Leonardo Da Vinci and Renaissance Period

1) I sat there looking and studying Figure 5 for a couple of minutes. I tried figuring out who she might be looking at with such a tender smile and eyes. I fell in love with the red, brown, orange, and black shading of the chalk done to shape her face. This drawing was made by no other than Leonardo da Vinci himself and happens to be one of my favorite artists. The angle in which Mary is drawn makes me think that she is in a position where she is bending down because her hair falls perpendicular to her face. I cant help but think sher's looking at its her new born child due to the sweetness in her smile, slightly lifted cheeks, her relaxed eyebrows, and loving gaze. 2) Many art forms during this period still involved religion and the Christian belief with a more humanist style, this period was also known as High Renaissance. The figures are closer to the anatomy of the human body and are more proportionate. Many of the art patrons were still those with high class. Many of them were churches who commissioned art work to decorate the interior of their massive buildings. Many royals knew of Leonardo da Vinci and respected his work, but this drawing was made for him to perfect the human form and was conserved. 3) Leonardo da Vinci was born in Italy near a the town Vinci on April 5th, 1452 was a Renaissance man. He had many talents for he was a painter, sculptor, architect, draftsman, and engineer. He is mainly known for two of the most famous pieces of art in history, the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. He helped shape what we now know as the humanist ideal during the Renaissance. He kept all of his studies in notebooks, where millions of ideas for inventions are scattered. He used his drawings to study his surroundings, whether it was the environment or the human body as we see in this drawing of Maryr's head. Most of his knowledge came when he was already a man eager to learn about mathematics and geometry. There is so much to be said about Leonardo da Vinci due to his dedication to many forms of art, he truly was one of the greatest minds this world has come to know. 4) Leonardo da Vinci began this drawing in 1510-1513 using chalk, charcoal, pen, and brown- ink. The main technique we see here is the blending of delicate chalk lines to create a smoky feel, also known as sfumato. He used the two-chalk technique to bring red and black chalk together for her face leading down to her neck and also her long hair. Leonardo created a tone and then separated it from another area by erasing the edge using a dense ball of bread, as was the custom at the time (Panzera). The way blends the tones of the colors to make her skin look soft and gentle is astounding. The left handed strokes da Vinci makes are from the bottom right to the top left using the black chalk softly to create a silver color on her forehead close to her eye. The stokes on her hair and bold and intense while the curls are tiny curving ones. We also find a braid parallel to her hair dress which are believed to be made by medium hard strokes and then erased a little to blend in with the rest of the hair. Even though she is bending her her boy at a slight angle her hair on the left side remains out of her face unlike the realistic pieces on the right. This lets us know that the real focus is her face and what the simple shaping in the curving of her face and not her hair. There is an illusion of double vision on her hair-dress cloth showing where he studied how far the head should pull from the face. To differentiate her face from her neck instead of using a sharp line for her jaw da Vinci simply blends the color of her neck up. He does not completely stop at the jaw line but passes it up with a smaller lighter blend to match the contour of her cheek. He uses a dark gray to define her nose shadow next the eye forming a symmetrical connection to the eyebrow. The other eye, which we can vaguely see is also expected to share this same us of grey because we can see the same pattern above the eyelid. 5) This drawing is philosophical because it is used to study the nature of the Virgins Head. The beautiful piece is meant to leave us with the understanding that artist as great as di Vinci worked hard to become one of the greats. It took practice and patience repeated over and over again. They played with color and technique to come up with results that lead them to reflect the human body starting from scratch. Leonardo di Vinci studies the beauty of a mother and the emotion in her face.

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