Here she is again, but I'm not going to talk about her specifically, except to say that Leonardo Da Vinci never let her out of his hands. (How did he manage that? Presumably, her husband had paid him something for the commission, though probably not the full amount, since Leonardo never delivered the goods!) Did he keep her with him always because she was so wonderful? Did he fall in love with his most famous (today) creation? Or was it that he felt she wasn't finished, and he couldn't bare to let her out into the world?
The concept of "non finito", the art work which is not finished, but is left in that state and displayed as though it were finished, or is considered finished in its unfinished state - a nice paradox, the kind on which art thrives - is something that is associated strongly with Michelangelo (who, by the way, didn't like Leonardo all that much - I believe the feeling was mutual) because of his unfinished sculptures of captive souls, only partially 'freed' from the block of stone, and other work, e.g. his rough pieta, but I always think of Leonardo as the master of non finito, because he finished so little. It's one of the many things I love about him.
The main reason Da Vinci finished so few of the commissions he was given is that he was distracted by, and ultimately more interested in his personal researches into the nature of the world. These investigations have come down to us in a fragmentary state in his notebooks, and he never had any notion, other than fleeting, of collating them for publication. He was clearly a towering genius, his contemporaries knew it, and somehow he got away with stiffing his various patrons, repeatedly starting paintings with a burst of energy and creativity, and then...they just couldn't get him to finish the damn things! (Of course, quite a few of his works that were completed are lost, so that his finished output is available to us is very small.)
So why do I love this? He just didn't give a damn. He was driven through his life by an unquenchable curiosity and a brilliance so intense that he was able to escape out from under the centuries of intellectual dogma (in physics, anatomy, astronomy, mechanics, whatever he chose to look into) which crushed so many. He worked, sought patrons, took care to have a decent income to support his household and retainers, but he was an artist in the modern mode, as he was modern in so many other ways. He didn't care if he didn't finish a painting once his intellectual interest in the problems it presented had waned, or he had solved them; he just wanted to move on to something else that grabbed his attention. Because he was such a towering intellect, he never even approached the status of a dilettante, but he gives succour to those of us who do. Engineer, artist, scientist, anatomist...and slacker? He wasn't in it for the money or the fame! What a guy.
The concept of "non finito", the art work which is not finished, but is left in that state and displayed as though it were finished, or is considered finished in its unfinished state - a nice paradox, the kind on which art thrives - is something that is associated strongly with Michelangelo (who, by the way, didn't like Leonardo all that much - I believe the feeling was mutual) because of his unfinished sculptures of captive souls, only partially 'freed' from the block of stone, and other work, e.g. his rough pieta, but I always think of Leonardo as the master of non finito, because he finished so little. It's one of the many things I love about him.
The main reason Da Vinci finished so few of the commissions he was given is that he was distracted by, and ultimately more interested in his personal researches into the nature of the world. These investigations have come down to us in a fragmentary state in his notebooks, and he never had any notion, other than fleeting, of collating them for publication. He was clearly a towering genius, his contemporaries knew it, and somehow he got away with stiffing his various patrons, repeatedly starting paintings with a burst of energy and creativity, and then...they just couldn't get him to finish the damn things! (Of course, quite a few of his works that were completed are lost, so that his finished output is available to us is very small.)
So why do I love this? He just didn't give a damn. He was driven through his life by an unquenchable curiosity and a brilliance so intense that he was able to escape out from under the centuries of intellectual dogma (in physics, anatomy, astronomy, mechanics, whatever he chose to look into) which crushed so many. He worked, sought patrons, took care to have a decent income to support his household and retainers, but he was an artist in the modern mode, as he was modern in so many other ways. He didn't care if he didn't finish a painting once his intellectual interest in the problems it presented had waned, or he had solved them; he just wanted to move on to something else that grabbed his attention. Because he was such a towering intellect, he never even approached the status of a dilettante, but he gives succour to those of us who do. Engineer, artist, scientist, anatomist...and slacker? He wasn't in it for the money or the fame! What a guy.
3 comments:
da Vinci was one of the most brilliant people our world has ever seen. It's a shame he only lived once.
It gives hope knowing that a Homer,da Vinci, Shakespear or Einstien can show up at any time and shake up our world.
Just reading about The Man, something I hadn't realized was that Einstein kept working his day job,eight hour shifts ,six days a week in a patent office,in fact even after publishing the four papers in 1905 he stayed on, not a slacker of course,but far from a rock star.
Post a Comment