By admitting that he entertained a special personal relation to the problem
of flying since his childhood, Leonardo bears out what we must assume from our
investigation of children of our times, namely, that his childhood investigation
was directed to sexual matters. At least this one problem escaped the repression
which has later estranged him from sexuality. From childhood until the age of
perfect intellectual maturity this subject, slightly varied, continued to hold
his interest, and it is quite possible that he was as little successful in his
cherished art in the primary sexual sense as in his desires for mechanical
matters, that both wishes were denied to him. oil paintings on canvas for sale
As a matter of fact the great Leonardo remained infantile in some ways
throughout his whole life; it is said that all great men retain something of the
infantile. As a grown up he still continued playing, which sometimes made him
appear strange and incomprehensible to his contemporaries. When he constructed
the most artistic mechanical toys for court festivities and receptions we are
dissatisfied thereby because we dislike to see the master waste his power on
such petty stuff. He himself did not seem averse to giving his time to such
things. Vasari reports that he did similar things even when not urged to it by
request: "There (in Rome) he made a doughy mass out of wax,oil painting on canvas for sale, and when it softened
he formed thereof very delicate animals filled with air; when he blew into them
they flew in the air, and when the air was exhausted they fell to the ground.
For a peculiar lizard caught by the wine-grower of Belvedere Leonardo made wings
from skin pulled off from other lizards, which he filled with mercury so that
they moved and trembled when it walked; he then made for it eyes, a beard and
horns, tamed it and put it in a little box and
terrified all his friends with it."Such playing often served him as an expression of serious thoughts: "He had
often cleaned the intestines of a sheep so well that one could hold them in the
hollow of the hand; he brought them into a big room,modern abstract art oil painting, and attached them to a
blacksmith's bellows which he kept in an adjacent room, he then blew them up
until they filled up the whole room so that everybody had to crowd into a
corner. In this manner he showed how they gradually became transparent and
filled up with air, and as they were at first limited to very little space and
gradually became more and more extended in the big room, he compared them to a
genius."His fables and riddles evince the same playful pleasure in harmless concealment
and artistic investment, the riddles were put into the form of prophecies;
almost all are rich in ideas and to a remarkable degree devoid of wit. oil paints supplies
The plays and jumps which Leonardo allowed his phantasy have in some cases
quite misled his biographers who misunderstood this part of his nature. In Leonardo's Milanese manuscripts one
finds, for example, outlines of letters to the "Diodario of Sorio (Syria),
viceroy of the holy Sultan of Babylon," in which Leonardo presents himself as an
engineer sent to these regions of the Orient in order to construct some works.
In these letters he defends himself against the reproach of laziness, he
furnishes geographical descriptions of cities and mountains, and finally
discusses a big elementary event which occurred while he was there. buy oil paintings online
No comments:
Post a Comment