达芬奇
达.芬奇（Leonardo da Vinci，1452-1519）
意大利文艺复新时期最负盛名的艺术大师,科学家。他生于佛罗伦萨郊区的芬奇镇,卒于法国。其父为律师兼公证人,母为农妇,他15岁来到佛罗伦萨,学艺于韦罗基奥的作坊,1472年入画家行会。70年代中期个人风格已趋成熟。1482--1499年间一直工作于米兰,主要为米兰公爵服务,进行了广泛的艺术和科学活动,《岩间圣母》是他在这段时期创作的最有名的代表作。
他是一位天才，他一面热心于艺术创作和理论研究，他研究如何用线条与立体造型去表现形体的各种问题；另一方面他也同时研究自然科学。
《自画像》意大利绘画大师达.芬奇的素描精品。他的素描作品的艺术水平已达极高的境地,被誉为素描艺术的典范。他对建筑,雕刻和绘画的创作都以大量素描为构思和研究的基础,从构到每个人物 甚至每个手势都准备了充分的素描习作及写生,他的素描起了相当于甚或超过现代摄影术的作用。在这幅《自画像》中,画家描绘起自己来可谓得心应手,他观察入微,用的线条丰富多变,刚柔相济 尤其善用浓密程度不同斜线表现光暗的微妙变化,这些素描艺术手法使后来的不少画家得益菲浅,堪称素描艺术的精典。此画用线生动灵活,概括性强,简单的寥寥数笔却包含许多转折,体面关系,发线代面,立体感很强,还有,人物的表情也很传神。因此,此画虽为素描小作,其艺术美,形式美却丝毫不亚于达.芬奇的那些恢宏巨制,诸多年来,继续以其隽永的魅力吸引后世 美术爱好者的赞赏和推崇。
LEONARDO: RENAISSANCE POLYMATH
"There has never been an artist who was more fittingly, and without qualification, described as a genius. Like Shakespeare, Leonardo came from an insignificant background and rose to universal acclaim. Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a local lawyer in the small town of Vinci in the Tuscan region. His father acknowledged him and paid for his training, but we may wonder whether the strangely self-sufficient tone of Leonardo's mind was not perhaps affected by his early ambiguity of status. The definitive polymath, he had almost too many gifts, including superlative male beauty, a splendid singing voice, magnificent physique, mathematical excellence, scientific daring ... the list is endless. This overabundance of talents caused him to treat his artistry lightly, seldom finishing a picture, and sometimes making rash technical experiments. The Last Supper, in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, for example, has almost vanished, so inadequate were his innovations in fresco preparation.
"Yet the works that we have salvaged remain the most dazzlingly poetic pictures ever created. The Mona Lisa has the innocent disadvantage of being too famous. It can only be seen behind thick glass in a heaving crowd of awe-struck sightseers. It has been reproduced in every conceivable medium; it remains intact in its magic, forever defying the human insistence on comprehending. It is a work that we can only gaze at in silence.
"Leonardo's three great portraits of women all have a secret wistfulness. This quality is at its most appealing in Cecilia Gallarani, at its most enigmatic in the Mona Lisa, and at its most confrontational in Ginevra de' Benci. It is hard to gaze at the Mona Lisa because we have so many expectations of it. Perhaps we can look more truly at a less famous portrait, Ginevra de' Benci. It has that haunting, almost unearthly beauty peculiar to Leonardo da Vinci.
A WITHHELD IDENTITY
"The subject of Ginevra de' Benci has nothing of the Mona Lisa's inward amusement, and also nothing of Cecilia's gentle submissiveness. The young woman looks past us with a wonderful luminous sulkiness. Her mouth is set in an unforgiving line of sensitive disgruntlement, her proud and perfect head is taut above the unyielding column of her neck, and her eyes seem to narrow as she endures the painter and his art. Her ringlets, infinitely subtle, cascade down from the breadth of her gleaming forehead (the forehead, incidentally, of one of the most gifted intellectuals of her time). These delicate ripples are repeated in the spikes of the juniper bush.
"The desolate waters, the mists, the dark trees, the reflected gleams of still waters - all these surround and illuminate the sitter. She is totally fleshly and totally impermeable to the artist. He observes, held rapt by her perfection of form, and shows us the thin veil of her upper bodice and the delicate flushing of her throat. What she is truly like she conceals; what Leonardo reveals to us is precisely this concealment, a self-absorption that spares no outward glance.
INTERIOR DEPTH
"We can always tell a Leonardo work by his treatment of hair, angelic in its fineness, and by the lack of any rigidity of contour. One form glides imperceptibly into another (the Italian term is sfumato), a wonder of glazes creating the most subtle of transitions between tones and shapes. The angel's face in the painting known as the Virgin of the Rocks in the National Gallery, London, or the Virgin's face in the Paris version of the same picture, have an interior wisdom, an artistic wisdom that has no pictorial rival.
"This unrivaled quality meant that few artists actually show Leonardo's influence: it is as if he seemed to be in a world apart from them. Indeed he did move apart, accepting the French King Francis I's summons to live in France. Those who did imitate him, like Bernardini Luini of Milan (c. 1485-1532), caught only the outer manner, the half-smile, the mistiness.
"The shadow of a great genius is a peculiar thing. Under Rembrandt's shadow, painters flourished to the extent that we can no longer distinguish their work from his own. But Leonardo's was a chilling shadow, too deep, too dark, too overpowering."
