Continuing yesterday’s post on a Short Biography of Leonardo da Vinci, today we turn to Leonardo’s artistic legacy, and discuss his influence in the history of art.

Leonardo’s advances were more technical and theoretical, which is logical, as he considered himself first a scientist and engineer, then a musician performing on the lira da braccio, and only lastly an artist—in some circles he was better known as a mathematician than a painter.  His technical interests were exemplified in his Last Supper: he was more interested in experimenting with new techniques, in his use of oil paints on a dry plaster wall (the opposite of the tried-and-true fresco method of tempera paint on a wet plaster wall), than he was in creating a painting that would be certain to last.  But while painting fell low on his list of passions, the puzzle of how to approach something in a new and better way provided a great stimulus.  He seemed more excited about designing a method for casting his colossal bronze horse monument for the Sforza family, the mechanics and physics of such a literally enormous undertaking, than he was about seeing the finished product.  This is evidenced by the fact that not a single sculpture by Leonardo survives.  Though he worked as a military architect, his advances were likely technical, structural, and partial rather than our modern concept of an architect designing an entire building, or in this case, a fortress.  As with his sculpture, not one building exists that is definitively attributed to Leonardo.

Ironically, his greatest influence came in painting.  He did not wholly invent, but he popularized and advanced several techniques with which he would later be associated.  The concept of aerial or atmospheric perspective is an optic phenomenon in which landscapes and objects farther into the distance appear blurrier to the eye than those nearer to us, as we see them through layers of atmosphere.  The farther away from the viewer, the “fuzzier” the outlines appear until, at a certain point, given a hazy day or a landscape with polluted air, we can see no further.  Leonardo was not the first to paint atmospheric perspective; Jan van Eyck had done so a generation earlier in his 1432 Ghent Altarpiece, but Leonardo brought the technique to Italy.  The background of the Mona Lisa is a defining example of this atmospheric perspective.

A part of the physical execution of the illusion of atmospheric perspective in painting was the use of sfumato.  This technique features the softening of paint to de-accentuate lines, and angles, and allow adjacent colors to intermingle.  To create the sfumato effect (meaning “vanishing,” literally into smoke, fuma) entails swirling one’s paintbrush, often when it is dry or nearly dry, over recently-laid paint, in order to disperse the pigment and “cloud” the edges.  Another technique is to paint a translucent dark color and then, while this is still wet, apply an opaque white over the dark color to disperse it.  This increases the sensuality and the dream-like quality (recall television show dream sequences from the 1980s, when the edges of the screen would be blurred to indicate that we are seeing a dream).  An equivalent system in photography would be a low-contrast photograph.

Alongside sfumato, Leonardo used chiaroscuro, the juxtaposition of light and dark (chiaro is Italian for “clear” or “light,” and scuro means “dark,” “shadowy,” or “obscured”), specifically the emergence of figures from darkness into light.  Chiaroscuro heightens drama: imagine a dark stage in a blacked-out auditorium, with a single spotlight shining on a face in profile.  Now imagine that same stage with all of the lights on, including the house lights, and an actor simply standing on stage.  That diffused lighting was commonplace in the 15^th century, before the use of a dramatic, single light-source picking out details, leaving the rest in shadow.  Leonardo used this technique, although it did not reach its dramatic peak until the Baroque, a century later, when Caravaggio took it to an extreme, essentially painting the darkened stage mentioned above, eliminating any background in favor of an amorphous blackness with figures picked out by what appears to be a sort of spot-lighting.

Leonardo’s other artistic advances were drawn from science, and were typified by close observation.  We might consider that the three techniques mentioned above: atmospheric perspective, sfumato, and chiaroscuro, are as much about calculating what the eye sees, and the mechanics of how to reproduce it in paint, as they are about art in and of itself.  Likewise Leonardo’s extensive use of drawing was based on recording information and observation scientifically.  He practiced caricature, accentuating aspects of faces for dramatic effect, and categorizing personality by physiognomy.  Along with Michelangelo he participated in some of the earliest autopsies of cadavers by artists, to learn the details of musculature and anatomy—the two artists were only able to dissect in secret in the hospital of Santo Spirito in Florence, for it was illegal to “desecrate” Christian remains.  He delicately copied what he saw, creating the first known drawing of a fetus in a womb and of ligaments in a flayed human hand.

These drawings and notes were kept in an invaluable series of notebooks all in a sort of cipher, written out left-handed (this was highly unusual at the time, as those born left-handed were trained to use their right hands; lefties were considered suspicious and unholy, “sinister”).  The notes were further encoded with “mirror writing,” written so that the text could be read correctly only in a mirror reflection.  His notebooks brim with ideas, many of them still scientifically acceptable.  These include the mechanics of blood circulation, the effect of the moon on tides, theories about continent formation to fossil shells, hydraulics (he invented the hydrometer) to methods of making canals out of rivers, from the aerodynamics of birds to the construction of machine guns and tanks.  He anticipated inventions like flying machines centuries before they were actually made—the technical abilities were not yet there, but his concepts certainly were.  We might attribute to him the obvious but then innovative trick of simply observing the natural world closely, and documenting it with as great accuracy and detail as possible.

Leonardo has become known as the quintessential “Renaissance man” for working in a variety of fields, from science to engineering to architecture to musical performance to sculpture to painting.  But it should be noted that his range of activities was not atypical during the Early Modern period.  Today we tend to assume a person can only be good at one thing—you’re either an actor or a musician or an accountant or a soccer player.  We regard with suspicion those who try to engage in multiple activities at more than a hobby level (when Michael Jordan or Deon Sanders switched from basketball and football respectively to play baseball, it was seen as an oddity).  Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Verrocchio, van Eyck, Vasari—these and many great artists of the Renaissance were tasked with a variety of roles.  Raphael and Michelangelo were architects, painters, archaeologists (in charge of excavations around the Vatican), curators (supervising the Vatican collection of art and antiquities), and illustrators.  Raphael also wore the hat of a courtier and, as such, was involved in politics.  Michelangelo was of course a masterful sculptor above all.  While it was not unusual in the Renaissance to participate in various activities, the breadth of Leonardo’s interests and the extent of his abilities, including not only various artistic media (it stands to reason that a good draughtsman could be a good painter), but to achieve excellence in science, music, and engineering, was not ordinary at all.

This is the second in a series of excerpts from the new book, The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World’s Most Famous Painting, written by Noah Charney and published by ARCA Publications.  It tells the complete criminal history of the Mona Lisa, including the true story of the famous 1911 theft by Vincenzo Peruggia, the 100th anniversary of which is August 21.  Another installment will be published tomorrow, on Leonardo’s artistic legacy.  All profits from the sale of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa support charity.  To order a copy, click here.  To read the first installment, click here.

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