It is quite possible that the conception of a beaming jovial and happy
Leonardo was true only for the first and longer period of the master's life.
From now on, when the downfall of the rule of Lodovico Moro forced him to leave
Milan, his sphere of action and his assured position, to lead an unsteady and
unsuccessful life until his last asylum in France, it is possible that the
luster of his disposition became pale and some odd features of his character
became more prominent. The turning of his interest from his art to science which
increased with age must have also been responsible for widening the gap between
himself and his contemporaries. All his efforts with which,art oil paintings for sale, according to their
opinion, he wasted his time instead of diligently filling orders and becoming
rich as perhaps his former classmate Perugino, seemed to his contemporaries as
capricious playing, or even caused them to suspect him of being in the service
of the "black art." We who know him from his
sketches understand him better. In a time in which the authority of the church
began to be substituted by that of antiquity and in which only theoretical
investigation existed, he the forerunner, or better the worthy competitor of
Bacon and Copernicus, was necessarily isolated. When he dissected cadavers of
horses and human beings, and built flying apparatus, or when he studied the
nourishment of plants and their behavior towards poisons, he naturally deviated
much from the commentators of Aristotle and came nearer the despised alchemists,
in whose laboratories the experimental investigations found some refuge during
these unfavorable times. cheap oil paintings
The effect that this had on his paintings was that he disliked to handle the
brush, he painted less and what was more often the case, the things he began
were mostly left unfinished; he cared less and less for the future fate of his
works. It was this mode of working that was held up to him as a reproach from
his contemporaries to whom his behavior to his art remained a riddle. cheap oil paintings
Many of Leonardo's later admirers have attempted to wipe off the stain of
unsteadiness from his character. They maintained that what is blamed in Leonardo
is a general characteristic of great artists. They said that even the energetic
Michelangelo who was absorbed in his work left many incompleted works, which was
as little due to his fault as to Leonardo's in the same case. Besides some
pictures were not as unfinished as he claimed, and what the layman would call a
masterpiece may still appear to the creator of the work of art as an unsatisfied
embodiment of his intentions; he has a faint notion of a perfection which he
despairs of reproducing in likeness. Least of all should the artist be held
responsible for the fate which befalls his works. oil paintings for sale online
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