Leonardo da Vinci (1471-1528)
is one
of the most famous artists on the planet. What makes him so
unique is his wide range of research of different subjects
while providing unseen solutions to hardly imaginable
problems. He was a genius, or better, a magus. ...
In his notebooks, Leonardo expressed a desire to leave behind a drawing of himself 'for posterity'. He probably made many sketches of himself during his lifetime.
It was common for Renaissance artists to include images of themselves in their paintings. There is a lone shepherd in the Adoration of the Magi which could well be a likeness of the young artist. It is also likely that the master used his own reflection as a basis for his studies of the proportions of the human face.
As well as the self portraits, there are several likenesses of Leonardo by other artists. The most recognisable is a drawing by Leonardo's pupil Melzi, of the master in his latter years. Leonardo also appears as Plato in Raphael's painting of Greek philosophers, and he may also have been the model for Verrocchio's sculpture of David.
Lillian Schwartz, an American artist, is known for some of the first use of computers in computer developed art. Her best-known work is Mona Leo, her morphing of the image of a Leonardo self-portrait with the Mona Lisa.The morphing of Leonardo to Mona Lisa, 1987, could only have been realized with a computer. Lillian Schwartz split the faces of the Mona Lisa and Leonardo's self-portrait down the mid-dle, adjusting the sizes and juxtapos-ing them so that one side of Mona Lisa's face matched Leonardo's. Schwartz chronicles the evolution of the split-face from a study in composition to a convincing argument that the Mona Lisa is based on Leonardo's self-portrait...
X-rays of the painting and close comparison with drawings of Leonardo suggest that this may actually be true.
In his pictures, drawings and notebooks Leonardo expressed the code of nature ( Da Vinci code ). It is in connections with the mathematics of the Golden section and also with his research of the numerology.
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