NationStates Jolt Archive

Let us discuss the man and the interesting life he lived.

I still can't believe that he actually designed what are the predecessors to today's modern vehicles, like helicopters.

As an illegitimate child, he was excluded from the Guild of Notaries of his father and grandfather. To think that but for a bizarre twist of fate, Leonardo would have been history's greatest accountant...

Yeah, and Gene Roddenberry designed warp-capable ships. His design for a tank was basically a reinforced tent on wheels. Any flying machine he designed was of little practical use, basically a glider, but the materials available at the time were too heavy.

What he did best was art, remember him for that. If he had any practical ideas for machines, they'd have been made back then. Or do you have evidence of these designs being used, on a tight budget, with materials of the age, to produce useful machines?

His design for a tank was basically a reinforced tent on wheels. Any flying machine he designed was of little practical use, basically a glider, but the materials available at the time were too heavy
I'm using the term predecessor pretty loosley. Besides, who else had thought of these before him?

It was still a pretty nice leap forward

I can't believe how anyone could be as academically diverse as Da Vinci. He did mathematics, painting, engineering, anatomy, and a whole lotta things. He was ahead of his time in everything he did, too. However, I sometimes have to wonder if any of his work actually bore fruit. I mean, even his painting can be described as a 3-D version of Fra Angelico's paintings.

His pyramid design for a parachute was successfully tested a few years back.

Well, the idea of gliders and flying machines dates back thousands of years, the tank is basically inspired by a Roman Army formation called the Tortoise(only in Latin), where the soldiers pull in tight with shields on all exposed sides. These designs were basically mentally exercises from an interested man, not particularly original ones, which we see by analogues coming about independantly later- unless we think the vision of engineers in grubby, oily overalls thumbing through Renaissance sketches isn't too incongruous.

His pyramid design for a parachute was successfully tested a few years back.
Okay. I also heard that when he designed machines, he went into excruciating detail on how they'd work. On his bicycle model, he even designed the gears.

http://www.wga.hu/art/l/leonardo/02/2virg_p.jpg

And what about the little jokes in his paintings, huh? Anyone notice the formation of rocks behind Mary? What shape does it remind you of? And why is John the Baptist giving the benediction to Jesus, instead of the other way around? (Leonardo was a Johannite. )

http://www.mystae.com/restricted/streams/scripts/johannite.html

Anyone notice the formation of rocks behind Mary? What shape does it remind you of?

What?

I am reading the Da Vinci Code now, and if half of it is true, he was an interesting man, to say the least.

What?

I posted a link to DaVinci's Virgin of the Rocks.

I posted a link to DaVinci's Virgin of the Rocks.

I think they might be asking what formation the rocks are taking in the picture.

Yep. I'm not seeing it either. There are just too many rocks and formations can mean many things.

Just behind Mary, there's a great big rock formation in the shadows that looks like a dick and balls.

I still dont see it....


Perhaps you have psychological issues....


Tell me about your father :P

Many of Leonardo's more practical inventions were built for the purposes of demonstrations. He was in the pay of a Medicci who hired him to design weapons of war. He invented the canonball that has a chain inside. It splits in two after being fired and essentially mowes through opposing forces as it spins. However, the majority of his inventions were not seen as practical on the contemporary battlefield and were simply thoughts alnog the way toward developing yet one more weapon he could receive payment for. As a benefactor, the medicci could always throw Leonardo out on his butt because he owned essentially everything DiVinci touched.

Most of what is written in the DiVinci code is true and can be looked up, the symbolism behind the objects is always subject to debate however. Take for instance the rock formation in the painting of the virgen mary... many have suggested the same thing about the empire states building, and the Eiffel tower. I don't have that hang-up, I guess.

Don't bother remembering him as an artist, he only actually completed something like 9 paintings, they are just extremely well known paintings. Remember him instead as a man who as shaped our modern world through nearly every aspect of our lives. Few other humans hold that distinction.

I don't have an electra complex, if that's what you're implying...;)

It's not just The Virgin of the Rocks, though, either. The Last Supper has some weird things going on in it, too. http://www.ocdsrose.com/Last%20Supper%20-%20da%20vinci.JPG

There's a woman to Jesus' right, and there's also a hand holding a knife which belongs to nobody.

http://www.join2day.net/abc/L/leonardo/leonardo3.JPG

There's also the Virgin and Child with St. Anne, in which Jesus appears to be trying to pull the lamb's head off. It's all supposed to be Johannite symbolism, and very often it tends to give Jesus a questionable position in a painting.

[QUOTE=Homocracy]the tank is basically inspired by a Roman Army formation called the Tortoise(only in Latin)QUOTE]

Testudo.

Many of Leonardo's more practical inventions were built for the purposes of demonstrations. He was in the pay of a Medicci who hired him to design weapons of war. He invented the canonball that has a chain inside. It splits in two after being fired and essentially mowes through opposing forces as it spins. However, the majority of his inventions were not seen as practical on the contemporary battlefield and were simply thoughts alnog the way toward developing yet one more weapon he could receive payment for. As a benefactor, the medicci could always throw Leonardo out on his butt because he owned essentially everything DiVinci touched.

Most of what is written in the DiVinci code is true and can be looked up, the symbolism behind the objects is always subject to debate however. Take for instance the rock formation in the painting of the virgen mary... many have suggested the same thing about the empire states building, and the Eiffel tower. I don't have that hang-up, I guess.

Don't bother remembering him as an artist, he only actually completed something like 9 paintings, they are just extremely well known paintings. Remember him instead as a man who as shaped our modern world through nearly every aspect of our lives. Few other humans hold that distinction.

I agree with you on the symbolism and the entertaining but academically dubious way that the DaVinci code uses it. I think it's a bit unfair to write Leonardo off as an artist, though, just because of the volume of his output (since when did quality and quantity become the same thing?). His problem was a low boredom threshhold, so he failed to complete things (like the equestrian bronze for the Visconti, which would have made him the foremost bronze sculptor of his day), but the paintings he DID complete were some of the most important of the period, from the Last Supper to the Portrait of Ginevra de Wassername. There's a reason that they're well-known paintings...

There are two Madonnas of the Rocks BTW, one in the National Gallery in London, one in the Musee du Louvre in Paris. AFAIK the Parisian one is the later of the two. Brown (in the DaVinci Code) makes a lot of the difference between the two, but then he thinks that the Merovingian Kings of France are descended from Christ, so I'm inclined to take him with a pinch of salt.

He was quite an important military engineer. The tanks and helicopters are flights of fancy, to be sure, but he was a skilled cartographer (he got in with the Visconti by drawing a map of Milan as an aerial view) and designer of fortifications.

He also did a lot of pioneering work on anatomy, which was closely connected with art at the time (Michelangelo also used to dissect corpses).

There's a woman to Jesus' right, and there's also a hand holding a knife which belongs to nobody.


The woman is the apostle John, who is conventionally depicted as young, long-haired and clean-shaven. A lot of Renaissance artists painted young men in a fairly androgynous way (take a look at some of the other disciples - the ones without beards at least). There is a considerable school of thought that Leonardo was gay, BTW. The problem if you want to make it Mary Magdalene is that there are only 13 people around the table, which is the 12 disciples and Jesus, just as it says in the Bible. Why put the Magdalene into a scene in which she wasn't present? And if you believe it IS her and that she was married to Jesus, why has the artist got her turned away, instead of doing some conventional representation of affection like resting her head on his shoulder or hand on his arm? I also can't see the monks of Santa Maria Della Grazie putting up with it, either, nor paying him in that case. Don't get me wrong - I have no problem with the idea of Magdalene being Jesus' wife, the wedding at Cana being his own etc. I just don't think Leonardo could have got away with putting it in a painting, even if he believed it (which there is no evidence for).

The hand is interesting. At first I thought the artist had changed his mind about the positioning of Judas' right hand, and the original that he painted had been revealed during cleaning, but it would also be quite symbolically approproate for Judas to have a knife behind his back, both literally as well as metaphorically. It does look a bit too far over to be John's hand, doesn't it?

I think unless you either knew the artist, or are the artist, then you are either interpretting, or quoting intreptation. You can not know who each individual is as DiVinci did not label them. Some you can infer (subject to your interpretation) ie Jashua, but the artist leaves it to your mind who each individual is, and lets you fill in the story. The sign of an excellent artist.

And if, as you say, it is John, then John's working on a nice cleavage line that Renaissance artists did not usually paint on men. And as everyone seems to agree that Leonardo was a master I doubt he'd have simply erred in putting that detail in.

And if, as you say, it is John, then John's working on a nice cleavage line that Renaissance artists did not usually paint on men. And as everyone seems to agree that Leonardo was a master I doubt he'd have simply erred in putting that detail in.

I really can't see the cleavage in the painting. Also bear in mind this painting has also been badly damaged and very heavily restored.

Also - if you believe Jesus was a Johannite, where the heck is John in the painting if not sitting next to Jesus because you've painted Mary Magdalene there? You can't have it both ways.

The hand - I've just got it. It's Peter's. His left hand is clutching John's tunic, the right is on his hip and twisted backwards, clutching the knife, so that Judas can have appear to have a knife behind his back.

I wasn't trying to have it both ways, I say I don't know who any of the people are except that I assume Joshua is in the middle.

And someone else claimed that DiVinci, not Joshua was a Johannite

Let us discuss the man and the interesting life he lived.

I still can't believe that he actually designed what are the predecessors to today's modern vehicles, like helicopters.

I consider him overrated. So he drew blueprints to machines nobody could build and that would never EVER work in the form he deviced.. I guarantee that several of his contemporaries did the same, but did not have the fortune of guessing correctly. It is part of the inventive nature in humans to dream ahead. I have drawn fictionary spacecrafts on the cover of several of my schoolbooks. Would you consider me a genius if I happened to get one of the designs romotely alike some futuristic machine?
Now if he had uncovered the principle behind rotary winged flight or discovered Bernuolis force that enables a wing heavier than air to fly I would have bowed deeply. Alas, he only dreamed up machines that would never work.

I wasn't trying to have it both ways, I say I don't know who any of the people are except that I assume Joshua is in the middle.

And someone else claimed that DiVinci, not Joshua was a Johannite

Mea Culpa on the Johannite thing. Typing too fast.

You don't need to know who the people are because there is a common symbolistic language to Renaissance art. It's the Last Supper. There are 13 people. They will be Jesus and the disciples. Jesus will be in the middle. Peter will have a grey beard and curly grey hair. Judas will look dark and saturnine (and in some paintings will be on the opposite side of the table to everyone else or otherwise have some symbolism related to his coming betrayal). Thomas will look sceptical. John will be young and clean shaven and will be close to Jesus, probably next to him (because he was regarded as the greatest chronicler of the life of Jesus, and because he was falsely believed at the time to have written Revelation and so prophesied the Second Coming). And so on. If someone today did a cartoon of a man with cowboy boots and a US flag kicking the butt of a darker-skinned man with a beret and a black moustache, we wouldn't need labels to know it was George Bush and Saddam Hussein. Renaissance art works the same way. There are common shorthands. I don't argue that there isn't any room for interpretation. I do resist the argument that the interpretation is a free for all and anyone's guess is as good as any other.

Probably the biggest shocker of the painting, at least for the time, is that no-one has a halo. Only one (early) Leonardo painting has a halo in it, and this may indicate a rationalist tendency in his art.

Just take a look on the site (in french) of Le Clos Lucé (France), the last place in the life of the artist :
http://www.vinci-closluce.com

models of his machines :

http://www.vinci-closluce.com/machines.htm

I consider him overrated. So he drew blueprints to machines nobody could build and that would never EVER work in the form he deviced.. I guarantee that several of his contemporaries did the same, but did not have the fortune of guessing correctly. It is part of the inventive nature in humans to dream ahead. I have drawn fictionary spacecrafts on the cover of several of my schoolbooks. Would you consider me a genius if I happened to get one of the designs romotely alike some futuristic machine?
Now if he had uncovered the principle behind rotary winged flight or discovered Bernuolis force that enables a wing heavier than air to fly I would have bowed deeply. Alas, he only dreamed up machines that would never work.

He invented the lock system that is used today in almost the exact form he designed. He designed several machines that were scientifically sound but the materials were unavailable like the parachute. And as mentioned earlier he designed several military weapons that are too brutal to be used today. He was a skilled architect as well and designed several buildings. Not quite the same as drawing pictures on your school books.

I saw cleavage there too, but perhaps it's just something to do with the fact that it's a damaged fresco. In any case, I don't think that Da Vinci always depicted John in his paintings. He did, however, do a fairly good job of using the symbolism of his paintings to subtly paint Jesus in a poor light, or maybe just questionable.

As for the marriage to Mary Magdalene, I don't know about that. I wouldn't be upset if it were proven, since I wouldn't deny Jesus the happiness of temporal love, either. The whole Magdalene thing, though, is another morality play that the church has exploited. There are three women Jesus meets who get mentioned, but she has a name. They have an unnamed prostitute, vaguely speaking, and connect this to the name Magdalene. There's no proof that it's the same woman. Urgh. Art and theology should never mix, but for years, that's who paid for it. You can't fault that, though, either. If they hadn't, it's possible nobody else would have funded Da Vinci or Michelangelo.

Leonardo da Vinci invented the scissors. You know, that metal thing we use every day to cut paper and such. Anybody who can invent the scissors is a brilliant man in my book.

I consider him overrated. So he drew blueprints to machines nobody could build and that would never EVER work in the form he deviced.. I guarantee that several of his contemporaries did the same, but did not have the fortune of guessing correctly. It is part of the inventive nature in humans to dream ahead. I have drawn fictionary spacecrafts on the cover of several of my schoolbooks. Would you consider me a genius if I happened to get one of the designs romotely alike some futuristic machine?
Now if he had uncovered the principle behind rotary winged flight or discovered Bernuolis force that enables a wing heavier than air to fly I would have bowed deeply. Alas, he only dreamed up machines that would never work.

Scientist have builded atleast three of his machines and they have worked pretty well. I've seen several documentaries on this issue and I think BBC was behind one of the documentaries. Da Vinci drew things which weren't invented already so when you draw spacecrafts you're just copying what's already invented while Vinci drew machines noone knew about.