Leonardo Da Vinci was a very unique painter. Many would agree that he was extraordinarily innovative and influential. As most painters he used his painting to express his feelings and emotions but Leonardo expressed much more through his talents, especially through paintings. He expressed his intelligence and imagination; He showed us that he is amazing. Through his paintings Leonardo expresses his likes and desires and his passions. We see that he has a great desire for detail and that if he didn't paint he would find something else to do because of this passion for learning. Leonardo compared painting with other sciences and philosophy and also poetry, music and sculpture. In each case though it demonstrates its superiority. Leonardo began a style of painting that had really never been seen before. For example, he used facial and bodily expressions to display the exact emotions a person in the painting was feeling. In the Last Supper all of the disciples were displaying surprise, curiosity, and confusion with their facial expressions and gestures. Jesus Christ, seated in the middle, is sitting calmly. The picture shows the response of the disciples after Jesus told them that one of them would betray him. Thus, Leonardo's style of painting involved a calm nucleas, the Christ, framed by the confusion and the animated gestures of the disciples. The Mona Lisa also gave a good example of Leonardo's uniqueness. In the painting he used two specific techniques. The first of these two is Sfumato. This technique involves subtle almost infinitisimal transitions between colored areas creating a hazy, smoky effect. This look is evident in the hazy background and the gauzy robe worn by the sitter in Mona Lisa.

The second technique is called Chiaroscuro. This is the technique of modelling and defining forms through contrasts of light and shadow. Many masters of High Renaissance art learned and imitated Leonardo's techniques.

Many of his drawings can be found in the principal European collections; the largest group of drawings and paintings is displayed at the Windsor Castle in England. Most likely the most famous drawing of Leonardo's self-portrait is found at the castle, too (Portrait shown on home page).

In his paintings, Leonardo turned his attention to the space in a painting, appreciating the "substantiality of its atmosphere," compared to the chief concern of Leonardo's predecessors which was merely to define the location and solidity of objects in space.

Leonardo had notebooks filled with observations on the qualities of air and light, "on the 'obscuring medium' interceding between the eye and the object affecting the color and clarity of the latter." Leonardo perceived in nature a unified visual field which he worked to create in his painting. His desire was to draw unity of the picture with all the colors. Leonardo's sense of artistic creation was radically innovative. Even though he made sure of a great amount of detail and precision, he didn't feel the same way about polished craftmanship as his contemporaries. He felt that the artist works with his eyes and mind and then with his hand. "The imagination unceasingly receives stimuli from the vast world of visual phenomena." The artistic process is continuous. Leonardo painted a large number of products yet he was still more fascinated by the fact of creative power rather than by a finished painting or project. No doubt, this passion contributes to the reason that there were so many unfinished paintings by him. Leonardo's concern as a painter also helped to influence his desires to further more scientific, and explorations of the natural phenomena themselves. It was one of Leonardo's goals to create a psychological world, complementing the physical one, which he considered the painter's first "mimentic concern." Interest in the psychology behind physiognomic form was shown through all of Leonardo's many studies of human heads. He was fascinated by the movement of the body and the anatomy of animals and humans. His studies also helped him improve in his painting because it gave him a clearer understanding of what was behind all the movement or positions of things. He developed "a new sense of compositional hierarchy of broader forms organized on a larger scale. The grandeur and clarity of his design, however, were calculated to contain within the stable formal structure a diversity of conflicting forces." He showed this too through his painting the Last Supper. In this particular painting he modifies the traditional "contrapposto pose(with the upper part of the body twisted in the opposite direction from the lower) to achieve a new vitality.

The famous painting, the Battle of Anghiari, is an excellent example of Leonardo's talent. This painting is full of savage struggle, men and horses fighting against other men and horses involved in a bloody fray. It is said that throughout his earlier drawings or cartoons of this painting that there were many causal notations of furious faces of men, horses, lions, and imaginary beasts drawn in the margins.

Leonardo's art of sculpting has also been found throughout history. One of his most famous projects was the equestrian statue to Francesco Sforza. Although the project was never completed as a bronze statue, a clay model was made and it was put on public display and was greatly admired. Experimentation with artistic media and techniques characterizes his career. He used iron braces to help with the balance in sculpting and casting. He anticipated this solution later developed by Galileo. Leonardo worked in bursts of intense activity that preceded and were followed by periods of contemplation. This was "ill-suited" to the painstaking demands of the fresco technique. He worked impatiently and was constantly trying to do things quicker. His drawings of sculptures helped show his approach to 3D.

Leonardo Da Vinci and Architecture and Military Engineering

Leonardo Da Vinci and Science, Biology, and Geology

Leonardo Da Vinci and Optics and Mathematics

Pictures of Paintings

Inventions

By April Mitchell