30-Second Leonardo Da Vinci

His 50 Greatest Ideas and Inventions, each Explained in Half a Minute

Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp

• Publisher: Ivy Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782401193
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The bestselling 30-Second... series takes a revolutionary approach to learning about those subjects you feel you should really understand. Each title selects a popular topic and dissects it into the 50 most significant ideas at its heart. Every idea, no matter how complex, is explained in 300 words and one picture, all digestible in 30 seconds. 30-Second Leonardo da Vinci uses this unique approach to grapple with the truly diverse thoughts of the ultimate Renaissance Man. Artist, anatomist, sculptor, inventor, architect, cartographer, mathematician, musician, botanist, geologist the word polymath does not quite do Leonardo justice. The painter of the Mona Lisa and conceptualizer of the helicopter seems like a Renaissance superhero. Here, the worlds leading Leonardo scholars present an instant and expert guide to the breadth and brilliance of his greatest innovations.

PAINTING & SCULPTURE

PAINTING & SCULPTURE

GLOSSARY

academic art After the acceptance of the visual arts as liberal arts, thanks to the efforts of Leonardo, the late 16th century saw the creation of art schools, or art academies, throughout Europe that were to last until the 19th century. Sponsored by influential patrons of the arts, their aim was to educate young artists in the manner of the classical theories of art of the Renaissance, and these rules and conventions came to be known as academic art.

aerial perspective The visual effect of moisture and dust in the atmosphere on landscapes, particularly noticeable on distant objects, where colors seem to become bluer and tones more muted—the farther the object, the more its color matches that of the surrounding atmosphere. In painting, this gives an impression of depth and distance and is achieved by using true colors for foreground objects, gradually muting both colors and tones, as well as decreasing outline sharpness for the depiction of objects in the background. Also called atmospheric perspective.

chiaroscuro An Italian term, meaning “light–dark,” that describes the effect of strongly contrasting light and shade on a work of art. The technique was pioneered by Leonardo as an effective way of creating the illusion of depth and volume in a painting. In the early 17th century, Caravaggio and Rembrandt used the same technique to add a dramatic dimension to a scene.

liberal arts In the Classical world, the seven liberal arts were the studies worthy of a free man (homo liber) and were divided into trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). The lowly position of the visual arts as “vulgar” became increasingly contested during the early Renaissance, and efforts were made to raise them from the status of manual skills to that of liberal arts. Leonardo, more than anyone else, was responsible for promoting the idea of the painter as a creative thinker and, by 1500, both painting and sculpture were acknowledged as liberal arts.

paragone Italian word meaning “comparison” (of the arts), it refers to a debate during the Renaissance regarding the merits of painting versus those of sculpture and which could reproduce the various forms of nature most successfully. In the Treatise on Painting, Leonardo argues for the supremacy of painting over the arts of sculpture, music, and poetry.

sfumato From the Italian word fumo, meaning “smoke,” the term describes the very subtle blending of tones or colors into each other without noticeable transition. Leonardo described this technique as a gradation “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke.” Recent X-ray analysis of the Mona Lisa painting showed that Leonardo used up to 20 layers of paint as thin as two microns each to achieve this effect.

Treatise on Painting Throughout his life, Leonardo wrote a large number of notes and manuscripts, in his famous right-to-left, mirror-image script, and intended to publish treatises on different subjects. Instead, they were left to his friend and pupil Francesco Melzi, who started to collate them into the Libro di Pittura. Published in French and Italian in 1645 as Trattato della Pittura, and translated into English in 1817, the Treatise on Painting has been described as “the most important document in the entire history of art.” It begins with careful instructions on drawing the main features of human anatomy, then moves on to techniques of rendering motion and perspective. Good composition, inventiveness, the expression of emotions, the effects of light, shadow, and color, and many other subtle points of artistic expression are discussed, with the importance of meticulous study of the subject emphasized throughout.

THE TREATISE ON PAINTING

the 30-second theory

Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting became the main vehicle for the transmission of his theoretical ideas until the 19th century. Although no finished treatise by Leonardo himself survives—and what we now know as the Treatise is a 16th-century compilation by his pupil, Francesco Melzi—the materials it includes were copied directly from his notebooks and are therefore faithful to his teachings. It starts with a discussion (paragone) on the primacy of painting over sculpture, poetry, and music, in which the principles of what he considers the science of painting are stated. It then provides a series of precepts to painters, stressing the importance of nature as the primary guide. Next it discusses the human body, with a focus on proportion, motion, and expression, touching on the basic tenets for narrative paintings and ending with observations on drapery. Finally, it follows lengthy scientific discussions on light and shadow. These not only reveal Leonardo’s ideas about color and aerial perspective, but include instructions on how to depict trees, clouds, and the horizon. The Treatise shows Leonardo’s extraordinary mind at work, in his quest to understand the “laws” of nature as the founding principles for the science of painting, and to instruct the painter in how to re-create the natural world according to those principles.

3-SECOND SKETCH

Leonardo argues that painting is both an intellectual and practical activity that re-creates nature according to principles learned from direct, empirical observation.

3-MINUTE MASTERPIECE

Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting exercised a substantial influence on academic theory from the time of their first edition in Paris, in 1651, with illustrations based on drawings by Nicolas Poussin. It is one of the most important examples of Italo-French cultural exchange, and it also became the benchmark in the major debates that shaped thinking about European art in the 17th century and beyond.

RELATED RESEARCH

PARAGONE

DECORUM OF MOVEMENT & GESTURE

CHIAROSCURO & SFUMATO

NATURE

3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES

FRANCESCO MELZI

ca. 1492–ca. 1570

Italian painter and heir to Leonardo’s manuscripts.

NICOLAS POUSSIN

1594–1665

French painter, who lived in Rome most of his active life.

30-SECOND TEXT

Juliana Barone

Exceptional in the breadth of analysis and skill as a draftsman, Leonardo’s notebooks contain several studies of the movement of the human figure.

PARAGONE

the 30-second theory

“Painting laments that it has been excluded from the liberal arts,” concluded Leonardo in the section of his Treatise on Painting that deals with the paragone, or comparison of the arts. Comparing and contrasting painting with poetry and music, he sought to show that painting does indeed deserve to be numbered among the liberal arts. Painting, Leonardo argued, is superior to poetry because it appeals to the eye not to the ear. The eye—t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Painting & Sculpture
• Geometry
• Mechanics
• Civil Engineering
• Military Engineering
• Nature
• Anatomy & Anatomical Studies
• Resources
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright