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Leonardo (his red-chalk sketches): *
this self-portrait is drawn in red chalk on paper, depicts the head of an elderly man in 3/4 view, his face turned towards the viewer. The subject is distinguished by his long hair and long waving beard which flow over the shoulders and chest. The length of the hair and beard is uncommon in Renaissance portraits and suggests a person of sagacity.
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Leonardo (his backgrounds): *
illustration: The Madonna of the Yarnwinder ,
As with later works by Leonardo, the figures appear in a vast unpopulated landscape featuring a dramatic mountain range. This may be a specific location in the valley of the river Adda, as it runs from Lecco to Vaprio, an area familiar to Leonardo and which he mapped.
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Leonardo (aviation): *
He was fascinated with the idea of flight. His Codex on the Flight of Birds is a relatively short manuscript (dated. 1505), begins with an examination of the flight behaviour of birds & proposes mechanisms for flight by machines. Leonardo constructed a number of these machines, and attempted to launch them from a hill near Florence.
One of Leonardo’s flying machines appears to be a giant auger (illustration far left). This design used the blade's rotation to push the air below it down to keep the craft airborne.
When he began his study of birds in flight, Leonardo da Vinci realised that humans are too heavy. Because of this, they would not be strong enough to fly if they were only using wings attached to the arms. He envisaged that to achieve flight there would be a need to include levers, pedals and pulleys. On this basis, in about 1490 Leonardo da Vinci drew his up plans for a flying machine that would keep a man in the air by the beating of its wings. The plan in the drawing below far rigth shows a pair of giant wings that connect to a wooden frame. The pilot would lie face down inside the frame on a board. Using his hands, the pilot would grip a stick coming down from each wing for direction control. As there was no engine, to achieve flight, the pilot would make a flapping motion by pushing his legs downwards with his feet held in two spurs.
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“The transformation of Renaissance fresco-painting into Venetian oil-painting is a matter of spiritual history…. In almost every picture from Masaccio' s "Peter and the Tribute Money" in the Brancacci Chapel, through the soaring background that Piero della Francesca gave to the figures of Federigo and Battista of Urbino, to Perugino' s "Christ Giving the Keys," the fresco manner is contending with the invasive new form, though Raphael's artistic development in the course of his work on the Vatican “stanze" is almost the only case in which we can see comprehensively the change that is going on.”
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Oresme: *
In the diagram below Oresme drew a velocity-time graph for an object starting from rest and moving with constant acceleration. Along a horizontal axis (which he called longitudo) he marked points representing instants of time. For each instant he drew a perpendicular line (which he called latitudo). The above diagram has sixteen latitudo. He observed that the velocity half way through the time period (dotted line) was equal to half the final velocity, and that the distance covered in the second half of the time period was three times the distance covered in the second half of the time period.
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Michelangelo (painted pictures as if they were wall frescoes): *
The Madonna and Child with St John and Angels aka The Manchester Madonna, dated 1497, is an unfinished painting. The figures are arranged as if in a frieze, reflecting Michelangelo's sculptor's mind-set. The frieze becomes more convex at its centre with the figures of Virgin and Child (as in the later Pitti Tondo). Another similarity to relief sculpture is in the plain background, rather than the landscapes more common for exterior settings. Instead Michelangelo has simply painted an expanse of sky. illustration right
The Entombment is an unfinished painting of the placing of the body of Jesus in the garden tomb, date 1500-01. The centre of the panel portrays Christ being carried up a flight of steps to the sepulchre, which was intended to be painted in the blank area at the top right of the work. Most likely this is the work commissioned by the church of Sant'Agostino in Rome. He returned to Florence prior to finishing it. The floating appearance of some of the figures is explained by the fact that the painting is intended to be viewed from below, like a wall fresco. illustration right
The Doni Tondo, dated 1503-06, is the only finished panel painting by the mature Michelangelo to survive. Mary dominates the centre of the composition; the scene is rural one, the Holy Family enjoying themselves on the grass, separated from the unrelated group at the back by a horizontal band, a wall, which defines foreground & background. The background figures are 5 nudes. Behind Saint John the Baptist is a semi-circular ridge, against which the 'ignudi' are leaning, or sitting. This semi-circle mirrors the circular shape of the painting itself and acts as a foil to the vertical nature of the principal group (the Holy family). Many aspects of this painting foreshadow techniques Michelangelo would use in the Sistine chapel frescos notably: the juxtaposition of bright colours, the sharp modelling of the folds of the drapery, the sculptural, modelling of the figures (suggesting they are carved in marble). Most strikingly, the nude figures have softer modelling & are clearly precursors to the ignudi of the Sistine Ceiling. illustration below
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The Adoration of the Magi: *
Behind them is a semicircle of accompanying figures (on the far right a self-portrait). Left background ruin of a pagan building, on which workmen can be seen, apparently repairing it. This is a possible reference to the Basilica of Maxentius. According to Medieval legend, the Romans claimed would stand until a virgin gave birth; supposedly it collapsed on the night of Christ's birth. The ruins dominate a preparatory perspective drawing by Leonardo, which also includes the fighting horsemen. The palm tree in the centre has associations with the Virgin Mary The other tree in the painting is from the carob family, the seeds from the tree are used as a unit of measurement. They measure valuable stones and jewels. As with Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, the background is probably supposed to represent the Pagan world supplanted by the Christian world. By combining figures of pleading old men & armed horsemen, the artist transformed a banal biblical subject into a scene from human history. He also took the technique of non finito (without limits) to its extreme. The figures and architectural elements boldly delineated and filled out in earth colours on the five boards of this panel anticipate modern art. Remarkable for its extreme concentration & power, his contemporaries assumed it was unfinished.
