WHEN psychoanalytic investigation, which usually contents
itself with frail human material, approaches the great personages of humanity,
it is not impelled to it by motives which are often attributed to it by laymen.
It does not strive "to blacken the radiant and to drag the sublime into the
mire"; it finds no satisfaction in diminishing the distance between the
perfection of the great and the inadequacy of the ordinary objects. But it
cannot help finding that everything is worthy of understanding that can be
perceived through those prototypes, and it also believes that none is so big as
to be ashamed of being subject to the laws which control the normal and morbid
actions with the same strictness. art oil paintings
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was admired
even by his contemporaries as one of the greatest men of the Italian
Renaissance, still even then he appeared as mysterious to them as he now appears
to us. An all-sided genius, "whose form can only be divined but never deeply
fathomed,"he exerted the most decisive influence on his time as an artist; and it remained
to us to recognize his greatness as a naturalist which was united in him with
the artist. Although he left masterpieces of the art of painting, while his
scientific discoveries remained unpublished and unused, the investigator in him
has never quite left the artist, often it has severely injured the artist and in
the end it has perhaps suppressed the artist altogether. original oil paintings According to Vasari,
Leonardo reproached himself during the last hour of his life for having insulted
God and men because he has not done his duty to his art.And even if Vasari's story lacks all probability and belongs to those legends
which began to be woven about the mystic master while he was still living, it nevertheless retains indisputable value as a
testimonial of the judgment of those people and of those times. art oil paintings for sale
What was it that removed the personality of Leonardo from the understanding
of his contemporaries? Certainly not the many sidedness of his capacities and
knowledge, which allowed him to install himself as a player of the lyre on an
instrument invented by himself, in the court of Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed Il
Moro, the Duke of Milan, or which allowed him to write to the same person that
remarkable letter in which he boasts of his abilities as a civil and military
engineer. For the combination of manifold talents in the same person was not
unusual in the times of the Renaissance; to be sure Leonardo himself furnished
one of the most splendid examples of such persons. Nor did he belong to that
type of genial persons who are outwardly poorly endowed by nature,art oil painting reproduction, and who on
their side place no value on the outer forms of life, and in the painful
gloominess of their feelings fly from human relations. On the contrary he was
tall and symmetrically built, of consummate beauty of countenance and of unusual physical strength, he was charming
in his manner, a master of speech, and jovial and affectionate to everybody. He
loved beauty in the objects of his surroundings, he was fond of wearing
magnificent garments and appreciated every refinement of conduct. In his
treatise on the art of painting he compares in a significant passage the art of painting
with its sister arts and thus discusses the difficulties of the sculptor: "Now
his face is entirely smeared and powdered with marble dust,original oil paintings wholesale, so that he looks
like a baker, he is covered with small marble splinters, so that it seems as if
it snowed on his back, and his house is full of stone splinters, and dust. The
case of the painter is quite different from that; for the painter is well
dressed and sits with great comfort before his work, he gently and very lightly
brushes in the beautiful colors. He wears as decorative clothes as he likes, and
his house is filled with beautiful paintings and is spotlessly clean. He often
enjoys company, music, or some one may read for
him various nice works, and all this can be listened to with great pleasure,
undisturbed by any pounding from the hammer and other noises." large oil paintings for sale
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