"Leonardo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Mahommed had been effective, though not to the same degree, elsewhere than at St. Romain. Jerome the Italian and Leonardo di Langasco the Genoese, defending the port of Blacherne in the lowland, had not been able to save the Xiloporta or Wood Gate on the harbor front harmless; under pounding of the floating battery it lay in the dust, like a ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... at once. It is quite true that in the greatest artists, their proper artistical faculty is united with every other; and you may make use of the other faculties, and let the artistical one lie dormant. For aught I know, there may be two or three Leonardo da Vincis employed at this moment in your harbours and railroads: but you are not employing their Leonardesque or golden faculty there,—you are only oppressing and destroying it. And the artistical gift in average ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... grew enthusiastic for fine wool and expensive velvet of every shade. Dresses in the Renaissance style became her favourites, and the subject of her studies. She puffed out her bodices like those in Leonardo's and Rafael's portraits of women, and tried in other ways as well to ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... can only express half of them, and that the less important half. Still, it does express something; the thread is not broken that connects God With Nature, or Nature with men, or men with critics. The "Mona Lisa" was in some respects (not all, I fancy) what God meant her to be. Leonardo's picture was, in some respects, like the lady. And Walter Pater's rich description was, in some respects, like the picture. Thus we come to the consoling reflection that even literature, in the last resort, can express something other than its ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... mountain gorge. About him are fastnesses and splendours, torrents and cataracts, glaciers and untrodden snows. He comes tramping on heel-worn boots and ragged socks. Beauties and blue mysteries shine upon him and appeal to him, the enigma of beauty smiling the faint strange smile of Leonardo's Mona Lisa. He sees a light on the grass like music; and the blossom on the trees against the sky brings him near weeping. Such things come to him, give themselves to him. I do not know why he should not in response fling his shabby gear aside and behave like a god; ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... remains is found to be at the most some superficial trait, which would not even suffice for a caricature. The person to be painted stands before the artist like a world to discover. Michael Angelo said, "one paints, not with one's hands, but with one's brain." Leonardo shocked the prior of the convent delle Grazie by standing for days together opposite the "Last Supper" without touching it with the brush. He remarked of this attitude "that men of the most lofty genius, when they are doing ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... witnessed by Doge Pietro Lando and Doge Marcantonio Trevisan; and the same hand gives us Pietro Loredan imploring the aid of the Virgin. In the centre ceiling painting Tintoretto depicts Venice as Queen of the Sea. The other artist here is Palma the younger, whose principal picture represents Doge Leonardo Loredan presiding over an attack by a lion on a bull, typifying the position of the Republic when Pope Julius launched the League of Cambray against it in 1508. The Doge does not look dismayed, but Venice ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... is lower than partiality. Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy and God. A legend tells that Leonardo da Vinci was warned that his divine picture of the Last Supper would fade, because he had introduced his personal enemy as Judas, and thus desecrated art by making it serve personal hatred. The legend must be false, Leonardo had too grand a soul. A ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... change in kind or degree, the whole arrangement resembling that of an army in battle array; with its centre, flanks and skirmishers. The balance of equal measures—seen in his "Sistine Madonna," is conspicuous in most ecclesiastical pictures of that period, notably the "Last Supper of Leonardo" in which two groups of three persons each are posed on either side ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... like many and many another great inventor, from Leonardo da Vinci down to the present time, was also an artist. He was born November 14, 1765, at Little Britain, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, of that stock which is so often miscalled "Scotch-Irish." He was only ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... become serious and illuminative. To him "Parsifal" was a fresco, a decoration painted by a man whose true genius it was to reveal the most intimate secrets of the soul, to tell the enigmatic soul of longing as Leonardo da Vinci had done. But he had been led from the true path of his genius into the false one of a rivalry with Veronese. Only where Wagner is confiding a soul's secret is he interesting, and in "Tannhaeuser," in this first flower of his dramatic and musical ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... overtures to Leonardo dei Medici, vicar of the archbishopric of Florence, to obtain the punishment of the rebel: Leonardo, in obedience to the orders he received, from Rome, issued a mandate forbidding the faithful to attend at Savonarola's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... friend, the artist, would prove to be pictures, or at least a picture; for I knew he had been for several weeks in conference with Nicolino:—and now here was a box, which, from its shape, could possibly contain nothing in the world but a copy of Leonardo's "Last Supper;" and a copy of this very "Last Supper," done by Rubini the younger, at Florence, I had known, for some time, to be in the possession of Nicolino. This point, therefore, I considered as sufficiently settled. I chuckled excessively when I thought of my acumen. It was the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... upon my brain! By poor, good, weak Antonio, too disowned— I dream'd each night, I should be Desdemona'd: And, being in Mantua, thought upon the shop, Whence fair Verona's youth his breath did stop: And what if Leonardo, in foul scorn, Some lean Apothecary should suborn To take my hated life? A "tortoise" hung Before my eyes, and in my ears scaled "alligators" rung. But my Othello, to his vows more zealous— Twenty Iagos could not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... chamber. Don Rafael, having embraced the newcomer, asked him what news he brought. His friend replied that he had just come from the port of Santa Maria, where he had left four galleys bound for Naples, and that he had seen Marco Antonio Adorno, the son of Don Leonardo Adorno, on board one of them. This intelligence rejoiced Don Rafael, to whom it appeared that since he had so unexpectedly learned what it was of such importance for him to know, he might regard this an omen of his future success. He asked his friend, who knew his father well, to exchange ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... if Ivan Ivanovitch, or whatever you claim his name was, didn't invent flight of heavier than air craft, the glider was flown variously before 1900, including Otto Lilienthal in the 1890s, and was designed as far back as Leonardo da Vinci." ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... its plan to the more famous staircase which adorns the exterior of the wing of Francis I. at the great chateau of Blois in Touraine, which was built almost at the same time, from the designs (as I have attempted to prove elsewhere) of Leonardo da Vinci, and was decorated later on with statues by Jean Goujon. This sculptor was only born the year after St. Maclou's staircase was finished, but the main lines of the structure are so suggestive of the earlier work that I cannot but imagine this fine piece ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... very stringent order that any boat which should carry religious should be burned with all its goods, and that those going in it should be put to death. Nevertheless, some Franciscan friars have gone, very secretly. Some time ago, in the city of Fixoxuna, Father Antonio and Brother Leonardo, both Japanese, were imprisoned for the faith. For this also, on August 16, 1618, they beheaded in the city of Meaco Fray Juan de Santa Marta, of the Order of St. Francis, and a native of Cataluna. He had been imprisoned three ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... happiness, whatever they might do to their philosophy—Cato gave away his wife—of Varro's we know nothing—and of Seneca's, only that she was disposed to die with him, but recovered and lived several years afterwards. But says Leonardo, "L'uomo e animale civile, secondo piace a tutti i filosofi." And thence concludes that the greatest proof of the animal's civism is "la prima congiunzione, dalla ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... vigorous expression and confident attitude;—these two widely separated streams of Art, remote from each other in origin, and fed by various rills, in their course through the century, were to meet in one ocean at its close. This was then the fulness of perfection, the age of Angelo and Raphael, Leonardo and Correggio. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... hairy quadrumana that by the operation of the laws of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, ultimately and through endless ages, and by the most infinitesimal changes, becomes at last Plato and Caesar, Leonardo and Dante, St. Louis and Shakespeare ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... the finest portraits by Titian, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci, were the outcome of the enthusiastic sentiments by which, indeed, under various conditions, every masterpiece is engendered. The artist only bent ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... and laughing in the face of danger. We see her holding her court in the famous Castello of Porta Giovia or in the summer palaces of Vigevano and Cussago, in these golden days when Milan was called the new Athens, when Leonardo and Bramante decorated palaces or arranged masquerades at the duke's bidding, when Gaspare Visconti wrote sonnets in illuminated books, and Lorenzo da Pavia constructed organs or viols as perfect and beautiful to see as to hear, for the pleasure of the youthful duchess. Scholars and poets, ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... opportunity of protesting against a sentence which caught my eye in passing, and which I believe to be as fundamentally unsound as any I ever saw written, even by a professional art critic or by a director of a national collection. Sir Henry Layard, in his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci, ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... the household cares, the daily direction of a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been happily working. She has failed; but that has not ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... new movement is at hand. Forerunners, it is true, had not been lacking. Roger Bacon (1214-94) had already sought to obtain an empirical knowledge of nature based upon mathematics; and the great painter Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) had discovered the principles of mechanics, though without gaining much influence over the work of his contemporaries. It was reserved for the triple star which has been mentioned to overthrow ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... thee, good Leonardo, think on this; These things being bought and orderly bestow'd, Return in haste, for I do feast to-night My ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... among the works of these masters, and both in excellent condition. And Mr. Alexander Barker, whose collection is becoming one of the best selected and most interesting in England, has purchased several pictures of great value, especially one by Verocchio, the master of Leonardo da Vinci, which Dr. Waagen speaks of as "the most important picture I know by this rare master." Mr. Barker has also made an addition to his collection so recent as not to be described even in this last volume of the "Art Treasures," but which is of unsurpassed interest. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... most curious gem-treatises, especially as a source of early sixteenth-century beliefs in the magic properties of precious stones, the "Speculum Lapidum" of Camillo Leonardo, published in Venice, 1502, probably never came under Shakespeare's eye. Indeed, even in Italy it seems to have been so neglected that Ludovico Dolci ventured to publish a literal Italian version of the Latin ...
— Shakespeare and Precious Stones • George Frederick Kunz
... consequence of inordinate precautions, had left no mark upon his hands; and the Maletroit hand was famous. It would be difficult to imagine anything at once so fleshy and so delicate in design; the taper, sensual fingers were like those of one of Leonardo's[5] women; the fork of the thumb made a dimpled protuberance when closed; the nails were perfectly shaped, and of a dead, surprising whiteness. It rendered his aspect tenfold more redoubtable, that a man with hands like these should keep them devoutly folded like a virgin ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... student is supplied with a list of the authorities he should consult for the "History and Progress of his Art." He avoids expatiating on the books purely elementary—"the van of which is led by Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Durer, and the rear by Gherard Lavresse—as the principles which they detail must be supposed to be already in the student's possession, or are occasionally interwoven with the topics of the lectures;" and proceeds "to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Paris or at Saint Raphael, on the Mediterranean, the master lives, like Leonardo of old, the existence of a grand seigneur, surrounded by his family, innumerable guests, and the horses and dogs he loves,—a group of which his ornate figure and expressive face form the natural centre. Each year he lives more away from the world, but no more inspiriting sight can ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... selection of paintings which may be considered one of the most recherchee in Paris; a landscape by Dominichino is quite a gem, and he has scarcely a painting in his numerous collection but must be admired; his copy of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the best that has ever been executed, and affords a most exact idea of the original, which is now, alas! nearly if not entirely defaced. To see these, as well as many other very excellent private collections, it is merely necessary ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... patron was irretrievably landed and considering that his own "expert" dignity had been sufficiently saved, relaxed into enthusiasm and small talk. Only in the later Italian rooms did his critical claws again allow themselves to scratch. A small Leonardo, the treasure of the house, which had been examined and written about by every European student of Milanese art for half a ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... delusion is that success is attained by what I may call the "Benjamin Franklin" method. Franklin was a very great man; he united in his character a set of splendid qualities as various, in their different ways, as those possessed by Leonardo da Vinci. I have an immense admiration for him. But his Autobiography does make me angry. His Autobiography is understood to be a classic, and if you say a word against it in the United States you are apt to get killed. I do not, however, contemplate an immediate ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... "Leonardo," she repeated. "Hast thou seen his Bacchus, or his battle-fresco? Knowest thou the later work of Raffaello? And what sayest thou to our Fra Lippo Lippi? A Christian monk he, forsooth! What sayest thou to Giorgione of Venice and his pupils, to this efflorescence of loveliness, to our statuaries ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the grand prize, five canvases demonstrating both his versatility and his mastery of color. On the north and south walls are the medal-of-honor pictures of Onorato Carlandi and Camillo Innocenti, the latter striking in their golden tone. Coromaldi's rich harvest scenes (26, 27), and a Leonardo Bazzaro (4) (both gold medallists), hang on the east wall. Not to be overlooked, though passed by the jury, are Casciaro's warm landscapes on the north wall and Ricci's "Butterflies" (96), which help to make this ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... that Leonardo de Pourceaugnac is a man to buy a pig in a poke, and that he has not the sense to find out what goes on in the world, and to see if, in ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... Gian Antonio Amadeo, cost him fifty thousand golden florins. An equestrian statue of gilt wood, voted to him by the town of Bergamo, surmounts his monument inside the chapel. This was the work of two German masters called Sisto figlio di Enrico Syri da Norimberga and Leonardo Tedesco. The tomb itself is of marble, executed for the most part in a Lombard style resembling Amadeo's, but scarcely worthy of his genius. The whole effect is disappointing. Five figures representing Mars, Hercules, and three sons-in-law of Colleoni, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... aweary and passed away when her boy was scarce eight years old, but his memories of her were deeply etched. She told him of Cimabue, Giotto, Ghirlandajo, Leonardo and Perugino, and especially of the last two, who were living and working only a few miles away. It was this spiritual and loving mother who infused into his soul the desire to do and to become. That hunger for harmony which marked his life was the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... between Giotto and Michelangelo contains the names of such artists as Orcagna, Masaccio, Fra Filippo, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, Leonardo, and Botticelli. Put beside these the greatest names in Venetian art, the Vivarini, the Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoret. The difference is striking. The significance of the Venetian names is exhausted with their significance as painters. Not so with the Florentines. Forget that they were ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... never by the people. How should they foster it? Instinctively they hate it, as they hate all superiorities. It was not Florence but the Medici and the Pope that employed Michelangelo; not Milan but Ludovic the Moor that valued Leonardo. It was the English nobles that patronized Reynolds and Gainsborough; the darlings of our middle class are Herkomer and Collier. There have been poets, it is true, who have been born of the people and loved of them; and I do not ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... thus looked back on with a purely admiring regret, as perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; the desirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most likely they are the fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the Aeolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with our redundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had been born in the age of Pitt, that his ardent youth ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Sabello boy, a third child was stolen from the top floor of a house at 119 Elizabeth Street. The father, Leonardo Quartiano, reported the disappearance, and in answer to questions stated that he had received no letters or telephone messages. "Why should I?" he inquired, with uplifted hands and the most guileless demeanor. "I am poor! I am a humble fishmonger." ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... "old masters" of Italian painting four, besides Michelangelo, stand out with special prominence. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519 A.D.) was architect, sculptor, musician, and engineer, as well as painter. His finest work, the "Last Supper," a fresco painting at Milan, is much damaged, but fortunately good copies of it exist. Paris has the best of his easel pictures—the "Monna Lisa." Leonardo spent ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the lime trees on the terraced garden of Amboise is a small bust of Leonardo da Vinci, for it was near here he died. His remains are laid in the beautiful chapel at the corner of the castle court, and the romantic story of his last moments at Fontainebleau becomes the sad reality of a tombstone ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... the young Castelfrancan passed a singularly calm and uneventful life. Untroubled, apparently, by the storm and stress of the political world about him, he devoted himself with a whole-hearted simplicity to the advancement of his art. Like Leonardo, he early won fame for his skill in music, and Vasari tells us the gifted young lute-player was a welcome guest in distinguished circles. Although of humble origin, he must have possessed a singular charm of manner, ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... nothing to detain her in the view of the busy printing plant in the room beyond. But on the walls of the room before her were four pictures—lithographs, cheap, not framed, held in place by a tack at each corner. There was Washington—then Lincoln—then a copy of Leonardo's Jesus in the Last Supper fresco—and a fourth face, bearded, powerful, imperious, yet wonderfully kind and good humored—a face she did not know. Pointing her riding stick at ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... he comes to modern times he fails to bring out clearly the decisive steps of its growth. And he does not seem to realise that a man might be "progressive" without believing in, or even thinking about, the doctrine of Progress. Leonardo da Vinci and Berkeley are examples. In my Ancient Greek Historians (1909) I dwelt on the modern origin of the idea (p. 253 sqq.). Recently Mr. R. H. Murray, in a learned appendix to his Erasmus and Luther, has developed the thesis that Progress ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... resumed the orator; "I should have confined my remark to the five of us who are French. I did injustice to the illustrious antecedents of our foreign allies. I know that you, Thaddeus Loubisky, that you, Leonardo Raselli, have been too eminent for hands hostile to tyrants not to be marked with a black cross in the books of the police; I know that you, Jan Vanderstegen, if hitherto unscarred by those wounds in defence of freedom which despots and cowards would fain miscall the brands of the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to Nelly Powers now, who had come back and stood facing her in one of those superb poses of hers, her yellow braids heavy as gold. It was Brunhilda talking to Leonardo da Vinci's Ste. Anne. No, heavens no! Not a saint, a musty, penitential negation like a saint! Only of course, the Ste. Anne wasn't a saint either, but da Vinci's glorious Renaissance stunt at showing what an endlessly desirable woman he could make if he put ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... ought to have been able to build lighthouses and write DAVID BALFOURS too. HINC ILLAE LACRYMAE. I take my own case as most handy, but it is as illustrative of my quarrel with the age. We take all these pains, and we don't do as well as Michael Angelo or Leonardo, or even Fielding, who was an active magistrate, or Richardson, who was a busy bookseller. J'AI HONTE POUR ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... execution of Jerome; and although not agreeing with him, or rather being indifferent in point of religion, the eloquence, magnanimity and amiable deportment of the unfortunate martyr, excited his sympathy and admiration in an uncommon degree. This is manifested in his letters to Leonardo Aretius; who in his reply found it advisable to warn his friend, not to show too ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... of how the greatest masters of the High Renaissance—Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael—used to come here to study, and thus this little chapel became a great art school; and how, at the present time, it is esteemed by many one of the four most important art-buildings in the world;—the others being, Arena Chapel, ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... had left no mark upon his hands; and the Maletroit hand was famous. It would be difficult to imagine anything at once so fleshy and so delicate in design; the taper, sensual fingers were like those of one of Leonardo's women; the fork of the thumb made a dimpled protuberance when closed; the nails were perfectly shaped, and of a dead, surprising whiteness. It rendered his aspect tenfold more redoubtable, that a man with hands like these should keep them devoutly folded ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... is no doubt as true of historical movements as of physical evolution. Before Columbus sighted Hispaniola, Portuguese sailors had told tales of some vast island seen by them far in the west. Botticelli had passed out of Filippo Lippi's school, and Leonardo was thirty, before Raphael was born; the printing press had reached England, and Greek had been re-discovered, in the last years of the previous "period"; the Byzantine Empire had fallen; the power of the old Baronage in England and France had been ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... printing-house in Florence forced Cooper to leave his family and go to Marseilles. His letters give some pretty pictures which passed his carriage windows on the way. Of Genoa: "The seaward prospect was glorious." The islands "were borrowed by Leonardo," and a circuit of the city walls was made on horseback. Full of charm and interest was the road "on the margin of the sea"—from Genoa to Nice. In his "Excursions in Italy" appears of Genoa: "I looked back with ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... that essay which first interpreted Botticelli to the modern world, Pater said, after naming the supreme artists, Michelangelo or Leonardo: ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... thee good Leonardo thinke on this, These things being bought and orderly bestowed Returne in haste, for I doe feast to night My best ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... "has the smile of La Gioconda, and hands and hair for Leonardo to paint. Lady Gloucester," he continued, leaving out the Christian name, "is English, like one of Shakespeare's women, Desdemona or Imogen; and Lady Irene has no nationality, she belongs to the dream ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... ideal in beauty, grandeur, and sublimity, and corresponds with the Greek, Roman, and Florentine schools. Modern art as founded upon the intellectual school of the ancient Greeks, became grand, scientific, and severe in the practice of Michael Angelo, and Leonardo da Vinci; graceful, beautiful and expressive in Raphael, Correggio, Dominichino, and Guido; and, aiming at sensible perfection, it attained harmony of colouring and effect in the works of Titian and Tintoret; but it sunk into grossness ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... autumn season of 1724 in October; in December appeared Ariosti's Artaserse, in January Giulio Cesare held the stage till the production of another Handel opera, Rodelinda, which came out on February 13, and ran for thirteen nights. Two more operas, by Ariosti and Leonardo Vinci of Naples, completed the season, but it was evidently Handel who scored the greatest triumphs, unless the honours should more properly go to Cuzzoni, as Rodelinda, and her brown silk gown trimmed with silver. All the old ladies, says Burney, were scandalised with its vulgarity ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... since the beginnin' of time," I scoff. "They laughed at Leonardo da Vinci, Columbus, Edison, a guy named Durante. Even the guy who first sat down at a pianer. We will take what we can git, pal, and then come back ...
— Operation Earthworm • Joe Archibald
... as a reed. To kneel upon the ground where Dante trod, To breathe the air of immortality From Angelo and Raphael—TO BE— Each sense new-quickened by a demi-god. To hear the liquid Tuscan speech at whiles, From citizen and peasant, to behold The heaven of Leonardo washed with gold— Would I had waked ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... vanished, while the semblance remained in debased outline. Nothing can be more fatal than to make a canon of art, to render precise and exact the laws of aesthetics. Great men, it is true, made the attempt. Leonardo, for instance, gives the recipe for drawing anger and despair. His "Trattato della Pintura"[19] describes the gestures appropriate for an orator addressing a multitude, and he gives rules for making a tempest or a deluge. He had a scientific ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... we always value him especially who has placed new scientific conquests at the disposal of art. Palma Vecchio painted by the side of Titian, but he is only a minor master; Botticelli remained of the generation before Leonardo, but he is one of the immortal great. Paolo Ucello, by his study of perspective, made a distinct advance in pictorial science, but his interest for us is purely historic; Fra Angelico made no advance whatever, but he practised consummately the current art ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... no lack of art education in Italy. Curiously enough, the date of the opening of the Bolognese Academy coincides as nearly as may be with the complete decadence of Italian painting. The academic system trains boys to study other people's works rather than nature, and, as Leonardo da Vinci so well says, it makes them nature's grandchildren and not her children. This I believe is at any rate half the secret of ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... was putting the legends of the Virgin and St. Dominic into colour in Umbria, Giovanni Dominici together with Leonardo Dati, master-general of the Order, was negotiating with the Bishop of Fiesole and Pope Gregory XII. to again obtain possession of the convent founded by Dominici. It was only in 1418 that the Fiesolan bishop acceded to their request, on condition that the Dominicans would make him ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... Augustus John, Beardsley, Courbet, Daumier, Maillol, Chavannes and Millet, particularly Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rodin and Blake, has been marked. The Silver Birch group has never tired of extolling the great names of Rembrandt, Duerer, El Greco, Van Eyck, Goya, Leonardo, Michael ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... enchantment of color deepens the farther and interior horizon with most men,—whether it is the atmosphere of one's own identity still warming and enriching it, or whether the orbed course of time has dropped the earthy part away, and left only the sunbeams falling there. But Leonardo da Vinci supposed that the sky owed its blue to the darkness of vast space behind the white lens of sunlit air; and perhaps where the sea presents through the extent of its depth, as it slips over into other hemispheres, tangents with the illumined atmosphere beyond, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... study of Greek and Latin classics stimulated a longing for the beautiful in art and literature. Fourteenth-century Italian writers, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, found increasing interest in their work. Sixteenth-century artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Raphael show their magnificent response to a world that had ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... the most hushed of all temples—that an excursion to look at pictures would have but half expressed my afternoon. I had looked at pictures, looked and looked again, at the vast Veronese, at Murillo's moon-borne Madonna, at Leonardo's almost unholy dame with the folded hands, treasures of the Salon Carre as that display was then composed; but I had also looked at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history, as a still-felt past ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... first principles of hydrostatics. It is remarkable that he did not extend his researches into the phenomena of motion, whether spontaneous or produced by force. The stationary condition of the human intellect is most strikingly illustrated by the fact that not until the time of Leonardo was any substantial advance made on his discovery. To sum up in one sentence the most characteristic feature of ancient and medieval science, we see a notable contrast between the precision of thought implied in the construction and demonstration of ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... Leonardo da Vinci was, doubtless, his greatest inspiration, and it was from this master-student of nature that the young man learned, with new enthusiasm, the value of going directly to Nature herself. The fruit of this new study is a group of lovely ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... afflict us with. It is an affliction, however, for which there is no remedy, because you want to see the things, and would be very sorry if you went home without having done so. From Venice we went to Milan to see the cathedral and Leonardo da Vinci's 'Last Supper.' The former is superb, and of the latter I am convinced, from the little that remains of it, that it was the greatest picture the world ever saw. We shall run back to Rome for Holy Week, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... Leonardo da Vinci is said to have been four years employed upon the portrait of Mona Lisa, a fair Florentine, without being able to come up to the idea of ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... the masterpieces of Michel Angelo, Guercino, Titian, Paul Veronese, Correggio, Albarro, the two Carracci, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci." [Footnote: This wonderful banner was hung up in the hall of the Directory while the members of the latter were occupying the Luxemburg. It afterward accompanied the three consuls to the Tuileries, and was preserved there in the ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... as a rule it is thick and heavy, but there are copies on a good paper of a much lighter quality. The illustrations drawn by his friend and fellow countryman, van Calcar, are very much in advance of anything previously seen, except those of Leonardo. The title-page, one of the most celebrated pictures in the history of medicine, shows Vesalius in a large amphitheatre (an imaginary one of the artist, I am afraid) dissecting a female subject. He is demonstrating the abdomen to a group of students ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... scenes in which the Apostles appear are modeled more or less after the great religious paintings, especially those of the Bavarian artist, Albrecht Duerer. The Last Supper is a living representation of the famous painting of Leonardo da Vinci in the refectory at Milan. Peter and Judas are here brought into sharp contrast. Next to Christ, is the slender figure of the beloved disciple. The characters of the different Apostles are placed in bold relief. We are at once interested in the fine face of Andreas Lang, the Apostle ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... head in wax, of unknown date, but supposed to be either of the best Greek age, or a work of Raphael or Leonardo. It is ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... On the Improvement of the Genius, illustrated in the characters of Lord Bacon, Mr. Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, and Leonardo da Vinci.—We have not been able to learn, what papers in the Guardian were written by him, besides Number 37, Vol. I. which contains Remarks ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... neighbour and rival. Brussels, which had been gradually asserting itself as a weaving community, from that date absorbed most of the trade of Arras, and thence forwards, till Henri IV. established the works of the Savonnerie, Brussels led European taste, and employed the best artists. Brussels employed Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna, Giovanni da Udine, Raphael, and later, Rubens and the great Dutch painters, to design cartoons for tapestry works. Raphael's pupil, Michael Coxsius, of Mechlin, superintended the copying of his master's cartoons. Shortly afterwards, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... ruled the destiny of nearly all the most famous of Leonardo da Vinci's works. Two of the three most important were never completed, obstacles having arisen during his life-time, which obliged him to leave them unfinished; namely the Sforza Monument and the Wall-painting of the Battle of Anghiari, while the third—the picture of the Last Supper at Milan—has ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... dramatic, and at its worst it is horrible with a vulgar material horror. The end of "Titus Andronicus" is not so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo da Vinci: "Cosa bella mortal passa, e non d'arte," and the action of the play is intended as a symbol of the possessing and destroying mastery of art and of beauty. But the idea is materialised into a form of grotesque horror, and all the charm of the atmosphere and the grace of the ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... and ignorance had raised them above the anecdote, and they had become epics, whether by intensity of religious belief—as in the case of the monk of Fiesole—or by being given sublime artistic form—for paganism was not yet dead in the world to witness Leonardo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto. To these painters Biblical subjects were a mere pretext for representing man in all his attributes; and when the same subjects were treated by the Venetians, they were transformed in a pomp ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... a mountain spring, were not clarified without an effort. The faculty on which Hawthorne depended for this, as every artist does, was his imagination, and imagination is as easily disturbed as the electric needle. There is no fine art without sensitiveness. We see it in the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, a man who could bend horseshoes in his hands; and Bismarck, who was also an artist in his way, confessed to the same mental disturbance from noise and general conversation, which Hawthorne felt at Brook Farm. It was ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... been disdained by the greatest minds. They were rather the healthful diversion of their leisure hours. Even the stern and rugged-natured artist, Annibale Caracci, was famous for his humorous inventions, and the good Leonardo da Vinci esteemed them as most useful exercises. We all remember the group of the Laocoon that Titian sketched with apes, and those whole humorous poems in lines found in Herculaneum, where Anchises and AEneas are represented with the heads of apes and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... chance of Nature's inscrutable working, the babe of the tenement came into the world endowed with the greater possibilities of the two, if the tenement mother upon her mean bed bore into the world in her agony a spark of divine fire of genius, the soul of an artist like Leonardo da Vinci, or of a poet like Keats, is it less than a calamity that it should die—choked by conditions which only ignorance and greed ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... [50] IN Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned by name—Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance only, but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for people have begun ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... plainer the bronze-gold of their slopes. Not far off, the enchanted lakes slumber. It seems that an emblazonment fluctuates from their waters, and writhing above the crags which imprison them drifts athwart a sky sometimes a little chill—Leonardo's pensive sky of shadowed amethyst—again of a flushed blue, whereupon float great clouds, silken and ruddy, as in the backgrounds of Veronese's pictures. The beauty of the light lightens and beautifies the over-heavy opulence of ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... dislikes wine or pictures or human faces, that seem delightful and beautiful to others. I am not aware of any method whereby I can prove that the most perfect claret is better than zoedone in flavour, or that the most exquisite creation of Botticelli or Leonardo is more beautiful than the cuts on the sides of railway novels. Again, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... regular profession of transcribers, who may be looked upon as the precursors of printers. Numbered among them were some who had great fame for transcribing;—learned men, who knew Latin almost, if not quite, as well as they knew their mother-tongue, Cosimo of Cremona, Leonardo Giustiniani of Venice, Guarino of Verona, Biondo Flavio, Gasparino Barzizza, Sarzana, Niccoli, Vitturi, Lazarino Resta, Faccino Ventraria, and some others;—in fact, a host; for nearly all the literary men, in consideration of the enormous sums they obtained for copies of the ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... place for all worlds."(7) Here, then, we see this earliest of paleontologists studying the fossil-bearing strata of the earth, and drawing from his observations a marvellously scientific induction. Almost two thousand years later another famous citizen of Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, was independently to think out similar conclusions from like observations. But not until the nineteenth century of our era, some twenty-four hundred years after the time of Xenophanes, was the old ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... But then the best and most upright of men sought, without any scruples whatever, the presence and favors of the Borgias. Pinturicchio and Perugino painted for Alexander VI, and the most wonderful genius of the century, Leonardo da Vinci, did not hesitate to enter the service of Caesar Borgia as his engineer, to erect fortresses for him in the same Romagna which he had appropriated by such ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... I spoke of as coming two hundred years later is Leonardo da Vinci. True he is best known as an artist, but if you read his works you will come to the conclusion that he was the most scientific artist who ever lived. He teaches the laws of perspective (then new), of light and shade, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... beauty of it! Once I remember seeing him next to the Bishop's wife; I've got a little sketch of that duet somewhere... Well, he was simply magnificent, a born ruler; what a splendid condottiere he would have made, in gold armor, with a griffin grinning on his casque! You remember those drawings of Leonardo's, where the knight's face and the outline of his helmet combine in one monstrous saurian profile? He always reminded ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... away from scientific investigation, it was among their contemporaries at the revival of learning that there began to arise fruitful thought in this field. Then it was, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, that Leonardo da Vinci, as great a genius in science as in art, broached the true idea as to the origin of fossil remains; and his compatriot, Fracastoro, developed this on the modern lines of thought. Others in other parts of Europe took up the idea, and, while mixing with it many ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... to Milan! The conveyance that bore him to Leonardo's city was plain and overcrowded, but in it he had found Isabella. And Rome, Rome, eternal, never-to-be-forgotten Rome, where so long as we dwell there, we grow out of ourselves, increase in strength and intellectual power, and which makes us wretched ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is no personal character in true Greek art:—abstract ideas of youth and age, strength and swiftness, virtue and vice,—yes: but there is no individuality; and the negative holds down to the revived conventionalism of the Greek school by Leonardo, when he tells you how you are to paint young women, and how old ones; though a Greek would hardly have been so discourteous to age as the Italian is in his canon of it,—"old women should be represented as passionate and hasty, after the manner ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... tubes, pulleys, and wheels. The learned Charles Patin, in his scientific travels, records, among other valuable productions of art, a cherry-stone, on which were engraven about a dozen and a half of portraits! Even the greatest of human geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci, to attract the royal patronage, created a lion which ran before the French monarch, dropping fleurs de lis from its shaggy breast. And another philosopher who had a spinnet which played and stopped at command, might have made a revolution in the arts and sciences, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... he was appointed director of the British National Gallery in succession to Sir W. Boxall, R.A. During the twenty years that he held this post he was responsible for many important purchases, among them Leonardo da Vinci's "Virgin of the Rocks," Raphael's "Ansidei Madonna," Holbein's "Ambassadors," Van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Charles I., and the "Admiral Pulido Pareja," by Velasquez; and he added largely to the noted series of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Government, Laws, Languages, Customs, Manners, Habits, Shape, and Inclinations of the Natives. With an Account of many other adjacent Islands, and several remarkable Voyages through the Streights of Magellan, and in other Parts. Written in Spanish by Bartholomew Leonardo Argensola, Chaplain to the Empress, and Rector of Villahermosa. Now translated into English; and illustrated with a ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... driving by our fields and thinking of the impossibility of such a life: I was thinking too that I would come to you and tell you of the mice.... Paris, Nice, Monaco, costumes, English perfumes, wine, Leonardo da Vinci, neo-classicism, lovers, what are they? With you everything is just ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... were to pass before another man was to take up the horse as a serious scientific study; and this was Leonardo da Vinci, a man in many ways very much like Aristotle. The distinguishing feature in these men—the thing that differentiates them from other men—was the great outpouring sympathy with every living creature. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... its effect, though evanescent as a vision the brain sometimes retains of a dream, and as senseless in the cold light of reason as Monna Sidonia's invocation at the Witches' Sabbath: (Romance of Leonardo ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... back to mythological times, without dwelling on Archytas of Tarentum, we find, in the works of Dante of Perugia, of Leonardo da Vinci and Guidotti, the idea of machines made to move through the air. Two centuries and a half afterwards inventors began to multiply. In 1742 the Marquis de Bacqueville designed a system of wings, tried it over the Seine, ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... cotta, movie-films, telephones, and printed matter than those Florentines did, but we have, with our 100,000,000 inhabitants, yet to produce that little town, her Dante, her Andrea del Sarto, her Michael Angelo, her Leonardo da Vinci, her Savonarola, her Giotto, or the group who followed Giotto's picture. Florence had a marvelous energy—re-lease experience. All our industrial formalism, our conventionalized young manhood, our schematized universities, ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Examined by Sir Leonardo Spaghetti Coyne, Mr. Hole said that he was not aware that the mortality among monkeys employed in the piano-organ industry during the late War was excessive. But he agreed that the fearlessness shown by the monkeys at the Zoo in the course of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... carry their calculations back as far as the fourteenth century when algebra seems to have become for the first time the standard measure of mechanical progress in western Europe; for not only Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, but even artists like Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Albert Durer worked by mathematical processes, and their testimony would probably give results more exact than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare; but, to save trouble, one might tentatively carry back the same ratio of acceleration, or retardation, to the year 1400, with ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Think of what Florence was at this time, and how an artist must have thrilled at its very name! Beautiful as a flower, with her marble palaces, her fine churches, her lily-like bell-tower! What a charm was added when within her walls Leonardo da Vinci was painting, Michael Angelo carving, Savonarola preaching. In the early years of Raphael's apprenticeship, the voice of the preacher had been silenced, but still, "with the ineffable left hand," Da Vinci painted, and still the marble chips dropped from Angelo's chisel as a David ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... analyze its charms for myself. It is full of distinction, though the only really beautiful feature in it is the brow, broad and low, from which her hair rolls back in that long, full sweep. About her lips, there is the fulness that Leonardo gave his Mona Lisa, and the lips have the same subtle curves, with a smile whose meaning is often of dubious interpretation, and tempts the eyes of her companion to return to them again and again ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... paper and shut up in a monastery, because he is undertaking to answer questions which will not be asked until five centuries after his death. Perhaps the supreme man of genius is he who, like Virgil, Leonardo, or Shakespeare, has a message for his own time and a message for all times, a message which is for ever renewed for every ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... his third law, that there was a direct relation between weight and velocity. That man gave us a key to heaven. That man opened its infinite book, and we now read it, and he did more good than all the theologians that ever lived. I have not time to speak of the others—of Galileo, of Leonardo da Vinci, and of hundreds of ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... are as follows: In his treatise on the casting of cannons Don Ramon speaks of a certain invention called Thunder, made by Leonardo da Vinci, your master, and says that it might be applied to ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... literature than his master. Matteo Bandello was born at the end of the fifteenth century at Castelnuovo di Scrivia near Tortona. He lived mainly in Milan, at the Dominican monastery of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo painted his "Last Supper." As he belonged to the French party, he had to leave Milan when it was taken by the Spaniards in 1525, and after some wanderings settled in France near Agen. About 1550 he was appointed Bishop of Agen by Henri II., and he ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter |
