Quotes About Leonardo

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

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?

Leonardo had a free-range mind that merrily wandered across all the disciplines of the arts, sciences, engineering, and humanities. His knowledge of how light strikes the retina helped inform the perspective in The Last Supper, and on a page of anatomical drawings depicting the dissection of lips he drew the smile that would reappear in the Mona Lisa. He knew that art was a science and that science was an art.

Leonardo may have gone to work with Borgia at the behest of Machiavelli and Florence's leaders as a gesture of goodwill, similar to the way he had been dispatched twenty years earlier to Milan as a diplomatic gesture to Ludovico Sforza. Or he may have been sent as a way for Florence to have an agent embedded with Borgia's forces. Maybe it was both. But either way, Leonardo was no mere pawn or agent. He would not have gone to work for Borgia unless he wanted to.

Leonardo's interest in machinery was linked to his fascination with motion.

He was still Leonardo, always pursuing a curiosity, less passionate about tying up loose ends.

As the New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik once wrote, "Leonardo remains weird, matchlessly weird, and nothing to be done about it."11

I started by making pilgrimages to see the originals in Milan, Florence, Paris, Seattle, Madrid, London, and Windsor Castle. That followed Leonardo's injunction to begin any investigation by going to the source: "He who can go to the fountain does not go to the water-jar.

For Leonardo, this talent may have been connected to growing up with a love of nature while not being overly schooled in received wisdom.

movimiento y la emoción, las dos columnas gemelas del arte de Leonardo

Para Leonardo, haber nacido fuera del matrimonio propició que no tuviera que ser enviado a una de las «escuelas de latín» que enseñaban los clásicos y las humanidades a los aspirantes a profesionales y a los comerciantes del Quattrocento.

Why would a person whose notebook aphorisms decry killing and whose personal morality led him to be a vegetarian go to work for the most brutal murderer of the era? Partly this choice reflects Leonardo's pragmatism. In a land where the Medici, Sforzas, and Borgias jostled for power, Leonardo was able to time his patronage affiliations well and know when to move on. But there is more. Even as he remained aloof from most current events, he seemed to be attracted to power.

Indifferent to the shifting political agendas of Italy yet attracted to military engineering and strongmen, Leonardo had a chance to live out his military fantasies, which he did until he realized they could become nightmares.

Christianity initially rejected zero, but trade would soon demand it. The man who reintroduced zero to the West was Leonardo of Pisa. The son of an Italian trader, he traveled to northern Africa. There the young man-better known as Fibonacci-learned Mathematics from the Muslims and soon became a good mathematician in his own right.

I went to the Louvre in Paris, and I saw all the paintings and the Mona Lisa. You don't really see something like that every day. I was looking at it, and everything else in the room just shut out. Like, Leonardo Da Vinci painted this thing - this is unreal that he touched that. It had this crazy effect on me.

Leonardo believed his research had the potential to convert millions to a more spiritual life. Last year he categorically proved the existence of an energy force that unites us all. He actually demonstrated that we are all physically connected… that the molecules in your body are intertwined with the molecules in mine… that there is a single force moving within all of us.

Leonardo da Vinci had gained his expertise in the human form by exhuming corpses and dissecting their musculature.

Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because by means of it one comes to the fruits of mathematics.

I didn't know what types of movies I wanted to do. I want to do things that are different. I want to take my time with each role.

Hai ragione - disse la signora, e si alzò. Alta, il busto erompente, le braccia nude fino al folto ciuffo delle ascelle, alata di un profumo in cui un naso più esperto (e una natura meno ardente) avrebbe distinto il Balenciaga dal sudore, per un momento sovrastò il professore come la Vittoria di Samotracia chi sale le scale del Louvre.

vi si trova, lampeggiante nelle tenebre di allora e di oggi, allora di incredibile azzardo ma lasciata cadere con incredibile e adorabile noncuranza, la frase che io considero del più sublime laicismo: "Dopotutto, è un mettere le proprie congetture a ben alto prezzo, il volere, per esse, fare arrostire vivo un uomo". Quell'impagabile "dopotutto", quel ridurre a "congetture" tutte le fanatiche e potenti certezze! (su un passo degli Essais di Montaigne)

Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.

I'm an eclectic individual when it comes to film. I love my Disney: 'Aladdin,' 'The Lion King.' Also, 'Romeo+Juliet,' the Leonardo DiCaprio version.

That sounded so incredibly romantic. Of course, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet had thought the same thing in Titanic . And look how that had ended.