Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition by Wasay ASHIQ

Before the Renaissance, during the Medieval times, living conditions were very poor. People during this time were thinking more about their survival than art. This meant that only rich figures such as the Church, who did not have to worry about their survival, were able to make art. This caused a lot of the Medieval art to be religiously themed and aimed at religious devotion rather than looking pretty. Medieval portraits of people such as Mary and Baby Jesus were purposely made to look ugly because they were represented as beings different from mortal people.

This changed soon enough with the rise of the idea of humanism, which sparked the Renaissance movement (1300-1600). As people started getting richer in places such as Florence, there was no point standing out, since everyone was rich. More people wanted paintings that related to them. This void in artistic style led more artist to look at the classics that had already idealised the human form such as Greek and Roman art.

Leonardo was surrounded by these new art pieces and came to love the human form even more through his apprenticeship with Verrocchio: one of the pioneers of this art style. Florence’s booming art culture in the Renaissance would influence the foundations of Leonardo’s artistic style: that of realism and ideal human form.

Vinci’s natural landscape; the birds and lush, green, open fields led Leonardo to gain a passion for light and movement, influencing his art-style, mainly with depth and movement. He is said to have studied the physics of light and movement of animals such as birds. Overall all these influences allowed Leonardo to convey his idea of beauty and nature, one which is based on the realism of things and human perception of everyday life.

Although art was becoming a lot more realistic at the time of Leonardo’s birth, art pieces were still missing certain human elements. Most portraits featured rigid almost inanimate subjects. Leonardo change this by adding elements of movement and blur and position to make his portraits to make the subjects as human as possible. An example of this is shown in his Mona Lisa Painting, where he made the base of the painting heavier than the top, so that viewer would naturally be drawn to the eyes of the subject as they would be doing when looking at a normal human in real life. This proved to be so popular that this form of position came to be the norm of portraits painted later in the Renaissance movement.