Book: Leonardo Da Vinci
Quotes of Book: Leonardo Da Vinci
The good painter has to paint two principal things, man and the intention of his mind," he wrote. "The first is easy and the second is difficult, because the latter has to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs."44 He expanded on this concept in a long passage in his notes for his planned treatise on painting: "The movement which is depicted must be appropriate to the mental state of the figure. The motions and postures of figures should display the true mental state of the originator of these motions, in such a way they can mean nothing else. Movements should announce the motions of the mind."45 Leonardo's dedication to portraying the outward manifestations of inner emotions would end up driving not only his art but some of his anatomical studies. He needed to know which nerves emanated from the brain and which from the spinal cord, which muscles they activated, and which facial movements were connected to others. He would even try, when dissecting the brain, to figure out the precise location where the connections were made between sensory perceptions, emotions, and motions. By the end of his career, his pursuit of how the brain and nerves turned emotions into motions became almost obsessive. It was enough to make the Mona Lisa smile. book-quoteOn what may be the last page he wrote in his notebooks, Leonardo drew four right triangles with bases of differing lengths {fig. 143}. Inside of each he fit a rectangle, and then he shaded the remaining areas of the triangle. In the center of the page he made a chart with boxes labeled with the letter of each rectangle, and below it he described what he was trying to accomplish. As he had done obsessively over the years, he was using the visualization of geometry to help him understand the transformation of shapes. Specifically, he was trying to understand the formula for keeping the area of a right triangle the same while varying the lengths of its two legs. He had fussed with this problem, explored by Euclid, repeatedly over the years. It was a puzzle that, by this point in his life, as he turned sixty-seven and his health faded, might seem unnecessary to solve. To anyone other than Leonardo, it may have been. book-quoteWhen Leonardo was painting The Last Supper {fig. 74}, spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event. According to the account of a priest, Leonardo would "come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding," and then "remain there brush in hand from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat or drink, painting continually." On other days, however, nothing would be painted. "He would remain in front of it for one or two hours and contemplate it in solitude, examining and criticizing to himself the figures he had created." Then there were dramatic days that combined his obsessiveness and his penchant for procrastination. As if caught by whim or passion, he would arrive suddenly in the middle of the day, "climb the scaffolding, seize a brush, apply a brush stroke or two to one of the figures, and suddenly depart."1 Leonardo's quirky work habits may have fascinated the public, but they eventually began to worry Ludovico Sforza. Upon the death of his nephew, he had become the official Duke of Milan in early 1494, and he set about enhancing his stature in a time-honored way, through art patronage and public commissions. He also wanted to create a holy mausoleum for himself and his family, choosing a small but elegant church and monastery in the heart of Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie, which he had Leonardo's friend Donato Bramante reconstruct. For the north wall of the new dining hall, or refectory, he had commissioned Leonardo to paint a Last Supper, one of the most popular scenes in religious art. At first Leonardo's procrastination led to amusing tales, such as the time the church prior became frustrated and complained to Ludovico. "He wanted him never to lay down his brush, as if he were a laborer hoeing the Prior's garden," Vasari wrote. When Leonardo was summoned by the duke, they ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. "Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least," he told the duke, "for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form." book-quote
