c. 1434-1494), from the lower class. It remains uncertain where Leonardo was born; the traditional account, from a local oral tradition recorded by the historian Emanuele Repetti, is that he was born in Anchiano, a country hamlet that would have offered sufficient privacy for the illegitimate birth, though it is still possible he was born in a house in Florence that Ser Piero almost certainly had. Leonardo's parents both married separately the year after his birth. Caterina - who later appears in Leonardo's notes as only "Caterina" or "Catelina" - is usually identified as the Caterina Buti del Vacca, who married the local artisan Antonio di Piero Buti del Vacca, nicknamed L'Accattabriga, 'the quarrelsome one'. Having been betrothed to her the previous year, Ser Piero married Albiera Amadori and after her death in 1464, went on to have three subsequent marriages. From all the marriages, Leonardo eventually had 16 half-siblings (of whom 11 survived infancy) who were much younger than he (the last was born when Leonardo was 46 years old) and with whom he had very little contact.

The possible birthplace and childhood home of Leonardo in Anchiano, Vinci, Italy

Very little is known about Leonardo's childhood and much is shrouded in myth, partially because of his biography in the frequently apocryphal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) by 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari. Tax records indicate that by at least 1457 he lived in the household of his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci, but it is possible that he spent the years before then in the care of his mother in Vinci, either Anchiano or Campo Zeppi in the parish of San Pantaleone. He is thought to have been close to his uncle, Francesco da Vinci, but his father was probably in Florence most of the time. Ser Piero, who was the descendant of a long line of notaries, established an official residence in Florence by at least 1469 and had a successful career. Despite his family history, Leonardo only received a basic and informal education in (vernacular) writing, reading, and mathematics; possibly because his artistic talents were recognised early, so his family decided to focus their attention there.

Later in life, Leonardo recorded his earliest memory, now in the Codex Atlanticus. While writing on the flight of birds, he recalled as an infant when a kite came to his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail; commentators still debate whether the anecdote was an actual memory or a fantasy.

Verrocchio's workshop

The Baptism of Christ (1472-1475) by Verrocchio and Leonardo, Uffizi Gallery

In the mid-1460s, Leonardo's family moved to Florence, which at the time was the centre of Christian Humanist thought and culture. Around the age of 14, he became a garzone (studio boy) in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who was the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his time. This was about the time of the death of Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello. Leonardo became an apprentice by the age of 17 and remained in training for seven years. Other famous painters apprenticed in the workshop or associated with it include Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo was exposed to both theoretical training and a wide range of technical skills, including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and woodwork, as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling.

Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio or at the Platonic Academy of the Medici. Florence was ornamented by the works of artists such as Donatello's contemporaries Masaccio, whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion, and Ghiberti, whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.

Much of the painting in Verrocchio's workshop was done by his assistants. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his The Baptism of Christ (c.  1472-1475), painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe with skill so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio purportedly put down his brush and never painted again (the latter claim probably being apocryphal). The new technique of oil paint was applied to areas of the mostly tempera work, including the landscape, the rocks seen through the brown mountain stream, and much of Jesus's figure, indicating Leonardo's hand. Additionally, Leonardo may have been a model for two works by Verrocchio: the bronze statue of in the Bargello and the archangel Raphael in Tobias and the Angel.

Vasari tells a story of Leonardo as a very young man: a local peasant made himself a round buckler shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo, inspired by the story of Medusa, responded with a painting of a monster spitting fire that was so terrifying that his father bought a different shield to give to the peasant and sold Leonardo's to a Florentine art dealer for 100 ducats, who in turn sold it to the Duke of Milan.

First Florentine period (1472 - c. 1482)

Adoration of the Magi c. 1478-1482, Uffizi, Florence

By 1472, at the age of 20, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate and live with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a 1473 pen-and-ink drawing of the Arno valley (see below). According to Vasari, the young Leonardo was the first to suggest making the Arno river a navigable channel between Florence and Pisa.

In January 1478, Leonardo received an independent commission to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of Saint Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio, an indication of his independence from Verrocchio's studio. An anonymous early biographer, known as Anonimo Gaddiano, claims that in 1480 Leonardo was living with the Medici and often worked in the garden of the Piazza San Marco, Florence, where a Neoplatonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers organised by the Medici met. In March 1481, he received a commission from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto for The Adoration of the Magi. Neither of these initial commissions were completed, being abandoned when Leonardo went to offer his services to Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo wrote Sforza a letter which described the diverse things that he could achieve in the fields of engineering and weapon design, and mentioned that he could paint. He brought with him a silver string instrument - either a lute or lyre - in the form of a horse's head.

With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neoplatonism; Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were the foremost. Also associated with the Platonic Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. In 1482, Leonardo was sent as an ambassador by Lorenzo de' Medici to Ludovico il Moro, who ruled Milan between 1479 and 1499.

First Milanese period (c. 1482-1499)

Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1483-1493, Louvre version

Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In the spring of 1485, Leonardo travelled to Hungary (on behalf of Sforza) to meet king Matthias Corvinus, and was commissioned by him to paint a Madonna. In 1490 he was called as a consultant, together with Francesco di Giorgio Martini, for the building site of the cathedral of Pavia and was struck by the equestrian statue of Regisole, of which he left a sketch. Leonardo was employed on many other projects for Sforza, such as preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions; a drawing of, and wooden model for, a competition to design the cupola for Milan Cathedral; and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Ludovico's predecessor Francesco Sforza. This would have surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the Gran Cavallo. Leonardo completed a model for the horse and made detailed plans for its casting, but in November 1494, Ludovico gave the metal to his brother-in-law to be used for a cannon to defend the city from Charles VIII of France.

Contemporary correspondence records that Leonardo and his assistants were commissioned by the Duke of Milan to paint the Sala delle Asse in the Sforza Castle, c. 1498. The project became a trompe-l'œil decoration that made the great hall appear to be a pergola created by the interwoven limbs of sixteen mulberry trees, whose canopy included an intricate labyrinth of leaves and knots on the ceiling.

Second Florentine period (1500-1508)

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, c. 1499-1508, National Gallery, London

When Ludovico Sforza was overthrown by France in 1500, Leonardo fled Milan for Venice, accompanied by his assistant Salaì and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli. In Venice, Leonardo was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack. On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men [and] women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were going to a solemn festival."

In Cesena in 1502, Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. Leonardo created a map of Cesare Borgia's stronghold, a town plan of Imola in order to win his patronage. Upon seeing it, Cesare hired Leonardo as his chief military engineer and architect. Later in the year, Leonardo produced another map for his patron, one of Chiana Valley, Tuscany, so as to give his patron a better overlay of the land and greater strategic position. He created this map in conjunction with his other project of constructing a dam from the sea to Florence, in order to allow a supply of water to sustain the canal during all seasons.

Leonardo had left Borgia's service and returned to Florence by early 1503, where he rejoined the Guild of Saint Luke on 18 October of that year. By this same month, Leonardo had begun working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the model for the , which he would continue working on until his twilight years. In January 1504, he was part of a committee formed to recommend where Michelangelo's statue of should be placed. He then spent two years in Florence designing and painting a mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina.

In 1506, Leonardo was summoned to Milan by Charles II d'Amboise, the acting French governor of the city. There, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. The Council of Florence wished Leonardo to return promptly to finish The Battle of Anghiari, but he was given leave at the behest of Louis XII, who considered commissioning the artist to make some portraits. Leonardo may have commenced a project for an equestrian figure of d'Amboise; a wax model attributed to him survives and would be the only extant example of Leonardo's sculpture, but the attribution is not widely accepted. Leonardo was otherwise free to pursue his scientific interests. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, and Marco d'Oggiono. In 1507, Leonardo was in Florence sorting out a dispute with his brothers over the estate of his father, who had died in 1504.

Second Milanese period (1508-1513)

By 1508, Leonardo was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila.

In 1512, Leonardo was working on plans for an equestrian monument for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, but this was prevented by an invasion of a confederation of Swiss, Spanish and Venetian forces, which drove the French from Milan. Leonardo stayed in the city, spending several months in 1513 at the Medici's Vaprio d'Adda villa.

Rome and France (1513-1519)

An apocalyptic deluge drawn in black chalk by Leonardo near the end of his life (part of a series of 10, paired with written description in his notebooks)

In March 1513, Lorenzo de' Medici's son Giovanni assumed the papacy (as Leo X); Leonardo went to Rome that September, where he was received by the pope's brother Giuliano. From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere Courtyard in the Apostolic Palace, where Michelangelo and Raphael were both active. Leonardo was given an allowance of 33 ducats a month and, according to Vasari, decorated a lizard with scales dipped in quicksilver. The pope gave him a painting commission of unknown subject matter, but cancelled it when the artist set about developing a new kind of varnish. Leonardo became ill, in what may have been the first of multiple strokes leading to his death. He practised botany in the Vatican Gardens, and was commissioned to make plans for the Pope's proposed draining of the Pontine Marshes. He also dissected cadavers, making notes for a treatise on vocal cords; these he gave to an official in hopes of regaining the Pope's favour, but he was unsuccessful.

In October 1515, King Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On 21 March 1516 Antonio Maria Pallavicini, the French ambassador to the Holy See, received a letter sent from Lyon a week previously by the royal advisor Guillaume Gouffier, seigneur de Bonnivet, containing the French king's instructions to assist Leonardo in his relocation to France and to inform the artist that the King was eagerly awaiting his arrival. Pallavicini was also asked to reassure Leonardo that he would be well received at court, both by the King and by his mother, Louise of Savoy. Leonardo entered Francis's service later that year, and was given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé near the King's residence at the royal Château d'Amboise. He was frequently visited by Francis, and drew plans for an immense castle town the King intended to erect at Romorantin. He also made a mechanical lion, which during a pageant walked towards the King and - upon being struck by a wand - opened its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies.

Leonardo was accompanied during this time by his friend and apprentice Francesco Melzi, and was supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi. At some point, Melzi drew a portrait of Leonardo; the only others known from his lifetime were a sketch by an unknown assistant on the back of one of Leonardo's studies (c.  1517) and a drawing by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino depicting an elderly Leonardo with his right arm wrapped in clothing. The latter, in addition to the record of an October 1517 visit by Louis d'Aragon, confirms an account of Leonardo's right hand being paralytic when he was 65, which may indicate why he left works such as the Mona Lisa unfinished. He continued to work at some capacity until eventually becoming ill and bedridden for several months.

Drawing of the Château d'Amboise (c.  1518) attributed to Francesco Melzi

Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67, possibly of a stroke. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari describes Leonardo as lamenting on his deathbed, full of repentance, that "he had offended against God and men by failing to practice his art as he should have done." Vasari states that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari also records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story may be legend rather than fact. In accordance with his will, sixty beggars carrying tapers followed Leonardo's casket. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving, as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo's other long-time pupil and companion, Salaì, and his servant Baptista de Vilanis, each received half of Leonardo's vineyards. His brothers received land, and his serving woman received a fur-lined cloak. On 12 August 1519, Leonardo's remains were interred in the Collegiate Church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise.

Salaì, or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One", i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490 as an assistant. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton," after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions and spent a fortune on clothes. Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence, and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. Salaì executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salaì, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him many things about painting," his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggiono and Boltraffio.

At the time of his death in 1524, Salaì owned a painting referred to as Joconda in a posthumous inventory of his belongings; it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.

Personal life

Saint John the Baptist c.  1507-1516, Louvre. Leonardo is thought to have used Salaì as the model.

Despite the thousands of pages Leonardo left in notebooks and manuscripts, he scarcely made reference to his personal life.

Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "great physical beauty" and "infinite grace," as described by Vasari, as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect was his love for animals, likely including vegetarianism and according to Vasari, a habit of purchasing caged birds and releasing them.

Leonardo had many friends who are now notable either in their fields or for their historical significance, including mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on the book Divina proportione in the 1490s. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Cecilia Gallerani and the two Este sisters, Beatrice and Isabella. While on a journey that took him through Mantua, he drew a portrait of Isabella that appears to have been used to create a painted portrait, now lost.

Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud in his Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood. Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salaì and Melzi. Melzi, writing to inform Leonardo's brothers of his death, described Leonardo's feelings for his pupils as both loving and passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Walter Isaacson in his biography of Leonardo makes explicit his opinion that the relations with Salaì were intimate and homosexual.

Earlier in Leonardo's life, court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy in an incident involving a known male prostitute. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and there is speculation that since one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in Saint John the Baptist and and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings.

Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his fame rested on his achievements as a painter. A handful of works that are either authenticated or attributed to him have been regarded as among the great masterpieces. These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities that have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter.

Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are his innovative techniques for laying on the paint; his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology; his interest in physiognomy and the way humans register emotion in expression and gesture; his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition; and his use of subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and the Virgin of the Rocks.

Early works

Annunciation c. 1472-1476, Uffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest extant and complete major work.

Leonardo first gained attention for his work on the Baptism of Christ, painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at Verrocchio's workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, 59 centimetres (23 in) long and 14 cm (5.5 in) high. It is a " predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, 217 cm (85 in) long. In both Annunciations, Leonardo used a formal arrangement, like two well-known pictures by Fra Angelico of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with a rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now generally attributed to Leonardo.

In the smaller painting, Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. Mary is not submissive, however, in the larger piece. The girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God, not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting, the young Leonardo presents the humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.

Paintings of the 1480s

Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (unfinished) c. 1480-1490, Vatican

In the 1480s, Leonardo received two very important commissions and commenced another work that was of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Two of the three were never finished, and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment.

One of these paintings was Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, which Bortolon associates with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, as evidenced in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die." Although the painting is barely begun, the composition can be seen and is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.

The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a complex composition, of about 250 x 250 centimetres. Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture that forms part of the background. In 1482 Leonardo went to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo de' Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro, and the painting was abandoned.

Lady with an Ermine, c. 1489-1491, Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, Poland

The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks, commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece. Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water. While the painting is quite large, about 200×120 centimetres, it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of San Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished: one remained at the chapel of the Confraternity, while Leonardo took the other to France. The Brothers did not get their painting, however, nor the de Predis their payment, until the next century.

Leonardo's most remarkable portrait of this period is the Lady with an Ermine, presumed to be Cecilia Gallerani ( c. 1483-1490), lover of Ludovico Sforza. The painting is characterised by the pose of the figure with the head turned at a very different angle to the torso, unusual at a date when many portraits were still rigidly in profile. The ermine plainly carries symbolic meaning, relating either to the sitter, or to Ludovico who belonged to the prestigious Order of the Ermine.

Paintings of the 1490s

The Last Supper, Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan (c. 1492-1498)

Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, commissioned for the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. It represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death, and shows the moment when Jesus has just said "one of you will betray me", and the consternation that this statement caused.

The writer Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat and then not paint for three or four days at a time. This was beyond the comprehension of the prior of the convent, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model.

The painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined." Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface subject to mould and to flaking. Despite this, the painting remains one of the most reproduced works of art; countless copies have been made in various mediums.

Toward the end of this period, in 1498 Leonardo's trompe-l'œil decoration of the Sala delle Asse was painted for the Duke of Milan in the Castello Sforzesco.

Paintings of the 1500s

In 1505, Leonardo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred) in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Leonardo devised a dynamic composition depicting four men riding raging war horses engaged in a battle for possession of a standard, at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. Michelangelo was assigned the opposite wall to depict the Battle of Cascina. Leonardo's painting deteriorated rapidly and is now known from a copy by Rubens.

Mona Lisa or La Gioconda c. 1503-1516, Louvre, Paris

Among the works created by Leonardo in the 16th century is the small portrait known as the or La Gioconda, the laughing one. In the present era, it is arguably the most famous painting in the world. Its fame rests, in particular, on the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality perhaps due to the subtly shadowed corners of the mouth and eyes such that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called " sfumato", or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari wrote that the smile was "so pleasing that it seems more divine than human, and it was considered a wondrous thing that it was as lively as the smile of the living original."

Other characteristics of the painting are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details; the dramatic landscape background, in which the world seems to be in a state of flux; the subdued colouring; and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils laid on much like tempera, and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed that the painting's quality would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is rare in a panel painting of this date.

In the painting Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape, which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" and harkens back to the Saint Jerome with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, Saint Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, influenced Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.

Antique Warrior in Profile, c.  1472. British Museum, London

Presumed self-portrait of Leonardo (c. 1510) at the Royal Library of Turin, Italy

Leonardo was a prolific draughtsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper. His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.

Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body; the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre; a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem; and a large drawing (160×100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in the Louvre.

Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that Leonardo would look for interesting faces in public to use as models for some of his work. There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salaì, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salaì is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de' Medici, in the Pazzi conspiracy. In his notes, Leonardo recorded the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.

Like the two contemporary architects Donato Bramante (who designed the Belvedere Courtyard) and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised.

Journals and notes

Renaissance humanism recognised no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are sometimes considered as impressive and innovative as his artistic work. These studies were recorded in 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). They were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him. Leonardo's notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirlpools, war machines, flying machines and architecture.

A page showing Leonardo's study of a foetus in the womb (c.  1510), Royal Library, Windsor Castle

These notebooks - originally loose papers of different types and sizes - were largely entrusted to Leonardo's pupil and heir Francesco Melzi after the master's death. These were to be published, a task of overwhelming difficulty because of its scope and Leonardo's idiosyncratic writing. Some of Leonardo's drawings were copied by an anonymous Milanese artist for a planned treatise on art c. 1570. After Melzi's death in 1570, the collection passed to his son, the lawyer Orazio, who initially took little interest in the journals. In 1587, a Melzi household tutor named Lelio Gavardi took 13 of the manuscripts to Pisa; there, the architect Giovanni Magenta reproached Gavardi for having taken the manuscripts illicitly and returned them to Orazio. Having many more such works in his possession, Orazio gifted the volumes to Magenta. News spread of these lost works of Leonardo's, and Orazio retrieved seven of the 13 manuscripts, which he then gave to Pompeo Leoni for publication in two volumes; one of these was the Codex Atlanticus. The other six works had been distributed to a few others. After Orazio's death, his heirs sold the rest of Leonardo's possessions, and thus began their dispersal.

Some works have found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España , the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, which holds the 12-volume Codex Atlanticus, and the British Library in London, which has put a selection from the Codex Arundel (BL Arundel MS 263) online. Works have also been at Holkham Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the private hands of John Nicholas Brown I and Robert Lehman. The Codex Leicester is the only privately owned major scientific work of Leonardo; it is owned by Bill Gates and displayed once a year in different cities around the world.

Most of Leonardo's writings are in mirror-image cursive. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it was probably easier for him to write from right to left. Leonardo used a variety of shorthand and symbols, and states in his notes that he intended to prepare them for publication. In many cases a single topic is covered in detail in both words and pictures on a single sheet, together conveying information that would not be lost if the pages were published out of order. Why they were not published during Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.

Science and inventions

Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's Divina proportione (1509)

In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book Divina proportione, published in 1509. While living in Milan, he studied light from the summit of Monte Rosa. Scientific writings in his notebook on fossils have been considered as influential on early palaeontology.

The content of his journals suggest that he was planning a series of treatises on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy is said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis d'Aragon's secretary in 1517. Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by Melzi and eventually published as A Treatise on Painting in France and Italy in 1651 and Germany in 1724, with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicolas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into 62 editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art."

While Leonardo's experimentation followed scientific methods, a recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as a scientist by Fritjof Capra argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him in that, as a " Renaissance Man", his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting.

Anatomy and physiology

Leonardo started his study in the anatomy of the human body under the apprenticeship of Verrocchio, who demanded that his students develop a deep knowledge of the subject. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.[citation needed ]

As a successful artist, Leonardo was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre, professor of Anatomy at the University of Pavia. Leonardo made over 240 detailed drawings and wrote about 13,000 words toward a treatise on anatomy. Only a small amount of the material on anatomy was published in Leonardo's Treatise on painting. During the time that Melzi was ordering the material into chapters for publication, they were examined by a number of anatomists and artists, including Vasari, Cellini and Albrecht Dürer, who made a number of drawings from them.

Leonardo's anatomical drawings include many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, and of muscles and sinews. He studied the mechanical functions of the skeleton and the muscular forces that are applied to it in a manner that prefigured the modern science of biomechanics. He drew the heart and vascular system, the sex organs and other internal organs, making one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. The drawings and notation are far ahead of their time, and if published would undoubtedly have made a major contribution to medical science.

Leonardo also closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness. Leonardo also studied and drew the anatomy of many animals, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.

Leonardo's dissections and documentation of muscles, nerves, and vessels helped to describe the physiology and mechanics of movement. He attempted to identify the source of 'emotions' and their expression. He found it difficult to incorporate the prevailing system and theories of bodily humours, but eventually he abandoned these physiological explanations of bodily functions. He made the observations that humours were not located in cerebral spaces or ventricles. He documented that the humours were not contained in the heart or the liver, and that it was the heart that defined the circulatory system. He was the first to define atherosclerosis and liver cirrhosis. He created models of the cerebral ventricles with the use of melted wax and constructed a glass aorta to observe the circulation of blood through the aortic valve by using water and grass seed to watch flow patterns.

Engineering and inventions

During his lifetime, Leonardo was also valued as an engineer. With the same rational and analytical approach that moved him to represent the human body and to investigate anatomy, Leonardo studied and designed many machines and devices. He drew their "anatomy" with unparalleled mastery, producing the first form of the modern technical drawing, including a perfected "exploded view" technique, to represent internal components. Those studies and projects collected in his codices fill more than 5,000 pages. In a letter of 1482 to the lord of Milan Ludovico il Moro, he wrote that he could create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled from Milan to Venice in 1499, he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. In 1502, he created a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno river, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. He continued to contemplate the canalisation of Lombardy's plains while in Louis XII's company and of the Loire and its tributaries in the company of Francis I. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, a mechanical knight, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.

Leonardo's drawings of a scythed chariot and a fighting vehicle

Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight for much of his life, producing many studies, including Codex on the Flight of Birds ( c. 1505), as well as plans for several flying machines, such as a flapping ornithopter and a machine with a helical rotor. In a 2003 documentary by British television station Channel Four, titled Leonardo's Dream Machines, various designs by Leonardo, such as a parachute and a giant crossbow, were interpreted and constructed. Some of those designs proved successful, whilst others fared less well when tested. Similarly, a team of engineers built ten machines designed by Leonardo in the 2009 American television series Doing DaVinci, including a fighting vehicle and a self-propelled cart.

In his notebooks, Leonardo first stated the 'laws' of sliding friction in 1493. His inspiration for investigating friction came about in part from his study of perpetual motion, which he correctly concluded was not possible. His results were never published and the friction laws were not rediscovered until 1699 by Guillaume Amontons, with whose name they are now usually associated. For this contribution, Leonardo was named as the first of the 23 "Men of Tribology" by Duncan Dowson.

Statue outside the Uffizi, Florence, by Luigi Pampaloni (1791-1847)

Although he had no formal academic training, many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the " Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man", an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination." He is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote." Scholars interpret his view of the world as being based in logic, though the empirical methods he used were unorthodox for his time.

Leonardo's fame within his own lifetime was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. Interest in Leonardo and his work has never diminished. Crowds still queue to see his best-known artworks, T-shirts still bear his most famous drawing, and writers continue to hail him as a genius while speculating about his private life, as well as about what one so intelligent actually believed in.

The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ( The Courtier), wrote in 1528: "...Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled..." while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c.  1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf..." Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists (1568), opens his chapter on Leonardo:

In the normal course of events many men and women are born with remarkable talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty, who displayed infinite grace in everything that he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.

The Death of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818

The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius..." This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."

Art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896:

Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values.

The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found. Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said:

Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge...Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe.

The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana is a special collection at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Leonardo Museum in Vinci, which houses a large collection of models constructed on the basis of Leonardo's drawings

Twenty-first-century author Walter Isaacson based much of his biography of Leonardo on thousands of notebook entries, studying the personal notes, sketches, budget notations, and musings of the man whom he considers the greatest of innovators. Isaacson was surprised to discover a "fun, joyous" side of Leonardo in addition to his limitless curiosity and creative genius.

On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death, the Louvre in Paris arranged for the largest ever single exhibit of his work, called Leonardo, between November 2019 and February 2020. The exhibit includes over 100 paintings, drawings and notebooks. Eleven of the paintings that Leonardo completed in his lifetime were included. Five of these are owned by the Louvre, but the Mona Lisa was not included because it is in such great demand among general visitors to the Louvre; it remains on display in its gallery. Vitruvian Man, however, is on display following a legal battle with its owner, the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. Salvator Mundi was also not included because its Saudi owner did not agree to lease the work.

The Mona Lisa, considered Leonardo's magnum opus, is often regarded as the most famous portrait ever made. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time, and Leonardo's Vitruvian Man drawing is also considered a cultural icon.

More than a decade of analysis of Leonardo's genetic genealogy, conducted by Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato, came to a conclusion in mid-2021. It was determined that the artist has 14 living male relatives. The work could also help determine the authenticity of remains thought to belong to Leonardo.

Location of remains

Tomb in the chapel of Saint Hubert at the Château d'Amboise where a plaque describes it as the presumed site of Leonardo's remains

While Leonardo was certainly buried in the collegiate church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise in 12 August 1519, the current location of his remains is unclear. Much of Château d'Amboise was damaged during the French Revolution, leading to the church's demolition in 1802. Some of the graves were destroyed in the process, scattering the bones interred there and thereby leaving the whereabouts of Leonardo's remains subject to dispute; a gardener may have even buried some in the corner of the courtyard.

In 1863, fine-arts inspector general Arsène Houssaye received an imperial commission to excavate the site and discovered a partially complete skeleton with a bronze ring on one finger, white hair, and stone fragments bearing the inscriptions "EO", "AR", "DUS", and "VINC" - interpreted as forming "Leonardus Vinci". The skull's eight teeth correspond to someone of approximately the appropriate age, and a silver shield found near the bones depicts a beardless Francis I, corresponding to the king's appearance during Leonardo's time in France.

Houssaye postulated that the unusually large skull was an indicator of Leonardo's intelligence; author Charles Nicholl describes this as a "dubious phrenological deduction". At the same time, Houssaye noted some issues with his observations, including that the feet were turned toward the high altar, a practice generally reserved for laymen, and that the skeleton of 1.73 metres (5.7 ft) seemed too short.[failed verification - see discussion] Art historian Mary Margaret Heaton wrote in 1874 that the height would be appropriate for Leonardo. The skull was allegedly presented to Napoleon III before being returned to the Château d'Amboise, where they were re-interred in the chapel of Saint Hubert in 1874. A plaque above the tomb states that its contents are only presumed to be those of Leonardo.

It has since been theorised that the folding of the skeleton's right arm over the head may correspond to the paralysis of Leonardo's right hand. In 2016, it was announced that DNA tests would be conducted to determine whether the attribution is correct. The DNA of the remains will be compared to that of samples collected from Leonardo's work and his half-brother Domenico's descendants; it may also be sequenced.

In 2019, documents were published revealing that Houssaye had kept the ring and a lock of hair. In 1925, his great-grandson sold these to an American collector. Sixty years later, another American acquired them, leading to their being displayed at the Leonardo Museum in Vinci beginning on 2 May 2019, the 500th anniversary of the artist's death.

General

Dates of works

References

Early

Modern

1. ^ "A portrait of Leonardo c. 1515-18". Royal Collection Trust. Archived from the original on 23 November 2020.

2. Polidoro, Massimo (2019). "The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci, Part 1". Skeptical Inquirer. 43 (2). Center for Inquiry: 30-31.

3. ^ Franz-Joachim Verspohl, Michelangelo Buonarroti und Leonardo Da Vinci: Republikanischer Alltag und Künstlerkonkurrenz in Florenz zwischen 1501 und 1505 (Wallstein Verlag, 2007), p. 151.

4. ^ Moffitt, John F. (1990). "Leonardo's "Sala delle Asse" and the Primordial Origins of Architecture". Arte Lombarda (92/93 (1-2)). Vita e Pensiero - Pubblicazioni dell'Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore: 76-90. JSTOR 43132702. Archived from the original on 16 August 2023.

5. ^ "Mona Lisa - Heidelberg discovery confirms identity". University of Heidelberg. Archived from the original on 5 November 2013.

6. ^ Delieuvin, Vincent (15 January 2008). "Télématin". Journal Télévisé. France 2 Télévision.

7. ^ Goldscheider, Ludwig (1967). Michelangelo: paintings, sculptures, architecture. Phaidon Press. ISBN 978-0-7148-1314-1.

8. ^ "Achademia Leonardi Vinci". Journal of Leonardo Studies & Bibliography of Vinciana. VIII: 243-244. 1990.

9. ^ Laurenza, Domenico (2004). "Leonardo nella Roma di Leone X". Lettura Vinciana (in Italian). XLIII. Giunti.

10. ^ Sammer, Jan (2009). "L'Invitation du roi". In Pedretti, Carlo (ed.). Léonard de Vinci et la France (in French). CB Edizioni. pp. 29-33.

11. McMahon, Barbara (1 May 2005). "Da Vinci 'paralysis left Mona Lisa unfinished'". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 8 February 2020.

12. Bodkin, Henry (4 May 2019). "Leonardo da Vinci never finished the Mona Lisa because he injured his arm while fainting, experts say". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on 10 January 2022.

13. Charlier, Philippe; Deo, Saudamini. "A physical sign of stroke sequel on the skeleton of Leonardo da Vinci?" Archived 15 April 2017 at the Wayback Machine. Neurology. 4 April 2017; 88(14): 1381-1382

14. ^ Antonina Vallentin, Leonardo da Vinci: The Tragic Pursuit of Perfection, (New York: The Viking Press, 1938), 533

15. Pedretti, Carlo, ed. (2009). Leonardo da Vinci: l'Angelo incarnato & Salai = the Angel in the flesh & Salai. Foligno (Perugia): Cartei & Bianchi. p. 201. ISBN 978-88-95686-11-0. OCLC 500794484.

16. MacCurdy, Edward, ^ The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci (1928) in Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism Archived 27 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine

17. ^ Cartwright Ady, Julia. Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497. Publisher: J.M. Dent, 1899; Cartwright Ady, Julia. Isabella D'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, 1474-1539. Publisher; J.M. Dent, 1903.

18. ^ Seracini, Maurizio (2012). "The Secret Lives of Paintings" (lecture). Archived from the original on 18 October 2019.

19. ^ Bean, Jacob; Stampfle, Felice (1965). Drawings from New York Collections I: The Italian Renaissance. Greenwich, CT: Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp. 81-82.

20. ^ Major, Richard Henry (1866). Archaeologia: Or Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity, Volume 40, Part 1. London: The Society. pp. 15-16. Archived from the original on 23 March 2024.

21. Da Vinci, Leonardo (1960). Taylor, Pamela; Taylor, Francis Henry (eds.). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. New York: New American Library. p. x. ISBN 978-0-486-22572-2.

22. ^ Livio, Mario (2003) [2002]. The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number (First trade paperback ed.). New York City: Broadway Books. p. 136. ISBN 0-7679-0816-3. Archived from the original on 13 March 2023.

23. ^ Windsor Castle, Royal Library, sheets RL 19073v-74v and RL 19102.

24. Baucon, A. 2010. Da Vinci's ^ Paleodictyon: the fractal beauty of traces. Acta Geologica Polonica, 60(1). Accessible from the author's homepage Archived 11 May 2019 at the Wayback Machine

25. Alastair Sooke, Daily Telegraph, 28 July 2013, "Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomy of an artist" Archived 2 December 2019 at the Wayback Machine, accessed 29 July 2013.

26. ^ Masters, Roger (1998). Fortune is a River: Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli's Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-452-28090-8.

27. ^ British Library online gallery Archived 21 November 2019 at the Wayback Machine (retrieved 10 October 2013)

28. ^ Hutchings, Ian M. (15 August 2016). "Leonardo da Vinci׳s studies of friction". Wear. 360-361: 51-66. doi:10.1016/j.wear.2016.04.019. ISSN 0043-1648. Archived from the original on 12 February 2017.

29. ^ Dowson, Duncan (1 October 1977). "Men of Tribology: Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)". Journal of Lubrication Technology. 99 (4): 382-386. doi:10.1115/1.3453230. ISSN 0022-2305. Archived from the original on 23 February 2023.

30. ^ See the quotations from the following authors, in section "Fame and reputation": Vasari, Boltraffio, Castiglione, "Anonimo" Gaddiano, Berensen, Taine, Fuseli, Rio, Bortolon.

31. Marmor, Max. "The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana." ^ The Book Collector 38, no. 3 (Autumn 1989): 1-23.

32. ^ Crow, Kelly (16 November 2017). "Leonardo da Vinci Painting 'Salvator Mundi' Sells for $450.3 Million". The Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Archived from the original on 29 June 2020.

33. Leonardo da Vinci painting 'Salvator Mundi' sold for record $450.3 million, Fox News, 16 November 2017

34. Vitruvian Man is referred to as "iconic" at the following websites and many others: ^ Vitruvian Man Archived 2 October 2020 at the Wayback Machine, Fine Art Classics Archived 9 September 2017 at the Wayback Machine, Key Images in the History of Science; Curiosity and difference at the Wayback Machine (archived 30 January 2009); "The Guardian: The Real da Vinci Code" Archived 3 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine

35. Montard, Nicolas (30 April 2019). "Léonard de Vinci est-il vraiment enterré au château d'Amboise?" [Is Leonardo da Vinci really buried at the Château d'Amboise?]. Ouest-France (in French). Archived from the original on 30 April 2019.

Works cited

Books

Arasse, Daniel [in French] (1998). Leonardo da Vinci. Old Saybrook: Konecky & Konecky. ISBN 978-1-56852-198-5.

Bambach, Carmen C., ed. (2003). Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-0-300-09878-5. Archived from the original on 23 March 2024.

Bortolon, Liana (1967). The Life and Times of Leonardo. London: Paul Hamlyn.

Brown, David Alan (1998). Leonardo Da Vinci: Origins of a Genius. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-07246-4. Archived from the original on 23 March 2024.

Clark, Kenneth (1961). Leonardo da Vinci. City of Westminster: Penguin Books. OCLC 187223.

Gasca, Ana Millàn; Nicolò, Fernando; Lucertini, Mario (2004). Technological Concepts and Mathematical Models in the Evolution of Modern Engineering Systems. Birkhauser. ISBN 978-3-7643-6940-8.

Heaton, Mary Margaret (1874). Leonardo Da Vinci and His Works: Consisting of a Life of Leonardo Da Vinci. New York: Macmillan Publishers. OCLC 1706262. Archived from the original on 23 March 2024.

Isaacson, Walter (2017). Leonardo da Vinci. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-5011-3915-4. Archived from the original on 23 March 2024.

Kemp, Martin (2006) [1981]. Leonardo Da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-920778-7. Archived from the original on 23 March 2024.

Martindale, Andrew (1972). . Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-56006-8.

Nicholl, Charles (2005). Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-029681-5.

O'Malley, Charles D.; Saunders, J.B. de C.M. (1952). Leonardo on the Human Body: The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. With Translations, Emendations and a Biographical Introduction. New York: Henry Schuman.

Ottino della Chiesa, Angela (1967). The Complete Paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. Classics of the World's Great Art. Translated by Jay, Madeline. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Pedretti, Carlo (1982). Leonardo, a study in chronology and style. Cambridge: Johnson Reprint Corp. ISBN 978-0-384-45281-7.

Popham, A.E. (1946). The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-60462-8.

Richter, Jean Paul (1970). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-22572-2. volume 2: ISBN 0-486-22573-9. A reprint of the original 1883 edition Archived 28 July 2020 at the Wayback Machine

Turner, A. Richard (1993). Inventing Leonardo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-520-08938-9. Archived from the original on 23 March 2024.

Vezzosi, Alessandro (1997). Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Man. 'New Horizons' series. Translated by Bonfante-Warren, Alexandra (English translation ed.). London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-30081-7.

Wallace, Robert (1972) [1966]. The World of Leonardo: 1452-1519. New York: Time-Life Books.

Williamson, Hugh Ross (1974). Lorenzo the Magnificent. Michael Joseph. ISBN 978-0-7181-1204-2.

Journals and encyclopedia articles

Further reading

See Kemp (2003) and Bambach (2019, pp. 442-579) for extensive bibliographies

General

Works

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 - 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect.

# data[].attributes.headline
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

# data[].attributes.subject
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (Italian: [mikeˈlandʒelodilodoˈviːkoˌbwɔnarˈrɔːtisiˈmoːni]; 6 March 1475 - 18 February 1564), known as Michelangelo (), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art. Michelangelo's creative abilities and mastery in a range of artistic arenas define him as an archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and elder contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. Given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, Michelangelo is one of the best-documented artists of the 16th century. He was lauded by contemporary biographers as the most accomplished artist of his era.

Michelangelo achieved fame early; two of his best-known works, the and , were sculpted before the age of thirty. Although he did not consider himself a painter, Michelangelo created two of the most influential frescoes in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and The Last Judgment on its altar wall. His design of the Laurentian Library pioneered Mannerist architecture. At the age of 71, he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan so that the western end was finished to his design, as was the dome, with some modification, after his death.

Michelangelo was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. In fact, three biographies were published during his lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that Michelangelo's work transcended that of any artist living or dead, and was "supreme in not one art alone but in all three."

In his lifetime, Michelangelo was often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). His contemporaries often admired his terribilità-his ability to instill a sense of awe in viewers of his art. Attempts by subsequent artists to imitate the expressive physicality of Michelangelo's style contributed to the rise of Mannerism, a short-lived movement in Western art between the High Renaissance and the Baroque.

Early life, 1475-1488

Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese, known today as Caprese Michelangelo, a small town situated in Valtiberina, near Arezzo, Tuscany. For several generations, his family had been small-scale bankers in Florence; but the bank failed, and his father, Ludovico di Leonardo Buonarroti Simoni, briefly took a government post in Caprese, where Michelangelo was born. At the time of Michelangelo's birth, his father was the town's judicial administrator and or local administrator of Chiusi della Verna. Michelangelo's mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. The Buonarrotis claimed to descend from the Countess Matilde di Canossa -a claim that remains unproven, but which Michelangelo believed.

Several months after Michelangelo's birth, the family returned to Florence, where he was raised. During his mother's later prolonged illness, and after her death in 1481 (when he was six years old), Michelangelo lived with a nanny and her husband, a stonecutter, in the town of Settignano, where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. There he gained his love for marble. As Giorgio Vasari quotes him:

If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.

Apprenticeships, 1488-1492

As a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino. He showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches and seek the company of other painters.

The city of Florence was at that time Italy's greatest centre of the arts and learning. Art was sponsored by the Signoria (the town council), the merchant guilds, and wealthy patrons such as the Medici and their banking associates. The Renaissance, a renewal of Classical scholarship and the arts, had its first flowering in Florence. In the early 15th century, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, having studied the remains of Classical buildings in Rome, had created two churches, San Lorenzo's and Santo Spirito, which embodied the Classical precepts. The sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti had laboured for fifty years to create the north and east bronze doors of the Baptistry, which Michelangelo was to describe as "The Gates of Paradise". The exterior niches of the Church of Orsanmichele contained a gallery of works by the most acclaimed sculptors of Florence: Donatello, Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Nanni di Banco. The interiors of the older churches were covered with frescos (mostly in Late Medieval, but also in the Early Renaissance style), begun by Giotto and continued by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, both of whose works Michelangelo studied and copied in drawings.

During Michelangelo's childhood, a team of painters had been called from Florence to the Vatican to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Among them was Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master in fresco painting, perspective, figure drawing and portraiture who had the largest workshop in Florence. In 1488, at age 13, Michelangelo was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio. The next year, his father persuaded Ghirlandaio to pay Michelangelo as an artist, which was rare for someone of fourteen. When in 1489, Lorenzo de' Medici, de facto ruler of Florence, asked Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils, Ghirlandaio sent Michelangelo and Francesco Granacci.

From 1490 to 1492, Michelangelo attended the Platonic Academy, a Humanist academy founded by the Medici. There, his work and outlook were influenced by many of the most prominent philosophers and writers of the day, including Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Poliziano. At this time, Michelangelo sculpted the reliefs Madonna of the Stairs (1490-1492) and Battle of the Centaurs (1491-1492), the latter based on a theme suggested by Poliziano and commissioned by Lorenzo de' Medici. Michelangelo worked for a time with the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni. When he was seventeen, another pupil, Pietro Torrigiano, struck him on the nose, causing the disfigurement that is conspicuous in the portraits of Michelangelo.

Bologna, Florence, and Rome, 1492-1499

Lorenzo de' Medici's death on 8 April 1492 brought a reversal of Michelangelo's circumstances. Michelangelo left the security of the Medici court and returned to his father's house. In the following months he carved a polychrome wooden (1493), as a gift to the prior of the Florentine church of Santo Spirito, which had allowed him to do some anatomical studies of the corpses from the church's hospital. This was the first of several instances during his career that Michelangelo studied anatomy by dissecting cadavers.

Between 1493 and 1494, he bought a block of marble, and carved a larger-than-life statue of Hercules, which was sent to France and subsequently disappeared sometime in the 18th century. On 20 January 1494, after heavy snowfalls, Lorenzo's heir, Piero de Medici, commissioned a statue made of snow, and Michelangelo again entered the court of the Medici.

In the same year, the Medici were expelled from Florence as the result of the rise of Savonarola. Michelangelo left the city before the end of the political upheaval, moving to Venice and then to Bologna. In Bologna, he was commissioned to carve several of the last small figures for the completion of the Shrine of St. Dominic, in the church dedicated to that saint. At this time Michelangelo studied the robust reliefs carved by Jacopo della Quercia around the main portal of the Basilica of St Petronius, including the panel of The Creation of Eve, the composition of which was to reappear on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Towards the end of 1495, the political situation in Florence was calmer; the city, previously under threat from the French, was no longer in danger as Charles VIII had suffered defeats. Michelangelo returned to Florence but received no commissions from the new city government under Savonarola. He returned to the employment of the Medici. During the half-year he spent in Florence, he worked on two small statues, a child St. John the Baptist and a sleeping . According to Condivi, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, for whom Michelangelo had sculpted St. John the Baptist, asked that Michelangelo "fix it so that it looked as if it had been buried" so he could "send it to Rome ... pass [it off as] an ancient work and ... sell it much better." Both Lorenzo and Michelangelo were unwittingly cheated out of the real value of the piece by a middleman. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, to whom Lorenzo had sold it, discovered that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome. This apparent success in selling his sculpture abroad as well as the conservative Florentine situation may have encouraged Michelangelo to accept the prelate's invitation.

Michelangelo arrived in Rome on 25 June 1496 at the age of 21. On 4 July of the same year, he began work on a commission for Cardinal Riario, an over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god . Upon completion, the work was rejected by the cardinal, and subsequently entered the collection of the banker Jacopo Galli, for his garden.

In November 1497, the French ambassador to the Holy See, Cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas, commissioned him to carve a , a sculpture showing the Virgin Mary grieving over the body of Jesus. The subject, which is not part of the Biblical narrative of the Crucifixion, was common in religious sculpture of Medieval Northern Europe and would have been very familiar to the Cardinal. The contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. Michelangelo was 24 at the time of its completion. It was soon to be regarded as one of the world's great masterpieces of sculpture, "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture". Contemporary opinion was summarised by Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh." It is now located in St Peter's Basilica.

Florence, 1499-1505

Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499. The Republic was changing after the fall of its leader, anti-Renaissance priest Girolamo Savonarola, who was executed in 1498, and the rise of the gonfaloniere Piero Soderini. Michelangelo was asked by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun 40 years earlier by Agostino di Duccio: a colossal statue of Carrara marble portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom to be placed on the gable of Florence Cathedral. Michelangelo responded by completing his most famous work, the statue of , in 1504. The masterwork definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination. A team of consultants, including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Antonio and Giuliano da Sangallo, Andrea della Robbia, Cosimo Rosselli, Davide Ghirlandaio, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea Sansovino and Michelangelo's dear friend Francesco Granacci, was called together to decide upon its placement, ultimately the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. It now stands in the Academia while a replica occupies its place in the square. In the same period of placing the David, Michelangelo may have been involved in creating the sculptural profile on Palazzo Vecchio's façade known as the Importuno di Michelangelo. The hypothesis on Michelangelo's possible involvement in the creation of the profile is based on the strong resemblance of the latter to a profile drawn by the artist, datable to the beginning of the 16th century, now preserved in the Louvre.

With the completion of the David came another commission. In early 1504 Leonardo da Vinci had been commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the council chamber of the Palazzo Vecchio, depicting the battle between Florence and Milan in 1440. Michelangelo was then commissioned to paint the Battle of Cascina. The two paintings are very different: Leonardo depicts soldiers fighting on horseback, while Michelangelo has soldiers being ambushed as they bathe in the river. Neither work was completed and both were lost forever when the chamber was refurbished. Both works were much admired, and copies remain of them, Leonardo's work having been copied by Rubens and Michelangelo's by Bastiano da Sangallo.

Also during this period, Michelangelo was commissioned by Angelo Doni to paint a " Holy Family" as a present for his wife, Maddalena Strozzi. It is known as the and hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in its original magnificent frame, which Michelangelo may have designed. He also may have painted the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, known as the Manchester Madonna and now in the National Gallery, London.

Tomb of Julius II, 1505-1545

Michelangelo's second design for the monument of Pope Julius II

In 1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II and commissioned to build the Pope's tomb, which was to include forty statues and be finished in five years. Under the patronage of the pope, Michelangelo experienced constant interruptions to his work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks.

The commission for the tomb forced the artist to leave Florence with his planned Battle of Cascina painting unfinished. By this time, Michelangelo was established as an artist; both he and Julius II had hot tempers and soon argued. On 17 April 1506, Michelangelo left Rome in secret for Florence, remaining there until the Florentine government pressed him to return to the pope.

Although Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years, it was never finished to his satisfaction. It is located in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and is most famous for the central figure of Moses, completed in 1516. Of the other statues intended for the tomb, two, known as the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Slave, are now in the Louvre.

Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508 -1512

Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; the work took approximately four years to complete (1508-1512).

During the same period, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508-1512). According to Condivi's account, Bramante, who was working on the building of St. Peter's Basilica, resented Michelangelo's commission for the pope's tomb and convinced the pope to commission him in a medium with which he was unfamiliar, in order that he might fail at the task. Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the Twelve Apostles on the triangular pendentives that supported the ceiling, and to cover the central part of the ceiling with ornament. Michelangelo persuaded Pope Julius II to give him a free hand and proposed a different and more complex scheme, representing the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Promise of Salvation through the prophets, and the genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel that represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

The composition stretches over 500 square metres of ceiling and contains over 300 figures. At its centre are nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, divided into three groups: God's creation of the earth; God's creation of humankind and their fall from God's grace; and lastly, the state of humanity as represented by Noah and his family. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling are painted twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of Jesus, seven prophets of Israel, and five Sibyls, prophetic women of the Classical world. Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are The Creation of Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Deluge, the Prophet Jeremiah, and the Cumaean Sibyl.

Florence under Medici popes, 1513 - early 1534

In 1513, Pope Julius II died and was succeeded by Pope Leo X, the second son of Lorenzo de' Medici. From 1513 to 1516, Pope Leo was on good terms with Pope Julius's surviving relatives, so encouraged Michelangelo to continue work on Julius's tomb, but the families became enemies again in 1516 when Pope Leo tried to seize the Duchy of Urbino from Julius's nephew Francesco Maria I della Rovere. Pope Leo then had Michelangelo stop working on the tomb, and commissioned him to reconstruct the façade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. He spent three years creating drawings and models for the façade, as well as attempting to open a new marble quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the project. In 1520, the work was abruptly cancelled by his financially strapped patrons before any real progress had been made. The basilica lacks a façade to this day.

In 1520, the Medici came back to Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this time for a family funerary chapel in the Basilica of San Lorenzo. For posterity, this project, occupying the artist for much of the 1520s and 1530s, was more fully realised. Michelangelo used his own discretion to create the composition of the Medici Chapel, which houses the large tombs of two of the younger members of the Medici family, Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and Lorenzo, his nephew. It also serves to commemorate their more famous predecessors, Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, who are buried nearby. The tombs display statues of the two Medici and allegorical figures representing and , and and . The chapel also contains Michelangelo's Medici Madonna. In 1976, a concealed corridor was discovered with drawings on the walls that related to the chapel itself.

Pope Leo X died in 1521 and was succeeded briefly by the austere Adrian VI, and then by his cousin Giulio Medici as Pope Clement VII. In 1524, Michelangelo received an architectural commission from the Medici pope for the Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo's Church. He designed both the interior of the library itself and its vestibule, a building utilising architectural forms with such dynamic effect that it is seen as the forerunner of Baroque architecture. It was left to assistants to interpret his plans and carry out construction. The library was not opened until 1571, and the vestibule remained incomplete until 1904.

In 1527, Florentine citizens, encouraged by the sack of Rome, threw out the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530, and the Medici were restored to power. Michelangelo fell out of favour with the young Alessandro Medici, who had been installed as the first Duke of Florence. Fearing for his life, he fled to Rome, leaving assistants to complete the Medici chapel and the Laurentian Library. Despite Michelangelo's support of the republic and resistance to the Medici rule, he was welcomed by Pope Clement, who reinstated an allowance that he had previously granted the artist and made a new contract with him over the tomb of Pope Julius.

Rome, 1534-1546

In Rome, Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto. It was at this time that he met the poet Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara, who was to become one of his closest friends until her death in 1547.

Shortly before his death in 1534, Pope Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint a fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. His successor, Pope Paul III, was instrumental in seeing that Michelangelo began and completed the project, which he laboured on from 1534 to October 1541. The fresco depicts the Second Coming of Christ and his Judgement of the souls. Michelangelo ignored the usual artistic conventions in portraying Jesus, showing him as a massive, muscular figure, youthful, beardless and naked. He is surrounded by saints, among whom Saint Bartholomew holds a drooping flayed skin, bearing the likeness of Michelangelo. The dead rise from their graves, to be consigned either to Heaven or to Hell.

Once completed, the depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary naked was considered sacrilegious, and Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini ( Mantua's ambassador) campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the Pope resisted. At the Council of Trent, shortly before Michelangelo's death in 1564, it was decided to obscure the genitals and Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, was commissioned to make the alterations. An uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, is in the Capodimonte Museum of Naples.

Michelangelo worked on a number of architectural projects at this time. They included a design for the Capitoline Hill with its trapezoid piazza displaying the ancient bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius. He designed the upper floor of the Palazzo Farnese and the interior of the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in which he transformed the vaulted interior of an Ancient Roman bathhouse. Other architectural works include San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the Sforza Chapel (Capella Sforza) in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore and the Porta Pia.

St Peter's Basilica, 1546-1564

The dome of St Peter's Basilica

While still working on the Last Judgment, Michelangelo received yet another commission for the Vatican. This was for the painting of two large frescos in the Cappella Paolina depicting significant events in the lives of the two most important saints of Rome, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Like the Last Judgment, these two works are complex compositions containing a great number of figures. They were completed in 1550. In the same year, Giorgio Vasari published his , including a biography of Michelangelo.

In 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica, Rome. The process of replacing the Constantinian basilica of the 4th century had been underway for fifty years and in 1506 foundations had been laid to the plans of Bramante. Successive architects had worked on it, but little progress had been made. Michelangelo was persuaded to take over the project. He returned to the concepts of Bramante, and developed his ideas for a centrally planned church, strengthening the structure both physically and visually. The dome, not completed until after his death, has been called by Banister Fletcher, "the greatest creation of the Renaissance".

As construction was progressing on St Peter's, there was concern that Michelangelo would pass away before the dome was finished. However, once building commenced on the lower part of the dome, the supporting ring, the completion of the design was inevitable.

On 7 December 2007, a red chalk sketch for the dome of St Peter's Basilica, possibly the last made by Michelangelo before his death, was discovered in the Vatican archives. It is extremely rare, since he destroyed his designs later in life. The sketch is a partial plan for one of the radial columns of the cupola drum of St Peter's.

Personal life

Ignudo fresco from 1509 on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

Speculation exists that this may be a drawing by Michelangelo that might portray Tommaso dei Cavalieri[77][78]

Michelangelo was a devout Catholic whose faith deepened at the end of his life. His poetry includes the following closing lines from what is known as poem 285 (written in 1554): "Neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer to calm my soul, now turned toward that divine love that opened his arms on the cross to take us in."

Personal habits

Michelangelo was abstemious in his personal life, and once told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man." Michelangelo's bank accounts and numerous deeds of purchase show that his net worth was about 50,000 gold ducats, more than many princes and dukes of his time. Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure" and that he "often slept in his clothes and ... boots." His biographer Paolo Giovio says, "His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him." This, however, may not have affected him, as he was by nature a solitary and melancholy person, bizzarro e fantastico, a man who "withdrew himself from the company of men."

Relationships and poetry

Love for a lady's different. Not much
in that for a wise and virile lover's trouble.

-  translation of Michelangelo work by John Frederick Nim

It is impossible to know whether Michelangelo had any physical relationships ( Condivi ascribed to him a "monk-like chastity"). Speculation about his sexuality is rooted in his poetry. He wrote more than three hundred sonnets and madrigals. The longest sequence, displaying deep loving feeling, was written to the young Roman patrician Tommaso dei Cavalieri ( c. 1509-1587), who was 23 years old when Michelangelo first met him in 1532, at the age of 57. The Florentine Benedetto Varchi fifteen years later described Cavalieri as of "incomparable beauty", with "graceful manners, so excellent an endowment and so charming a demeanour that he indeed deserved, and still deserves, the more to be loved the better he is known". In his " Lives of the Artists", Giorgio Vasari observed: "But infinitely more than any of the others he loved M. Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a Roman gentleman, for whom, being a young man and much inclined to these arts, [Michelangelo] made, to the end that he might learn to draw, many most superb drawings of divinely beautiful heads, designed in black and red chalk; and then he drew for him a Ganymede rapt to Heaven by Jove's Eagle, a Tityus with the Vulture devouring his heart, the Chariot of the Sun falling with Phaëthon into the Po, and a Bacchanal of children, which are all in themselves most rare things, and drawings the like of which have never been seen." Scholars agree that Michelangelo became infatuated with Cavalieri. The poems to Cavalieri make up the first large sequence of poems in any modern tongue addressed by one man to another; they predate by 50 years Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair youth:

I feel as lit by fire a cold countenance
That burns me from afar and keeps itself ice-chill;
A strength I feel two shapely arms to fill
Which without motion moves every balance.

-  translation of Michelangelo work by Michael Sullivan

Cavalieri replied: "I swear to return your love. Never have I loved a man more than I love you, never have I wished for a friendship more than I wish for yours." Cavalieri remained devoted to Michelangelo until his death.

In 1542, Michelangelo met Cecchino dei Bracci who died only a year later, inspiring Michelangelo to write 48 funeral epigrams. Some of the objects of Michelangelo's affections, and subjects of his poetry, took advantage of him: the model Febo di Poggio asked for money in response to a love-poem, and a second model, Gherardo Perini, shamelessly stole from him.

The homoerotic nature of the poetry has been a source of discomfort to later generations. Michelangelo's grandnephew, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger, published the poems in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed, and it was not until John Addington Symonds translated them into English in 1893 that the original genders were restored. In modern times some scholars insist that, despite the restoration of the pronouns, they represent "an emotionless and elegant re-imagining of Platonic dialogue, whereby erotic poetry was seen as an expression of refined sensibilities", but others read his poems at face value, suggesting a preference by him for young men over women.

Late in life, Michelangelo nurtured a great platonic love for the poet and noble widow Vittoria Colonna, whom he met in Rome in 1536 or 1538 and who was in her late forties at the time. They wrote sonnets for each other and were in regular contact until she died. These sonnets mostly deal with the spiritual issues that occupied them. Condivi recalls Michelangelo's saying that his sole regret in life was that he did not kiss the widow's face in the same manner that he had her hand.

Feuds with other artists

In a letter from late 1542, Michelangelo blamed the tensions between Julius II and him on the envy of Bramante and Raphael, saying of the latter, "all he had in art, he got from me". According to Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Michelangelo and Raphael met once: the former was alone, while the latter was accompanied by several others. Michelangelo commented that he thought he had encountered the chief of police with such an assemblage, and Raphael replied that he thought he had met an executioner, as they are wont to walk alone.

Madonna and Child

The Madonna of the Stairs is Michelangelo's earliest known work in marble. It is carved in shallow relief, a technique often employed by the master-sculptor of the early 15th century, Donatello, and others such as Desiderio da Settignano. While the Madonna is in profile, the easiest aspect for a shallow relief, the child displays a twisting motion that was to become characteristic of Michelangelo's work. The Taddei Tondo of 1502 shows the Christ Child frightened by a Bullfinch, a symbol of the Crucifixion. The lively form of the child was later adapted by Raphael in the Bridgewater Madonna. The Madonna of Bruges was, at the time of its creation, unlike other such statues depicting the Virgin proudly presenting her son. Here, the Christ Child, restrained by his mother's clasping hand, is about to step off into the world. The , depicting the Holy Family, has elements of all three previous works: the frieze of figures in the background has the appearance of a low-relief, while the circular shape and dynamic forms echo the Taddeo Tondo. The twisting motion present in the Madonna of Bruges is accentuated in the painting. The painting heralds the forms, movement and colour that Michelangelo was to employ on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Male figure

The kneeling is an early work, one of several that Michelangelo created as part of a large decorative scheme for the Arca di San Domenico in the church dedicated to that saint in Bologna. Several other artists had worked on the scheme, beginning with Nicola Pisano in the 13th century. In the late 15th century, the project was managed by Niccolò dell'Arca. An angel holding a candlestick, by Niccolò, was already in place. Although the two angels form a pair, there is a great contrast between the two works, the one depicting a delicate child with flowing hair clothed in Gothic robes with deep folds, and Michelangelo's depicting a robust and muscular youth with eagle's wings, clad in a garment of Classical style. Everything about Michelangelo's Angel is dynamic. Michelangelo's was a commission with a specified subject, the youthful God of Wine. The sculpture has all the traditional attributes, a vine wreath, a cup of wine and a fawn, but Michelangelo ingested an air of reality into the subject, depicting him with bleary eyes, a swollen bladder and a stance that suggests he is unsteady on his feet. While the work is plainly inspired by Classical sculpture, it is innovative for its rotating movement and strongly three-dimensional quality, which encourages the viewer to look at it from every angle.

In the so-called Dying Slave, Michelangelo again utilised the figure with marked contrapposto to suggest a particular human state, in this case waking from sleep. With the Rebellious Slave, it is one of two such earlier figures for the Tomb of Pope Julius II, now in the Louvre, that the sculptor brought to an almost finished state. These two works were to have a profound influence on later sculpture, through Rodin who studied them at the Louvre. TheAtlas Slave is one of the later figures for Pope Julius' tomb. The works, known collectively as The Captives, each show the figure struggling to free itself, as if from the bonds of the rock in which it is lodged. The works give a unique insight into the sculptural methods that Michelangelo employed and his way of revealing what he perceived within the rock.

Sistine Chapel ceiling

The Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted between 1508 and 1512. The ceiling is a flattened barrel vault supported on twelve triangular pendentives that rise from between the windows of the chapel. The commission, as envisaged by Pope Julius II, was to adorn the pendentives with figures of the twelve apostles. Michelangelo, who was reluctant to take the job, persuaded the Pope to give him a free hand in the composition. The resultant scheme of decoration awed his contemporaries and has inspired other artists ever since. The scheme is of nine panels illustrating episodes from the Book of Genesis, set in an architectonic frame. On the pendentives, Michelangelo replaced the proposed Apostles with Prophets and Sibyls who heralded the coming of the Messiah.

The Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1508-1512)

Michelangelo began painting with the later episodes in the narrative, the pictures including locational details and groups of figures, the Drunkenness of Noah being the first of this group. In the later compositions, painted after the initial scaffolding had been removed, Michelangelo made the figures larger. One of the central images, The Creation of Adam is one of the best known and most reproduced works in the history of art. The final panel, showing the Separation of Light from Darkness is the broadest in style and was painted in a single day. As the model for the Creator, Michelangelo has depicted himself in the action of painting the ceiling.

As supporters to the smaller scenes, Michelangelo painted twenty youths who have variously been interpreted as angels, as muses, or simply as decoration. Michelangelo referred to them as "ignudi". The figure reproduced may be seen in context in the above image of the Separation of Light from Darkness. In the process of painting the ceiling, Michelangelo made studies for different figures, of which some, such as that for The Libyan Sibyl have survived, demonstrating the care taken by Michelangelo in details such as the hands and feet. The Prophet Jeremiah, contemplating the downfall of Jerusalem, is a self-portrait.

Figure compositions

Michelangelo's relief of the Battle of the Centaurs, created while he was still a youth associated with the Medici Academy, is an unusually complex relief in that it shows a great number of figures involved in a vigorous struggle. Such a complex disarray of figures was rare in Florentine art, where it would usually only be found in images showing either the Massacre of the Innocents or the Torments of Hell. The relief treatment, in which some of the figures are boldly projecting, may indicate Michelangelo's familiarity with Roman sarcophagus reliefs from the collection of Lorenzo Medici, and similar marble panels created by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, and with the figurative compositions on Ghiberti's Baptistry Doors.[citation needed ]

The composition of the Battle of Cascina is known in its entirety only from copies, as the original cartoon, according to Vasari, was so admired that it deteriorated and was eventually in pieces. It reflects the earlier relief in the energy and diversity of the figures, with many different postures, and many being viewed from the back, as they turn towards the approaching enemy and prepare for battle.[citation needed ]

In The Last Judgment it is said that Michelangelo drew inspiration from a fresco by Melozzo da Forlì in Rome's Santi Apostoli. Melozzo had depicted figures from different angles, as if they were floating in the Heaven and seen from below. Melozzo's majestic figure of Christ, with windblown cloak, demonstrates a degree of foreshortening of the figure that had also been employed by Andrea Mantegna, but was not usual in the frescos of Florentine painters. In The Last Judgment Michelangelo had the opportunity to depict, on an unprecedented scale, figures in the action of either rising heavenward or falling and being dragged down.[citation needed ]

In the two frescos of the Pauline Chapel, The Crucifixion of St. Peter and The Conversion of Saul, Michelangelo has used the various groups of figures to convey a complex narrative. In the Crucifixion of Peter soldiers busy themselves about their assigned duty of digging a post hole and raising the cross while various people look on and discuss the events. A group of horrified women cluster in the foreground, while another group of Christians is led by a tall man to witness the events. In the right foreground, Michelangelo walks out of the painting with an expression of disillusionment.[citation needed ]

Architecture

Michelangelo's architectural commissions included a number that were not realised, notably the façade for Brunelleschi's Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, for which Michelangelo had a wooden model constructed, but which remains to this day unfinished rough brick. At the same church, Giulio de' Medici (later Pope Clement VII) commissioned him to design the Medici Chapel and the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo Medici. Pope Clement also commissioned the Laurentian Library, for which Michelangelo also designed the extraordinary vestibule with columns recessed into niches, and a staircase that appears to spill out of the library like a flow of lava, according to Nikolaus Pevsner, "... revealing Mannerism in its most sublime architectural form."

In 1546 Michelangelo produced the highly complex ovoid design for the pavement of the Campidoglio and began designing an upper storey for the Farnese Palace. In 1547 he took on the job of completing St Peter's Basilica, begun to a design by Bramante, and with several intermediate designs by several architects. Michelangelo returned to Bramante's design, retaining the basic form and concepts by simplifying and strengthening the design to create a more dynamic and unified whole. Although the late 16th-century engraving depicts the dome as having a hemispherical profile, the dome of Michelangelo's model is somewhat ovoid and the final product, as completed by Giacomo della Porta, is more so.

Final years

In his old age, Michelangelo created a number of Pietàs in which he apparently reflects upon mortality. They are heralded by the , perhaps created for the tomb of Pope Julius II but left unfinished. In this group, the youthful victor overcomes an older hooded figure, with the features of Michelangelo.

The Pietà of Vittoria Colonna is a chalk drawing of a type described as "presentation drawings", as they might be given as a gift by an artist, and were not necessarily studies towards a painted work. In this image, Mary's upraised arms and hands are indicative of her prophetic role. The frontal aspect is reminiscent of Masaccio's fresco of the Holy Trinity in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

In the Florentine Pietà, Michelangelo again depicts himself, this time as the aged Nicodemus lowering the body of Jesus from the cross into the arms of Mary his mother and Mary Magdalene. Michelangelo smashed the left arm and leg of the figure of Jesus. His pupil Tiberio Calcagni repaired the arm and drilled a hole in which to fix a replacement leg which was not subsequently attached. He also worked on the figure of Mary Magdalene.

The last sculpture that Michelangelo worked on (six days before his death), the Rondanini Pietà could never be completed because Michelangelo carved it away until there was insufficient stone. The legs and a detached arm remain from a previous stage of the work. As it remains, the sculpture has an abstract quality, in keeping with 20th-century concepts of sculpture.

Michelangelo died in Rome on 18 February 1564, at the age of 88 (three weeks before his 89th birthday). His body was taken from Rome for interment at the Basilica of Santa Croce, fulfilling the maestro's last request to be buried in his beloved Florence.

Michelangelo's heir Lionardo Buonarroti commissioned Giorgio Vasari to design and build the Tomb of Michelangelo, a monumental project that cost 770 scudi, and took over 14 years to complete. Marble for the tomb was supplied by Cosimo I de' Medici, Duke of Tuscany who had also organized a state funeral to honour Michelangelo in Florence.

Tomb of Michelangelo (1578) by Giorgio Vasari in the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence

Michelangelo, with Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, is one of the three giants of the Florentine High Renaissance. Although their names are often cited together, Michelangelo was younger than Leonardo by 23 years, and older than Raphael by eight. Because of his reclusive nature, he had little to do with either artist and outlived both of them by more than forty years.[citation needed ] Michelangelo took few sculpture students. He employed Francesco Granacci, who was his fellow pupil at the Medici Academy, and became one of several assistants on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo appears to have used assistants mainly for the more manual tasks of preparing surfaces and grinding colours. Despite this, his works were to have a great influence on painters, sculptors and architects for many generations to come.

While Michelangelo's David is the most famous male nude of all time and now graces cities around the world, some of his other works have had perhaps even greater impact on the course of art. The twisting forms and tensions of the Victory, the Bruges Madonna and the Medici Madonna make them the heralds of the Mannerist art. The unfinished giants for the tomb of Pope Julius II had profound effect on late-19th- and 20th-century sculptors such as Rodin and Henry Moore.

Michelangelo's foyer of the Laurentian Library was one of the earliest buildings to utilise Classical forms in a plastic and expressive manner. This dynamic quality was later to find its major expression in his centrally planned St Peter's, with its giant order, its rippling cornice and its upward-launching pointed dome. The dome of St Peter's was to influence the building of churches for many centuries, including Sant'Andrea della Valle in Rome and St Paul's Cathedral, London, as well as the civic domes of many public buildings and the state capitals across America.

Artists who were directly influenced by Michelangelo include Raphael, whose monumental treatment of the figure in the School of Athens and The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple owes much to Michelangelo, and whose fresco of in Sant'Agostino closely imitates the older master's prophets. Other artists, such as Pontormo, drew on the writhing forms of the Last Judgment and the frescoes of the Capella Paolina.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling was a work of unprecedented grandeur, both for its architectonic forms, to be imitated by many Baroque ceiling painters, and also for the wealth of its inventiveness in the study of figures. Vasari wrote:

The work has proved a veritable beacon to our art, of inestimable benefit to all painters, restoring light to a world that for centuries had been plunged into darkness. Indeed, painters no longer need to seek for new inventions, novel attitudes, clothed figures, fresh ways of expression, different arrangements, or sublime subjects, for this work contains every perfection possible under those headings.

In popular culture

a. Michelangelo's father marks the date as 6 March 1474 in the Florentine manner ab Incarnatione. However, in the Roman manner, ab Nativitate, it is 1475.

b. Sources disagree as to how old Michelangelo was when he departed for school. De Tolnay writes that it was at ten years old while Sedgwick notes in her translation of Condivi that Michelangelo was seven.

c. The Strozzi family acquired the sculpture Hercules. Filippo Strozzi sold it to Francis I in 1529. In 1594, Henry IV installed it in the Jardin d'Estang at Fontainebleau where it disappeared in 1713 when the Jardin d'Estange was destroyed.

d. Vasari makes no mention of this episode and Paolo Giovio's Life of Michelangelo indicates that Michelangelo tried to pass the statue off as an antique himself.

References

Bartz, Gabriele; Eberhard König (1998). Michelangelo. Könemann. ISBN 978-3-8290-0253-0.

Clément, Charles (1892). Michelangelo. Harvard University: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, ltd.: London. michelangelo.

Condivi, Ascanio; Alice Sedgewick (1553). The Life of Michelangelo. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 978-0-271-01853-9.

Goldscheider, Ludwig (1953). Michelangelo: Paintings, Sculptures, Architecture. Phaidon.

Goldscheider, Ludwig (1953). Michelangelo: Drawings. Phaidon.

Gardner, Helen; Fred S. Kleiner, Christin J. Mamiya, Gardner's Art through the Ages. Thomson Wadsworth, (2004) ISBN 0-15-505090-7.

Hirst, Michael and Jill Dunkerton. (1994) The Young Michelangelo: The Artist in Rome 1496-1501. London: National Gallery Publications, ISBN 1-85709-066-7

Liebert, Robert (1983). Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study of his Life and Images. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-02793-8.

Paoletti, John T. and Radke, Gary M., (2005) Art in Renaissance Italy, Laurence King, ISBN 1-85669-439-9

Tolnay, Charles (1947). The Youth of Michelangelo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Further reading

Barenboim, Peter (with Shiyan, Sergey). Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel: Genius in Details (in English & Russian), LOOM, Moscow, 2011. ISBN 978-5-9903067-1-4

Barenboim, Peter (with Heath, Arthur). Michelangelo's Moment: The British Museum Madonna, LOOM, Moscow, 2018.

Barenboim, Peter (with Heath, Arthur). 500 years of the New Sacristy: Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel, LOOM, Moscow, 2019. ISBN 978-5-906072-42-9

Carden, Robert W. (1913). Michelangelo: A Record of His Life as Told in His Own Letters and Papers. Constable and Company Ltd., London; reprinted by Legare Street Press, 2021.

Colvin, Sidney (1911). "Michelangelo" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 18 (11th ed.). pp. 362-369.

Einem, Herbert von (1973). Michelangelo. Trans. Ronald Taylor. London: Methuen.

Gayford, Martin (2013). Michelangelo: His Epic Life. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-141-93225-5.

Gilbert, Creighton (1994). Michelangelo: On and Off the Sistine Ceiling. New York: George Braziller.

Hartt, Frederick (1987). David by the Hand of Michelangelo-the Original Model Discovered, Abbeville, ISBN 0-89659-761-X

Hibbard, Howard (1974). Michelangelo. New York: Harper & Row.

Pietrangeli, Carlo, et al. (1994). The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration. New York: Harry N. Abrams

Ryan, Chris (2000). "Poems for Tommaso Cavalieri, Poems for Vittoria Colonna". The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 94-154. ISBN 9780567012012.

Sala, Charles (1996). Michelangelo: Sculptor, Painter, Architect. Editions Pierre Terrail. ISBN 978-2-87939-069-7.

Saslow, James M. (1991). The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Seymour, Charles, Jr. (1972). Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling. New York: W.W. Norton.

Stone, Irving (1987). The Agony and the Ecstasy. Signet. ISBN 978-0-451-17135-1. Fictional biography.

Summers, David (1981). Michelangelo and the Language of Art. Princeton University Press.

Symonds, John Addington (1893). The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, John C. Nimmo; reprinted by The Modern Library, Random House, 1927.

Tolnay, Charles de. (1964). The Art and Thought of Michelangelo. 5 vols. New York: Pantheon Books.

Wallace, William E. (2019). Michelangelo, God's Architect: The Story of His Final Years and Greatest Masterpiece. Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-19549-0

Wilde, Johannes (1978). Michelangelo: Six Lectures. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (Italian: [mikeˈlandʒelodilodoˈviːkoˌbwɔnarˈrɔːtisiˈmoːni]; 6 March 1475 - 18 February 1564), known as Michelangelo (), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Jiří Trnka (none [ˈjɪr̝iːˈtr̩ŋka]; 24 February 1912 - 30 December 1969) was a Czechoslovak puppet-maker, illustrator, motion-picture animator and film director.

In addition to his extensive career as an illustrator, especially of children's books, he is best known for his work in animation with puppets, which began in 1946. Most of his films were intended for adults and many were adaptations of literary works. Because of his influence in animation, he was called "the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe", despite the great differences between their works. He received the international Hans Christian Andersen Medal for illustrators in 1968, recognizing his career contribution to children's literature.

Jiří Trnka was born in Plzeň, in western Bohemia, where the family lived as middle class citizens. Although his father was a plumber and his mother a dressmaker, both remained very close to their peasant origins. As a child, young Jiří enjoyed sculpting puppets made of wood and put on small shows for friends.

He later attended classes at a vocational school in his hometown, where he met his teacher Josef Skupa, who eventually would become a leading public figure in the world of Czech puppeteers. Skupa was his mentor, entrusted Trnka with certain responsibilities, and managed to convince his family, who were initially reluctant, to allow him to enroll at the prestigious School of Applied Arts in Prague, where he completed his apprenticeship between 1929 and 1935.

With the training received in the school of arts and his experience working in a printmaking workshop, Trnka embarked upon a successful career as an illustrator. He was hired by the Prague publishing house Melantrich, and his first illustrated work was Tygr pana Boška ( The Tiger of Mr. Bošek) by Vítězslav Šmejc, published in 1937.

From then on, Trnka illustrated numerous children's books. During his life he illustrated 130 works of literature, most of them for children. Especially famous are his illustrations for the tales of the Brothers Grimm, and collections of folktales from Czech authors such as Jiří Horák and Jan Páleníček. Also drawing upon his native folklore are his illustrations for Bajaja by Vladimír Holan, published in 1955, which proved to be the starting point for his future work in animation. In addition to these, Trnka illustrated the tales of Andersen and Perrault, the fables of La Fontaine, The Thousand and One Nights, several works of Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (unfinished).

In some cases his work as illustrator generated his ideas for making animated films, as happened with Bajaja and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Trnka also created some children's books as writer and illustrator, for example Through the Magic Gate, published in 1962 in London.

The biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award conferred by the International Board on Books for Young People is the highest recognition available for a writer or illustrator of children's books. Trnka received the Illustrator award in 1968 for his lasting contribution. He also taught: his pupils included Daniela Havlíčková.

After graduating from the Prague School of Arts and Crafts, Trnka created a puppet theater in 1936. This group was dissolved when World War II began, and he instead designed stage sets and illustrated books for children throughout the war. Several years later, at the end of World War II, he founded with Eduard Hofman and Jiří Brdečka the animation studio . He began his activity in the study of animation by making some 2D animated short films: Zasadil dědek řepu ( Grandfather Planted a Beet, 1945); Zvířátka a Petrovští ( Animals and Bandits, 1946), which was awarded at the 1st Cannes Film Festival, just one year after he had begun working in films, , an anti-Nazi film, and Dárek ( The Gift, 1946), a satire on the values of the middle class in a style echoing surrealism. Despite his early success, Trnka did not feel comfortable with traditional animation, which in his opinion required too many intermediaries that prevented him from freely expressing his creativity. In the fall of 1946 he first considered puppet animation films, and began to experiment with the help of Břetislav Pojar.

The result was his first feature puppet film in a cycle Špalíček (The Czech Year, 1947), based on a book illustrated by Mikoláš Aleš. The cycle consists of six short films, which put on stage the legends and customs of his country: Carnival ( Masopust), spring (Jaro), the legend of St. Procopius ( Legenda or svatém Prokopu), the procession ( Pouť), party in the village ( Posvícení) and Bethlehem ( Betlém). The film attracted international attention to Czech animation and gained awards at many festivals, including the Venice Film Festival.

From 1948, the studios of Trnka began to receive subsidies from the government. The next film they produced was ( The Emperor's Nightingale, 1949), based on the 1843 fairy tale "The Nightingale" by Hans Christian Andersen. Unlike the previous, it is a real feature film with one single storyline. The movie also includes real actors (two children, Helena Patrocková and Jaromir Sobota), although only in the prologue that precedes the story itself. The puppets and sets are significantly different from the previous film, given the setting of an idealized imperial China. also won numerous awards at international festivals across Europe and the United States.

During 1949, Trnka also made three short films with animated puppets: Román s basou ( Story of a Bass, or Novel with Bass), adapted from a story by Anton Chekhov; Čertův mlýn ( The Devil's Mill), based on a Czech fairy-tale, and Arie prérie ( Song of the Prairie), a western parody loosely based on Stagecoach (known in Trnka's country as The Diligence) by John Ford.

The following year he produced his third feature animation with puppets, ( The Prince Bayaya, 1950), based on two stories by writer . Set in a fantastical medieval time, it is the story of a farmer who succeeds in becoming a knight, defeats a dragon, and wins the love of a princess.

During the first half of the next decade, Trnka experimented with new techniques in his short animations. He returned to the cartoon O zlaté rybce ( The Golden Fish, 1951), and animated shadow puppets in Dva mrazíci (1953). In Veselý Circus ( The Merry Circus, 1951) he used a technique that involved stop-motion with two-dimensional paper cutouts. He neglected, however, the production of any animated feature-length puppet film. Apparently, for a time he had the idea of making a film about Don Quixote, but the project was not well received by the Czechoslovakian authorities. In 1953 he premiered Staré pověsti české ( Old Czech Legends, 1953), his quarter-length movie. As with Špalíček, his first feature, Staré pověsti české is structured in seven episodes that tell the legendary history of the Czech people. The film is adapted from a work by Alois Jirásek (1851-1930), then a popular author among the Czech youth, and has an obvious patriotic tone.

In the same vein of exploring the classics of Czech literature, Trnka in 1955 faced the challenge of adapting to the screen a work immensely popular, the anti-war satire Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války of Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Švejk). At that time there already existed film adaptations of this work made using real actors, but Trnka was the first to make an animated film about the character. For the construction of the puppets, Trnka was inspired by the illustrations for the original book made by Josef Lada, which in the popular imagination were closely associated with the characters of Hašek. This humorous film is divided into three episodes, which tell the grotesque adventures of Švejk during World War I. It received several awards at international festivals.

In 1959 he made his last feature film: Sen noci svatojánské ( A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1959), adapted from one of the most famous works of William Shakespeare. Trnka had previously illustrated this book so he knew it well. In his adaptation he gave focus not only to the images, but also to the music of Václav Trojan, and strove to give the film an air of ballet, for which he hired a renowned dancer as an adviser. The puppets used in the film were not constructed of wood, but of a specially-made plastic, which allowed for a more detailed modeling of faces. Although it did not escape some criticism, Sen noci svatojánské was a resounding international success and is recognized as one of Trnka's masterpieces.

Grave of Jiří Trnka at the Central Cemetery in Plzeň

Over the next decade, the filmmaker made only a few short films, which were progressively in a pessimistic tone. The first was Vášeň ( The Passion, 1962), the story of a young man passionate about his motorcycle. He followed that same year with Kybernetická babička ( Cyber Grandma), a satire on the increasing importance of technology in everyday life. Archanděl Gabriel a paní Husa ( The Archangel Gabriel and Ms Goose, 1964), set in medieval Venice, adapts one of the stories of the by Boccaccio.

He considered his greatest work to be the short Ruka (, 1965), his last film. In the words of Bendazzi, Ruka is "a kind of hymn to the creative freedom raging." In short, it is about a sculptor visited by a huge hand, which seeks the completion of a sculpture of itself. By rejecting the imposition, the artist is constantly pursued by the hand, ending with induced suicide and the hand officiating at his funeral. Ruka is considered a protest against the conditions imposed by the Czechoslovak communist state to artistic creation, and even some have seen in it an anticipation of the so-called Prague Spring. Although the film initially had no problems with censorship, after his death copies were confiscated and banned from public display in Czechoslovakia for two decades.

Jiří Trnka died of complications from a heart condition in 1969, when he was only 57 years old, in Prague. His funeral, held in Plzeň, was a large public event.

Throughout his career Trnka experimented with different animation techniques, from traditional cartoons in his first shorts to animation with shadow puppets. However, his preferred method, and that which gave him worldwide fame, was stop-motion puppet work. His carved puppet characters were animated in complex sets with an expressive use of lighting. In this manner he was able to realize the dream of Czech baroque sculptors to set their sculptures in motion. Of puppet films Trnka said:

Puppet films are truly unlimited in their possibilities: they can express themselves with the greatest force precisely when the realistic expression of the cinematographic image often faces insurmountable obstacles.

Really Trnka was not involved so much with the animation itself, but primarily on the development of scripts and puppet making. His studio had a trained team of animators, among which especially Břetislav Pojar was credited as responsible for the animation of many of Trnka's films. Other prominent animators from Trnka's studios were Stanislav Látal, Jan Karpaš, Bohuslav Šrámek, Eduard Hofman and Václav Bedřich.

Although animated films with puppets had already been made before Trnka, he corresponds to the main thrust of this technique, later used in many parts of the world. Unlike what had been done before, Trnka chose not to alter the appearance of the dolls with artificial elements to denote their emotions but to keep it unchanged, getting his expression through changes in framing and lighting. According to Pojar:

He always gave his eyes a look indefinable. With the simple turn of their heads, or with a change of lighting, rose smiling expressions, or unhappy, or dreamers. This gave one the impression that the puppet hid more than it showed, and its heart of wood stored even more.

The scripts of the films were also Trnka's own work, who often used works of Czech authors (many of them related to popular folklore), as well as classics of world literature, such as Chekhov, Boccaccio, and Shakespeare. On some scripts he collaborated with Jiří Brdečka.

In Trnka animated films the music also had an important role. In all his films and several of his short films, the composer of the music was Václav Trojan (1905-1983).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jiří Trnka (none [ˈjɪr̝iːˈtr̩ŋka]; 24 February 1912 - 30 December 1969) was a Czechoslovak puppet-maker, illustrator, motion-picture animator and film director. In addition to his extensive career as an illustrator, especially of children's books, he is best known for his work in animation with puppets, which began in 1946.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abychom vám usnadnili procházení stránek, nabídli přizpůsobený obsah nebo reklamu a mohli anonymně analyzovat návštěvnost, využíváme soubory cookies, které sdílíme se svými partnery pro sociální média, inzerci a analýzu. Jejich nastavení upravíte odkazem "Nastavení cookies". Podrobnější informace najdete v našich Zásadách zpracování osobních údajů. Souhlasíte s používáním cookies?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Centrum současného umění DOX v Praze 7 je nejen galerie propojující výtvarné umění, literaturu, performing a architekturu. Program výstav, představení, diskuzí, debat, živého umění. Vzdělávací programy pro děti, rodiny, školy, firmy. Přihlaste se k newsletteru, podpořte nás zakoupením členství.