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Art Expressed in Music – Leonardo's Genius
April 2024
Duration: 3:30
Listen to the Playlist: soundcloud.com/bruce-klepper-1/sets/art-expressed-in-music-i
Painting: Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 to May 2, 1519) was an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer. His “Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa” are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time. He is renowned in the fields of civil engineering, chemistry, geology, hydrodynamics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, optics, physics and zoology. As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptually inventing the parachute, the helicopter, an armored fighting vehicle, and the use of concentrated solar power. The unique fame that Leonardo enjoyed in his lifetime has remained undimmed to the present day rests largely on his unlimited desire for knowledge, which guided all his thinking and behavior. As an artist, Leonardo considered his eyes to be his main avenue to knowledge; to Leonardo, sight was man’s highest sense because it alone conveyed the facts of experience immediately, correctly, and with certainty. He used his superb intellect, unusual powers of observation, and mastery of the art of drawing to study nature itself, a line of inquiry that allowed his dual pursuits of art and science to flourish. In Florence between 1500 and 1506, Leonardo began work on the “Mona Lisa”. The “Mona Lisa” set the standard for all future portraits. The painting presents a woman revealed to likely have been Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocond. The picture presents a half-body portrait of the subject, with a distant landscape visible as a backdrop; the expressive synthesis that Leonardo achieved between sitter and landscape has placed this work in the canon of the most-popular and most-analyzed paintings of all time. The sensuous curves of the woman’s hair and clothing, are echoed in the undulating valleys and rivers behind her. The sense of overall harmony achieved in the painting—especially apparent in the sitter’s faint smile—reflects Leonardo’s idea of the link connecting humanity and nature, making this painting an enduring record of Leonardo’s vision and genius. In 1517, a drawing by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino depicted an elderly Leonardo with his right arm wrapped in clothing. The latter, in addition to the record of an October 1517 visit by Louis d'Aragon, confirms an account of Leonardo's right hand being paralytic when he was 65, which may indicate why he left works such as the “Mona Lisa” unfinished. He continued to work at some capacity until eventually becoming ill and bedridden for several months. Leonardo only produced about 20 paintings in his lifetime. It is estimated that Leonardo produced between 20,000 to 28,000 pages of notes and sketches spanning across 50 different notebooks about work related to whatever topics that interested him – painting, engineering, philosophy, warfare, engineering, physiology, landscape, proportion, perspective, geography, and geology.... Unfortunately, Leonardo's interests were so broad, and he was so often compelled by new subjects, that he usually left projects unfinished. Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67, possibly of a stroke. Leonardo was described as lamenting on his deathbed, full of repentance, that "he had offended against God and men by failing to practice his art as he should have done”.
For virtual voices, piano, marimba, tubular bells, virtual instruments, sound effects and percussion.
- Genre
- Contemporary Classical