The picture of the cavalry battle of Anghiari, which in competition with
Michelangelo he began to paint later on a wall of the Sala de Consiglio in
Florence and which he also left in an unfinished state, seemed to have perished
through the failure of a similar technical process. It seems here as if a
peculiar interest, that of the experimenter, at first reënforced the artistic,
only later to damage the art production. oil paintings
The character of the man Leonardo evinces still some other unusual traits and
apparent contradictions. Thus a certain inactivity and indifference seemed very
evident in him. At a time when every individual sought to gain the widest
latitude for his activity, which could not take place without the development of
energetic aggression towards others, he surprised every one through his quiet
peacefulness, his shunning of all competition and controversies. He was mild and
kind to all, he was said to have rejected a meat diet because he did not
consider it just to rob animals of their lives, and one of his special pleasures
was to buy caged birds in the market and set them free.He condemned war and bloodshed and designated man not so much as the king of the
animal world,cheap oil paintings for sale, but rather as the worst of the wild beasts.But this effeminate delicacy of feeling did not prevent him from accompanying condemned criminals on their way to execution in
order to study and sketch in his notebook their features, distorted by fear, nor
did it prevent him from inventing the most cruel offensive weapons, and from
entering the service of Cesare Borgia as chief military engineer. Often he
seemed to be indifferent to good and evil, or he had to be measured with a
special standard. He held a high position in Cesare's campaign which gained for
this most inconsiderate and most faithless of foes the possession of the
Romagna. Not a single line of Leonardo's sketches betrays any criticism or
sympathy of the events of those days. The comparison with Goethe during the
French campaign cannot here be altogether rejected. paintings reproductions
If a biographical effort really endeavors to penetrate the understanding of
the psychic life of its hero it must not, as happens in most biographies through
discretion or prudery, pass over in silence the sexual activity or the sex
peculiarity of the one examined. What we know about it in Leonardo is very
little but full of significance. In a period where there was a constant struggle
between riotous licentiousness and gloomy
asceticism, Leonardo presented an example of cool sexual rejection which one
would not expect in an artist and a portrayer of feminine beauty.landscape paintings for sale Solmi cites the following sentence from Leonardo showing his frigidity: "The act of
procreation and everything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that
human beings would soon die out if it were not a traditional custom and if there
were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions." His posthumous works which not
only treat of the greatest scientific problems but also comprise the most
guileless objects which to us do not seem worthy of so great a mind (an
allegorical natural history, animal fables, witticisms, prophecies),are chaste to a degree—one might say abstinent—that in a work of belle
lettres would excite wonder even to-day. They evade everything sexual so
thoroughly, as if Eros alone who preserves everything living was no worthy
material for the scientific impulse of the
investigator.It is known how frequently great artists found pleasure in giving vent to their
phantasies in erotic and even grossly obscene representations; in
contradistinction to this Leonardo left only some anatomical drawings of the
woman's internal genitals, the position of the child in the womb, etc. oil painted portraits
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