"Da Vinci" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the head of a valet-de- place to afflict us with. It is an affliction, however, for which there is no remedy, because you want to see the things, and would be very sorry if you went home without having done so. From Venice we went to Milan to see the cathedral and Leonardo da Vinci's 'Last Supper.' The former is superb, and of the latter I am convinced, from the little that remains of it, that it was the greatest picture the world ever saw. We shall run back to Rome for Holy ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... king, her father-in-law, who at that time was very ill indeed, presented him, from time to time, with Italian pictures, knowing that he liked them much, being a friend of the Sieur Raphael d'Urbin and of the Sieurs Primatice and Leonardo da Vinci, to whom he sent large sums of money. She obtained from her family—who had the pick of these works, because at that time the Duke of the Medicis governed Tuscany —a precious picture, painted by a Venetian named Titian (artist to the Emperor Charles, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... in Italian art—therefore no greater in art—than that of Titian. If the Venetian master does not soar as high as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... alternative, that all the inland regions and highlands, in the rocks of which marine shells had been found, had once been covered by the ocean. It is not so surprising, therefore, as it may at first seem, that although such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy took just views of the nature of fossils, the opinion of the majority of their contemporaries set strongly the other way; nor even that error maintained itself long after the scientific grounds of the true interpretation of fossils had been stated, in a manner that left ...
— The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology - Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... especially, he ignores, and caring very little for the Rules of the Toilette, as duly published by the—bon ton journals, uses his razor for mending lead-pencils, and permits his beard to enjoy long vacation rambles. Again: those who first set the example of long beards, Leonardo da Vinci, for example, who painted his own portrait with a full beard a foot long, were men who moved from principle, and I have the belief that were Leonardo ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Signor Paoli, who has written so well upon Venice, is convinced, and the figure of Apollo is certainly free and fair as from a master's hand. Another picture, a Madonna and Child with two companions, is called a Leonardo da Vinci; but Baedeker gives it to Marco d'Oggiano. There is also a Filippino Lippi which one likes to find in Venice, where the prevailing art is so different from his. One of the most charming things here is a little relief of the manger; as pretty a rendering as one could ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... 21. 'The Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci.' A reproduction of the head of our Blessed Lord, taken from the fresco (photograph), is given in the quarto edition of Southwell's complete Poems in the Fuller Worthies' Library—none the less precious that it pathetically reveals the marks ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... figure as a portrait of Tabachetti before I found the V cut upon the hat; I found the V on examining the portrait to see if I could find any signature. It stands next to a second portrait of Leonardo da Vinci by Gaudenzio Ferrari, taken into the Ecce Homo chapel, doubtless, on the demolition of some earlier work by Gaudenzio on or near the same site. I knew of this second portrait of Leonardo da Vinci when I published my first edition, but did not venture to say anything about it, as thinking ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... first of all, for there would be a piquancy in thus employing the cherished possessions of the foe. Could not something be done, for example, with the famous wax bust, the glory of the Kaiser Friedrich Collection, into which LEONARDO DA VINCI, as a finishing touch, crammed an early Victorian waistcoat before delivering the masterpiece to its owner? A really ingenious organiser should be able to make telling use of that, perhaps with a play on the word "investment." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 12, 1917 • Various
... entry into the city of Nuremberg. It is not necessary to inquire whether these stories are true or false; what is certain is that the inventors did not leave their inventions as a legacy to their fellows. For a like reason Leonardo da Vinci, who busied himself with a mechanism which should enable man to operate wings with his legs, and who left a short treatise on the art of flight, has no place in the history. His mechanism is merely a drawing; his treatise remained in manuscript. The adventurers who risked their lives ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... they had been composed solely of eagles' feathers they would have been attracted to the air. This anecdote furnished Dunbar, the Scottish poet, with the subject of one of his rude satires. Leonardo da Vinci about the same time approached the problem in a more scientific spirit, and his notebooks contain several sketches of wings to be fitted to the arms and legs. In the following century a lecture on flying delivered in 1617 by Fleyder, rector of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Windsor), and invited him to Balmoral. The heir-apparent, the late King, admired his talent and relished his society. By the clerical world he was especially esteemed, being looked upon as a second Leonardo da Vinci. And, in fine, Dore must be regarded as an anticipator of the Entente cordiale. "Gustave Dore," his compatriots would say, "he is half an Englishman!" Forty years ago our popular favourite might indeed have believed in the fulfilment of ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... simpering that will feed the spirit of Christendom, but a steady church-patronage of the most skilful and original motion picture artists. Let the Church follow the precedent which finally gave us Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Correggio, Titian, Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... because we by no means agree with the writer in his views of the property of the Crown. The Queen behaved most kindly and liberally on the occasion of the late Exhibition of Mediaeval Art: but that is a very different thing from calling for a transfer of the Holbein or Da Vinci drawings to some ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various
... came into the world endowed with the greater possibilities of the two, if the tenement mother upon her mean bed bore into the world in her agony a spark of divine fire of genius, the soul of an artist like Leonardo da Vinci, or of a poet like Keats, is it less than a calamity that it should die—choked by conditions which only ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... and more alluring are the avenues of imaginative thought which it discloses. It has, more than any other long composition by its author, that quality of symmetry, that symmetria prisca recorded of Leonardo da Vinci in the Latin epitaph of Platino Piatto; and, as might be expected, its mental basis, what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, is as luminous, depth within depth, as the morning air. By its side, the more obviously "profound" poems, Bishop Blougram and the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Botticelli; and Verrocchio taught Lionardo da Vinci, Lorenzo di Credi, and Perugino. Have I not good reason to separate the masters of such pupils from the ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... Impersonality.—Personality is lower than partiality. Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy and God. A legend tells that Leonardo da Vinci was warned that his divine picture of the Last Supper would fade, because he had introduced his personal enemy as Judas, and thus desecrated art by making it serve personal hatred. The legend must be false, Leonardo had ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Renaissance period; and when he comes to modern times he fails to bring out clearly the decisive steps of its growth. And he does not seem to realise that a man might be "progressive" without believing in, or even thinking about, the doctrine of Progress. Leonardo da Vinci and Berkeley are examples. In my Ancient Greek Historians (1909) I dwelt on the modern origin of the idea (p. 253 sqq.). Recently Mr. R. H. Murray, in a learned appendix to his Erasmus and Luther, has developed the thesis that Progress was not grasped in antiquity (though ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... had to assist at an ecclesiastical council in the convent parlor, where Dionea appeared, rather out of place, an amazing little beauty, dark, lithe, with an odd, ferocious gleam in her eyes, and a still odder smile, tortuous, serpentine, like that of Leonardo da Vinci's women, among the plaster images of St. Francis, and the glazed and framed samplers before the little statue of the Virgin, which wears in summer a kind of mosquito-curtain to guard it from the flies, who, as you know, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... this morning was to see the pencil drawings by eminent artists. Of these the Louvre has a very rich collection, occupying many apartments, and comprising sketches by Annibale Caracci, Claude, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michel Angelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, and almost all the other great masters, whether French, Italian, Dutch, or whatever else; the earliest drawings of their great pictures, when they had the glory of their pristine idea directly before their minds' eye,— that idea which inevitably became ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... splendid attire, some of them wearing the bridal crown. It is altogether a curiosity, partaking, indeed, of the general bad taste of the times, but painted with great attention to nature in the minutiae, and resembling Lionardo da Vinci in many particulars, especially in the high finishing, the coloring of the carnations, and the grace, and beauty of some of the heads. The draperies, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... date absorbed most of the trade of Arras, and thence forwards, till Henri IV. established the works of the Savonnerie, Brussels led European taste, and employed the best artists. Brussels employed Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna, Giovanni da Udine, Raphael, and later, Rubens and the great Dutch painters, to design cartoons for tapestry works. Raphael's pupil, Michael Coxsius, of Mechlin, superintended the copying of his master's cartoons. Shortly afterwards, Antwerp, Oudenarde, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... they are the twin creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery; and what in my father is the genius of curiosity—the very essence of all scientific genius—in me is the desire for beauty. Do you remember Pater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, 'curiosity and ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... except Da Vinci's, carries the high associations of oracular and occult wisdom as far as Goethe's does. He hears the voices of "the Mothers" more clearly than other men and in heathen loneliness he "builds up the pyramid ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... indeed had long in his meditations an ideal head of Christ, which he was always talking of executing: "It is here!" he would cry, striking his head. That which baffled the invention, as we are told, of Leonardo da Vinci, who left his Christ headless, having exhausted his creative faculty among the apostles, this imaginative picture of the mysterious union of a divine and human nature, never ceased, even when conversing, to haunt ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... resemblance of its plan to the more famous staircase which adorns the exterior of the wing of Francis I. at the great chateau of Blois in Touraine, which was built almost at the same time, from the designs (as I have attempted to prove elsewhere) of Leonardo da Vinci, and was decorated later on with statues by Jean Goujon. This sculptor was only born the year after St. Maclou's staircase was finished, but the main lines of the structure are so suggestive of the earlier work that I cannot but imagine this fine piece of French Renaissance to ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... the countenance of men under the influence of passion; and often catches the most pleasing hints from subjects of turbulence or deformity. Even bad pictures themselves supply him with useful documents; and, as Leonardo da Vinci has observed, he improves upon the fanciful images that are sometimes seen in the fire, or are accidentally sketched upon a ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... Leonardo da Vinci did not impress Byron—the art of painting never did—this was his most marked limitation. From Milan they wandered down through ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... question clearly. No one before him, in antiquity, in the Middle Age, or in modern times, had seriously asked: What is the value of the distinctions between the arts? Which of them comes first? Which second? Leonardo da Vinci had declared his personal predilection for painting, Michael Angelo for sculpture, but the question had not been philosophically ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... serve it as some delicious fruit to be eagerly swallowed! But how is it possible to get a truth believed? Ah! the greatest of men have been mistaken there!" added the princess, with one of those meaning smiles which the pencil of Leonardo da Vinci alone has rendered. ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... Leonardo da Vinci might have known the art of flying in the air, and might even have practiced it. A statement to this effect, at least, is found in several historians. We have, however, no direct proof of ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... universities in Italy were attracting students from all over Europe, and such men as Linacre and Dr. Caius went down there from England. Raphael was but a young man at the end of the century, but he had done some noteworthy painting before it closed. Leonardo da Vinci was born just about the middle of the century, and did some marvellous work before the end of that century. Michael Angelo was only twenty-five at the close of the century, but he, too, did fine work, even at this early age. Among the other ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... Florence is perhaps unrivalled by any city, excepting Athens, of the ancient or the modern world. [Footnote: In her long roll of fame we find the names of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Macchiavelli, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Amerigo Vespucci, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... artists, whom he had commanded to the capital: Primaticcio brought with him, upon his arrival, more than a hundred antique statues. These art objects were first assembled at Fontainebleau and ornamented the apartments of the king. Among them were Da Vinci's "La Joconde" and Raphael's "Holy ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... predestined for conquering and circumventing others, the finest examples of which are Alcibiades and Caesar (with whom I should like to associate the FIRST of Europeans according to my taste, the Hohenstaufen, Frederick the Second), and among artists, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci. They appear precisely in the same periods when that weaker type, with its longing for repose, comes to the front; the two types are complementary to each other, and spring ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... "If Leonardo da Vinci could have seen this fellow's face just now," thought the artist, "he would not have had to seek so long for his model for the face of Judas. Only for my poniard, my fate would have been settled. This man was ready ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness in any artistic work, had a peculiar fascination. We find it in the mysticism of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle. We find it later in the Italian Renaissance agitating the minds of such men as Leonardo da Vinci. Schiller tried to adjust the balance between form and feeling, and Goethe to estimate the position of self-consciousness in art. Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'emotion remembered in tranquillity' may be taken as an analysis of one ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... there is "The Pope's Poisoner, a Tale of the Borgias." That is a historical romance, I got it up out of Histories of the Renaissance. The hero (Lionardo da Vinci) is the Pope's bravo, and in love with ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... the vehement impulse of birth is assuaged, the spirit of Nature is transfigured into Soul, and Grace is born. This point Art reached, after Leonardo da Vinci, in Correggio, in whose works the sensuous Soul is ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... afterwards saw in Florence, but which, unfortunately, is not now known to exist. Bramante, too, was of his Court at this time, as was Michelangelo Buonarroti, whose superb group of "Mercy," painted for Cardinal de Villiers, had just amazed all Rome. With Pinturicchio, and Leonardi da Vinci—whom we shall see later beside Cesare—Michelangelo was ever held in the highest esteem by ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... scientific investigation, it was among their contemporaries at the revival of learning that there began to arise fruitful thought in this field. Then it was, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, that Leonardo da Vinci, as great a genius in science as in art, broached the true idea as to the origin of fossil remains; and his compatriot, Fracastoro, developed this on the modern lines of thought. Others in other parts of Europe took up the idea, and, while mixing with it ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... his discovery of the true theory of the lever: his surprising merit in these respects is demonstrated by the fact that no advance was made in theoretical mechanics during the eighteen centuries intervening between him and Leonardo da Vinci. Of minor matters not fewer than forty mechanical inventions have been attributed to him. Among these are the endless screw, the screw pump, a hydraulic organ, and burning mirrors. His genius is well indicated by the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Leonardo da Vinci tells us in his celebrated Treatise on Painting that the young artist should first of all learn perspective, that is to say, he should first of all learn that he has to depict on a flat surface objects which are in relief or ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... applied to a book." Above all, you must beware of indirect expressions before a Caledonian. Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blest with a vein of it. Remember you are upon your oath. I have a print of a graceful female after Leonardo da Vinci, which I was showing off to Mr. ****. After he had examined it minutely, I ventured to ask him how he liked MY BEAUTY (a foolish name it goes by among my friends)—when he very gravely assured me, that "he had considerable respect for my character and talents" (so he was pleased to say), ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... artist, architect, engineer, and musician, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who, among other great works, planned and executed some navigable canals in Northern Italy, and who was an observer of rare penetration and judgment, saw how fossil shells were formed, saying that the mud of rivers had covered and penetrated into the interior ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... almost priceless relics of the olden time. Here are also valuable paintings and other works of art, among them Vandyck's portrait of Charles I. and many masterpieces of Rembrandt, Paul Veronese, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, Holbein, and Salvator Rosa. In December, 1871, the great hall and suite of private apartments at Warwick were burnt, but the valuable contents were almost all saved with little injury. The castle was restored by a public subscription. It is built around a large oval-shaped court; the gatehouse ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... with most men,—whether it is the atmosphere of one's own identity still warming and enriching it, or whether the orbed course of time has dropped the earthy part away, and left only the sunbeams falling there. But Leonardo da Vinci supposed that the sky owed its blue to the darkness of vast space behind the white lens of sunlit air; and perhaps where the sea presents through the extent of its depth, as it slips over into other hemispheres, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... barouche, leaning back among the black velvet cushions, her face mellowed by the shade of a small parasol, was a young woman of nineteen or twenty, as beautiful as a da Vinci freshly conceived. The Englishman saw a pair of grave dark eyes which, in the passing, met his and held them. He ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... lyrical rather than dramatic, and at its worst it is horrible with a vulgar material horror. The end of "Titus Andronicus" is not so revolting as the end of "La Gioconda." D'Annunzio has put as a motto on his title-page the sentence of Leonardo da Vinci: "Cosa bella mortal passa, e non d'arte," and the action of the play is intended as a symbol of the possessing and destroying mastery of art and of beauty. But the idea is materialised into a form of grotesque horror, and all the charm of the atmosphere and the grace of the words cannot ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... memor, Defuit mini symmetria prisca. Peregi Quod potui; Veniam da mihi, posteritas. —Lionardo da Vinci's ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... she had wrought heroically in the past for emancipation. She was busy with her hands, busier with her brain, and her spiritual nature was like a spring of sweet waters, overflowing in bounteous blessing on all around. Of the great painter Leonardo da Vinci, his biographer says: "He always saw four things he wanted to do at once." Our friend always saw many more. Her mind was teeming not only with ideals as beautiful as those of the great artist, but with practical plans to educate the ignorant, and lift ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Dante, a Brunelleschi, and a Michael Angelo,—a Fiesole, a Boccaccio, and a Botticelli, and we find that eagerness in the pursuit of the knowledge of men and things, which was so characteristic of them, summed up in a Macchiavelli and a Lionardi da Vinci." ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... studying mechanics. He told me himself that much as he liked landscape painting he thought an artist—a real artist, he said—ought to be versed in ancillary sciences; in fortification, wood-carving, architecture, and so on. Leonardo da Vinci, you know. Well, one day they could not get into his bedroom. They broke open his door and discovered that he had constructed a perfectly-formed guillotine; the knife had fallen; his head lay on one side and his body on the other. You may well be surprised. I went carefully into that ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... instructor of Leonardo da Vinci, accomplished several important pieces of jewelery in his youth: cope-buttons and silver statuettes, chiefly, which were so successful that he determined to take up the career of a sculptor. Ghirlandajo, as is well known, was ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous men in history—as a man more famous than Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart—because posterity has elected him the member for the Renaissance. Most great artists live ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... abstracted to adorn those Palaces which Royalty still condescends to inhabit, while worse and worst are removed from those and deposited here; yet it was interesting to me to gaze at undoubted originals by Raphael, Titian, Poussin, Rembrandt, Teniers, Albert Durer, Leonardo da Vinci, Tintoretto, Kneller, Lely, &c., though not their master-pieces. The whole number of pictures, &c. here exhibited is something over One Thousand, probably five-sixths Portraits. Some of these have a strong Historical interest apart from their artistic ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... people study the photographs of murdered people in the Sunday papers. "She is very beautiful...." But he should not have said that. Now when he brought Ellen to Marion he would hear her say to herself, as tourists do when they see a Leonardo da Vinci, "Well, that's not my idea of beauty, I must say!" and he would stop loving her. But Ellen was saying, "I thought she would be. You know, Richard, you are quite uncommon-looking. But tell me, what is she like?" Of course he might have known she ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... have been an engaging subject. Think of what Florence was at this time, and how an artist must have thrilled at its very name! Beautiful as a flower, with her marble palaces, her fine churches, her lily-like bell-tower! What a charm was added when within her walls Leonardo da Vinci was painting, Michael Angelo carving, Savonarola preaching. In the early years of Raphael's apprenticeship, the voice of the preacher had been silenced, but still, "with the ineffable left hand," Da Vinci painted, and still the marble chips dropped ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... yellow locks, I suspect the face of my 'Espendermad' might easily be matched among the maidens of the Caucasus, who furnish the most perfect types of Circassian beauty. You know there is a tradition that when Leonardo da Vinci chanced to meet a man with an expression of character that he wished to make use of in his work, he followed him until he was able to delineate the face on canvas; but, on the contrary, the countenances I paint present ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... be astonished to find a very substantial reason given for his contempt of the afore-mentioned old masters; it is, he says, "because I look with the most devoted veneration upon Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Da Vinci, that I do not distrust the principles which induce me to look with contempt," &c. We do not exactly see how these great men, who were not landscape painters, can very well be compared with those who were, but from some general ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... power Michel Angelo's De' Medici in the San Lorenzo Chapel? What ideal head is more beautiful than the Townley Clytie of the British Museum, or the Young Augustus of the Vatican? What grander than Da Vinci's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... their attachment to her outspread and dimpled shoulders. We have already said that Adrienne was red-haired; but it was the redness of many of the admirable portraits of women by Titian and Leonardo da Vinci,—that is to say, molten gold presents not reflections more delightfully agreeable or more glittering, than the naturally undulating mass of her very long hair, as soft and fine as silk, so long, that, when let loose, it reached the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... contemporaries, whom in his fashion he criticized, while the Spanish Bouguereau disguised his models as the Virgin? Walter Pater's description of the Monna Lisa would live if the picture disappeared. Indeed it has created a factitious interest in da Vinci's masterwork. Even more might be said for Huysmans's description of Moreau's Salome, which actually puts the figures in the picture in motion! The critic, the historian at their best are creative artists as the writers of fiction are creative artists. ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... fineness of the skin; but her features were coarsened, as it were, and the circles about her eyes were unwontedly dark. Nature nevertheless was so vigorous in her, that these traces of past folly did not spoil her beauty. Her eyes glittered. She looked like some Herodias of da Vinci's (I have dealt in pictures), so magnificently full of life and energy was she; there was nothing starved nor stinted in feature or outline; she awakened desire; it seemed to me that there was some passion in her yet stronger than love. ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... blonde, beardless type which Da Vinci and others have imposed upon the world, for Christ, to begin with, must be a Jew. And even when, in the course of my researches for a Jewish model, I became aware that there were blonde types, too, these seemed to me essentially Teutonic. A characteristic of the Oriental face, as I figured ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... godlike air of his. But of the misbegotten changelings who call themselves men, and prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I never saw one who seemed worthy to inspire love - no, nor read of any, except Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth. About women I entertain a somewhat different opinion; but there, I have the misfortune ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... discovers the laws that preside over the solar system.—His works are denounced by papal authority.—The foundations of mechanical philosophy are laid by Da Vinci.— Galileo discovers the fundamental laws of Dynamics.—Newton applies them to the movements of the celestial bodies, and shows that the solar system is governed by mathematical necessity.—Herschel extends that conclusion to the universe.—The ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... stand as types of men who were loved with infinite tenderness by stepmothers. And then we must not forget Leonardo da Vinci, who never knew a mother, and had no business to have a father, but who held averages good with four successive stepmothers, all of whom loved him with a tender, jealous and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... reconciliation, enthroned as the glorified mother of all things. The delicate plaiting of the tunic about the throat, the formal curling of the hair, and a certain weight of over-thoughtfulness in the brows, recall the manner of Leonardo da Vinci, a master, one of whose characteristics is a very sensitive expression of the sentiment of maternity. It reminds one especially of a work by one of his scholars, the Virgin of the Balances, in the Louvre, a picture which has been thought to represent, under a veil, the blessing of universal ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery; and what in my father is the genius of curiosity—the very essence of all scientific genius—in me is the desire for beauty. Do you remember Pater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, "curiosity ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... prisca,—"The antique symmetry was the one thing wanting to me," said Leonardo da Vinci; and he was an Italian. I will not presume to speak for the Americans, but I am sure that, in the Englishman, the want of this admirable symmetry of the Greeks is a thousand times more great and crying than ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... became the chief seat of the manufacture of nautical instruments. He was made a bishop, and summoned to Rome to reform the calendar. There was one Italian who possessed the scientific spirit, without help from books, by the prerogative of genius; that was Leonardo da Vinci. But he confided his thoughts to diaries and remained unknown ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... hundred and fifty steps—but the sight was worth everything, enough to light up one's memory for ever. How glorious that cathedral is! worthy almost of standing face to face with the snow Alps; and itself a sort of snow dream by an artist architect, taken asleep in a glacier! Then the Da Vinci Christ did not disappoint us, which is saying much. It is divine. And the Lombard school generally was delightful after Bologna and those soulless Caracci! I have even given up Guido, and Guercino too, since knowing more of them. Correggio, on the other hand, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... accepting with a pleasant ease the universal admiration of his genius-a personal admiration, too, of an altogether modern kind; careful of his fame as one who foresaw its immortality. They show him as having, though in a far less degree, something of Leonardo da Vinci's scientific interest, certainly as possessing a quick, though naive curiosity about the world and a quite modern freedom from superstition. It is clear that his dominating and yet kindly personality, no less than his physical beauty and distinction, made him the ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... to give place to vices; but to charming vices, vices in good taste, such as those indulged in by Alcibiades and sung by Catullus. Leo X died after having assembled under his reign, which lasted eight years, eight months, and nineteen days, Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio, Titian, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolommeo, Giulio ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... tenth century; Opera Horatii, executed for Ferdinand I. King of Naples, which realised respectively two hundred and ten and one hundred and twenty-five pounds; and Regole e Precetti della Pittura, written by Leonardo da Vinci, and illustrated with original drawings by Nicholas Poussin, which fetched one hundred ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... intellectual, which aspires to the ideal in beauty, grandeur, and sublimity, and corresponds with the Greek, Roman, and Florentine schools. Modern art as founded upon the intellectual school of the ancient Greeks, became grand, scientific, and severe in the practice of Michael Angelo, and Leonardo da Vinci; graceful, beautiful and expressive in Raphael, Correggio, Dominichino, and Guido; and, aiming at sensible perfection, it attained harmony of colouring and effect in the works of Titian and Tintoret; but it sunk into grossness and sensuality ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... man might know all that was to be known. Dante did; so did Lionardo da Vinci. But times have changed since a mediaeval scholar wrote a book 'Concerning all things and certain others also.' We cannot all be archaeologists. Perhaps when we go and stand in the Forum we have a few general ideas about the relative position of the old buildings; we ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... waited the arrival of these accounts with a keen interest: they were a relish to his life; and without experiencing any revulsion of feeling, he would lay down a portfolio filled with photographs of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci—studies of drapery, studies of hands and feet, realistic studies of thin-lipped women and ecstatic angels with the light upon their high foreheads—and cheerfully, and even with a sense of satisfaction, he would ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... his becoming a flute-player, Benvenuto continued to practise on the instrument, though he detested it. His chief pleasure was in art, which he pursued with enthusiasm. Returning to Florence, he carefully studied the designs of Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo; and, still further to improve himself in gold-working, he went on foot to Rome, where he met with a variety of adventures. He returned to Florence with the reputation of being a most expert worker in ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... are as follows: In his treatise on the casting of cannons Don Ramon speaks of a certain invention called Thunder, made by Leonardo da Vinci, your master, and says that it might be applied to the navigation ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... effect was pleasing and harmonious. The frescoes on the walls were almost obliterated by age, and were partially covered by dull red stuff. Against this latter hung three pictures from the famous Sansevero collection: a Holy Family by Leonardo da Vinci, a triptych by Perugino, and a Madonna by Correggio. Hardly less celebrated, but sharply at odds with the ecclesiastical subjects of the paintings, was the mantle, carved in a bacchanalian procession of satyrs and nymphs—a ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... the Breakfast Table" Doctor Holmes quotes this saying by the "wittiest of men," that "good Americans, when they die, go to Paris." Now this wittiest of men was Tom Appleton, as many of us knew at that time. He said of Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" that it probably had faded out from being stared at by sightseers, and that the same thing might have happened to the Sistine Madonna if it had not been put under glass,—these being the two most popular paintings in Europe. His fund ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... claims it for his own; Yet would I still with patience hear What each may for himself declare, That all in your defence may see The justice pure of my decree.— But, hold!—It ill beseems my place To hear debate in such a case: Be therefore thou, Da Vinci's shade, Who when on earth to men display'd The scattered powers of human kind In thy capacious soul combin'd; Be thou the umpire of the strife, And judge as thou ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... coiled up, a lonely figure in the mushrabiyeh chair. Madame blew a wreath of smoke from her lips, and, through half-closed eyes, watched it ascend, unbroken, toward the canopy of cloth-of-gold which masked the ceiling. A Madonna by Leonardo da Vinci faced her across the apartment, the painted figure seeming to watch the living one upon the divan. Madame smiled into the eyes of the Madonna. Surely even the great Leonardo must have failed to reproduce that smile—the great Leonardo whose supreme art has captured the smile of Mona Lisa. Madame ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... characteristics of these supposititious heads of the Saviour. It will thus again be easily understood how opposite has been the practice of the Eastern and Western Churches; it is a striking fact that at the time when, in Italy, under Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and others, the mystery of a God manifest in the flesh had been as it were solved by a perfected art, this Russian Church was still under bondage to the once accepted but now discarded notion that the Redeemer ought to be represented as one who had no form or comeliness. Art ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... Albert Durer, one of the greatest artists who ever lived. He was a man of universal genius—a painter, sculptor, engraver, mathematician, and engineer. He was to Germany what Leonardo da Vinci was to Italy. His house is wonderfully preserved. You see his entrance hall, his exhibition room, his bedroom, his studio, and the opening into which his wife—that veritable Xantippe —thrust the food that was to sustain him during ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... arts are essentially athletic." An invalid, a half paralyzed man, might be a great poet, a celebrated musician, but to be a Michael Angelo or a Titian a man must have not merely a privileged soul, but a vigorous body. Leonardo da Vinci broke a horseshoe in his hands; the sculptors of the Renaissance worked huge blocks of marble with their titanic arms or chipped off the bronze with their gravers; the great painters were often architects and, covered with dust, moved huge masses. Renovales listened thoughtfully ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... now holds and, if true to yourselves, will continue to hold a high position in the estimation of this appreciative community. If I have stepped aside from Art to tread what seems another path, there is a good precedent for it in the lives of artists. Science and Art are not opposed. Leonardo da Vinci could find congenial relaxation in scientific researches and invention, and our own Fulton was a painter whose scientific studies resulted in steam navigation. It may not be generally known that the important invention of the percussion cap is due to the scientific recreations ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... in the Gallery of the Louvre in Paris, a vision of the perfect adjustment of our seemingly conflicting relations to Caesar and to God shone forth to me, in the divine gesture of the Master in Da Vinci's wonderful painting of the Last Supper, where the hand turned downward lays hold of the things of earth, and the hand turned upward grips the things which are eternal, both of which obligations are glorified in those later words of the Saviour spoken out of the agony of the ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... Perugia are all practically in Tuscany, and that Florence alone has really given to the world Dante and Boccaccio, Galileo and Savonarola, Cimabue and Giotto, Botticelli and Fra Angelico, Donatello and Ghiberti, Michael Angelo and Raffael, Leonardo da Vinci and Macchiavelli and Alfieri, and a host of other almost equally great names, it will be obvious to every one that the problem of the origin of this Tuscan nationality must be one that profoundly interests the whole world. Nay, more, we must remember, too, that Etruria had other and earlier claims ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... and look at the Baccio Bandinelli portrait; you might place it beside Titian's Man with a Glove, or by that other Portrait of an Old Man in which Raphael's consummate skill blends with Correggio's art; or, again, compare it with Leonardo da Vinci's Charles VIII., and the picture would scarcely lose. The four pearls are equal; there is the same lustre and sheen, the same rounded completeness, the same brilliancy. Art can go no further than this. Art has risen above Nature, since Nature ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... in your studio, as we have both of us found something to admire in these stern drawings. The Transfiguration is a more spirited copy than most that I have seen, though the principal figure seems never to be quite well copied. Here is a Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci and one ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of telling you the plot; you wouldn't believe me, as the song goes. Dinner at seven. Will you dine in the salon with me, or will you dine in the solemn grandeur of your own cabin, in company with Da Vinci, Teniers, and that Carlo Dolci the Italian Government has been hunting high and ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... Iamblichus Hypatia Diogenes Quintus Sextus Ovid Plutarch Seneca Apollonius The Apostles Matthew James James the Less Peter The Christian Fathers Clement Tertullian Origen Chrysostom St. Francis d'Assisi Cornaro Leonardo da Vinci Milton Locke Spinoza Voltaire Pope Gassendi Swedenborg Thackeray Linnaeus Shelley Lamartine Michelet William Lambe Sir Isaac Pitman Thoreau Fitzgerald Herbert Burrows Garibaldi Wagner Edison Tesla Marconi Tolstoy George Frederick Watts Maeterlinck Vivekananda General Booth ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... the disciples of Jesus just as Leonardo da Vinci painted them four hundred years ago. Leonardo spent months among the men of Milan, Italy, looking into their faces and talking with them. When he began to paint "The Last Supper" he had gathered men ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... many another great inventor, from Leonardo da Vinci down to the present time, was also an artist. He was born November 14, 1765, at Little Britain, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, of that stock which is so often miscalled "Scotch-Irish." He was only a child when his father died, ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... Bethlehem. Through all the Christian centuries men of genius have been laying their most precious gifts at the feet of Christ. Columbus had no sooner set foot on a new shore than he named it San Salvador, Holy Saviour; and thus he laid his great discovery, America, at the feet of Jesus. Leonardo da Vinci swept the golden goblets from the table of his "Last Supper" because he feared their splendor would distract attention from and dim the glory of the Master himself. The hand that rounded St. Peter's dome reared it in adoration to Christ, and Raphael in painting ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... directed towards the person who causes this feeling, and the straightened fingers are separated. This gesture is represented by Mr. Rejlander in Plate VII. fig. 1. In the 'Last Supper,' by Leonardo da Vinci, two of the Apostles have their hands half uplifted, clearly expressive of their astonishment. A trustworthy observer told me that he had lately met his wife under most unexpected circumstances: "She started, opened her mouth and eyes ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... line from the early masters to the present, do you not find the description includes "the idealists" who could paint? The list would be a long and involved one, taking its start in Italy with Botticelli, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolomeo, Titian, Giorgione, and extending thence to our own time inclusive of Millet, Corot, Watts, Turner, Blake, Rousseau, Mauve, Puvis de Chavannes ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... of the eye," has shown us how to paint air that circulates, water that sparkles. The sun was the centre of the impressionistic attack, the "splendid, silent sun." A higher pitch in key colour has been attained, shadows have been endowed with vital hues. (And Leonardo da Vinci, wonderful landscapist, centuries ago wrote learnedly of coloured shadows; every new discovery is only a rediscovery.) The "dim, religious light" of the studio has been banished; the average palette is lighter, is more brilliant. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Then I reflect that it was worth a lifetime of work to win the praise of such as Angelo. This reflection calms me, and I plod on more serenely, glad of the fact that I can count Ghiberti and the bronze doors as a part of my world. When I can have Titian, Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, and Rosa Bonheur around, I feel that I have good company and must be on my good behavior. If Corot, Reynolds, Leighton, Watts, and Landseer should be banished from my world I'd feel that I had suffered a great loss. I like to hobnob with such ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... saint himself had more consequence, and was represented in a stronger light. In the Palazzo Borghese, I chiefly admired the following pieces: a Venus with two nymphs; and another with Cupid, both by Titian: an excellent Roman Piety, by Leonardo da Vinci; and the celebrated Muse, by Dominechino, which is a fine, jolly, buxom figure. At the palace of Colorina Connestabile, I was charmed with the Herodias, by Guido Rheni; a young Christ; and a Madonna, by Raphael; ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the collection of the Earl of Ellesmere a picture of the head of a girl which the connoisseurs of the nineteenth century ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci. The connoisseurs of the twentieth century ascribe it to Luini. But for the colour of the hair it might have been a portrait of Lady Loudwater, a faded portrait. It might also very well be a portrait of one of her actual ancestresses, for her ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... among work which we can apprehend as dealing justly with reality, there may be quite as much difference in all that constitutes outward form and likeness as there is between a Dutch interior by Peter van der Hooch, the portrait of a king by Velasquez, and the image of a woman smiling by Leonardo da Vinci. The soul, for instance, is at heart as real as the body; but, as we can hear it only through the body speaking, and see it only through bodily eyes, and measure it, often enough, only in the insignificant moment of its action, it may come to seem ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant |
