Quotes About Art

In collecting such a medley of ideas, Leonardo was following a practice that had become popular in Renaissance Italy of keeping a commonplace and sketch book, known as a zibaldone. But in their content, Leonardo's were like nothing the world had ever, or has ever, seen. His notebooks have been rightly called "the most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper."3

Leonardo refuted this by arguing that painting is not only an art but also a science. In order to convey three-dimensional objects on a flat surface, the painter needs to understand perspective and optics. These are sciences that are grounded in mathematics. Therefore, painting is a creation of the intellect as well as the hands.

The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings.

Leonardo was experimenting with the trick known as anamorphosis, in which some elements of a work may look distorted when viewed straight on but appear accurate when viewed from another angle. Leonardo occasionally made sketches of the technique in his notebooks.

Walter Isaacson

Among them was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. "I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

Mystery to Leonardo was a shadow, a smile and a finger pointing into darkness.

poetry as a language within a language

Many of the figures in his preparatory drawings are nude; he had come to believe in Alberti's advice that an artist should build a picture of a human body from the inside out, first conceiving of the skeleton, then the skin, then the clothing.

La Bella Principessa: The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Apple was destined to be: poetry connected to engineering, arts and creativity intersecting with technology, design that's bold and simple.

Los artistas buenos copian y los artistas geniales roban"

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.

It's rare that you see an artist in his thirties or forties able to really contribute something amazing," Jobs declared as he was about to turn thirty.

É claro que existiram muitos outros polímatas insaciáveis, e a própria Renascença produziu outros Homens da Renascença. Contudo, nenhum deles pintou a Mona Lisa.

As Osborne famously declared, Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous. Jobs found that approach to be morally appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne. This guy just doesn't get it, Jobs repeatedly railed as he wandered the Apple corridors. He's not making art, he's making shit.

Leonardo was not content merely to measure every aspect of every body part. In addition, he felt compelled to record what occurs when each of these parts moves.

In 1482, the year he turned thirty, Leonardo da Vinci left Florence for Milan, where he would end up spending the next seventeen years.

It seemed to him that the hand was not able to attain to the perfection of art in carrying out the things which he imagined.

This ability to "make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane," Leonardo said, was "the first intention of the painter."3

The result is a whirlwind of drama and emotion. Not only did Leonardo render each of the reactions of those first beholding the Christ child, but he turned the Epiphany into a swirl in which each character is swept by the others' emotions, and then so is the viewer.

Leonardo said so himself. "Intellectual passion drives out sensuality," he wrote in one of his notebooks.

But even when he was engaged in blue-sky thinking, his science was not a separate endeavor from his art. Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it. He had a reverence for the wholeness of nature and a feel for the harmony of its patterns, which he saw replicated in phenomena large and small.

After his excursion into comparative anatomy, Leonardo proceeded to delve deeper into the mechanisms of humans as they smile or grimace (fig. 111). He focused on the role of various nerves in sending signals to the muscles, and he asked a question that was central to his art: Which of these are cranial nerves originating in the brain, and which are spinal nerves?