"Da Vinci" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... farther wall a piano, with a bronze lamp suspended from the ceiling above it. His eyes caught the shadowy outline of cases filled with books; he saw close to the fireplace wide, low-built divans covered with cushions; and over the door through which they passed hung a framed copy of da Vinci's masterpiece, "La Joconde," the ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... Leonardo da Vinci was, doubtless, his greatest inspiration, and it was from this master-student of nature that the young man learned, with new enthusiasm, the value of going directly to Nature herself. The fruit of this new study is a group of lovely ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... it up with commentaries, and 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
... by our fields and thinking of the impossibility of such a life: I was thinking too that I would come to you and tell you of the mice.... Paris, Nice, Monaco, costumes, English perfumes, wine, Leonardo da Vinci, neo-classicism, lovers, what are they? With you everything is ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... time when the men of one city observed and studied and took hints from those of every other, how faint are the signs that this particular manner attracted any great attention in other art centres. Leonardo da Vinci was a master of chiaroscuro, but he used it only to express his forms, and never sacrifices to it the delicacy and fineness of his design. It is the one quality Raphael never assimilates, except for a brief instant at the period when Sebastian del Piombo had arrived in Rome from Venice. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the art of the Renaissance reached its highest development. Among all the great artists of this period three stand out in heroic proportions—Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Raphael. The first two not only practiced, but achieved almost equal distinction in, the three arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting.[240] It is impossible to give in a few lines any idea of the beauty and significance of the work of these great geniuses. Both Raphael ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... and 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 active ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the destruction of the petty despots in the pontifical State had gained for him nothing but sympathy, even if we take as proof of his great projects the army composed of the best soldiers and officers in Italy, with Leonardo da Vinci as chief engineer, which followed his fortunes in 1502, other facts nevertheless bear such a character of unreason that our judgement, like that of contemporary observers, is wholly at a loss to explain them. One fact of this kind is the devastation and maltreatment of the newly-won State, which ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... use now 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 ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... a serene indifference to hubbub. I like Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Balzac, Darwin, and other sages, for having been so concentrated on this or that eternal verity in art or science or philosophy, that they paid no heed to alarums and excursions which were sweeping all other folk off their feet. It is with some shame that I haunt the tape-machine whenever ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... of Leonardo da Vinci have equally suffered from his relatives. When a curious collector discovered some, he generously brought them to a descendant of the great painter, who coldly observed, that "he had a great deal more in the garret, which had lain there for many years, if the rats had not destroyed them!" ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... examines 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 ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... awakening of art in Italy. We have traced the early part of this under the Medici and Pope Nicholas. Lorenzo de'Medici was the centre of its later development.[21] From his court went forth that galaxy of artists which the world of art unites in calling the unequalled masters of all ages—Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... Genius which rises here and there in the past history of the Aryan races, and that so all-sidedly and confidingly as to seem miraculous. I confess that when I look closely and deeply into the knowledge of Dante and Lionardo da Vinci, of Fiar Bacon, and the Cavalier Marquis of Worcester, an awe comes over me. All of them seem to have been so great, some of their order so unearthly great; and they held the keys to so many mysteries, and to doors of science which were not unlocked ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 trained ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... freedom that had blown out of Italy, before which dogmas and slaveries had crumbled to dust. In contrast, the world today seemed pitifully arid. Men seemed to have shrunk in stature before the vastness of the mechanical contrivances they had invented. Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Aretino, Cellini; would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like. Perhaps it was inevitable that the crowds should sink deeper and deeper in slavery. Whichever won, tyranny ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... in his studies of that almost abstract, nay, almost cabalistic thing, the science of bodily proportions. It was plain that the mystery of antique beauty—the ancient symmetry, symmetria prisca as a humanist designs it in his epitaph for Leonardo da Vinci—was but a matter of numbers. For a man's length, if he stand with outstretched arms, is the same from finger tip to finger tip as his length when erect from head to feet, namely, eight times the length of his head. Now eight heads, if divided into halves, give four as the measure of throat ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... That head, as you must have noticed, is not Japanese. It's Jewish. Do you recall the head of Judas painted by Da Vinci in his Last Supper? Now isn't this old scoundrel's the exact duplicate—well, if not exact, there is a very strong resemblance." ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... a painter and a poet. Accident and secret history only reveal this softening feature in his grave and king-like character. Charles sought no glory from, but only indulged his love for, art and the artists. There are three manuscripts on his art, by Leonardo da Vinci, in the Ambrosian library, which bear an inscription that a King of England, in 1639, offered one thousand guineas of gold for each. Charles, too, suggested to the two great painters of his age the subjects he considered worthy of their pencils; and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... eloquently I made a feint of examining the picture and was indeed moved by the love which overflowed it, the Madonna caressing her babe and he in turn petting a little lamb; but my uncle pished and poohed, saying that this sentimentality was but a feeble reflection of his master Da Vinci; and our host cut the discussion short by demanding that Raphael should show his own work. This he could not be persuaded to do, modestly persisting that he had naught worthy of our consideration, though he promised later to show us ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... 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 ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... unheeding, everywhere in nature, and in all great art as well; it is a law of optics, for example, that all straight lines having a common direction if sufficiently prolonged appear to meet in a point, i.e., radiate from it (Illustration 31). Leonardo da Vinci employed this principle of perspective in his Last Supper to draw the spectator's eye to the picture's central figure, the point of sight toward which the lines of the walls and ceiling converge centering in the head of Christ. Puvis de Chavannes, in his Boston Library decoration, leads ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... 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 ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... makers of verse,' 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
... of Italian painting four, besides Michelangelo, stand out with special prominence. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519 A.D.) was architect, sculptor, musician, and engineer, as well as painter. His finest work, the "Last Supper," a fresco painting at Milan, is much damaged, but fortunately good copies of it exist. Paris has the best of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Milwaukee is to me! The American is an inartistic race!" But what about the shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens? The shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens will be flirting about on some entirely banal beach—Scarborough or Trouville—and for all he knows or cares Leonardo da Vinci might have been a cabman; and yet the loveliest things in the world are, relatively speaking, at his door! When the European shopkeeper gets as far as Lucerne in August, he thinks that a journey of twenty-four hours entitles him to rank a little lower than Columbus. It was an enormous feat ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... 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 portrait ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... Leonardo Da Vinci, the many-sided genius of the Italian Renaissance, was born, as his name implies, at the little town of Vinci, which is about six miles from Empoli and twenty miles west of Florence. Vinci is still very inaccessible, and the only means of conveyance is the cart of a general ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell
... 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
... community, from that 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, Lille, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... the "extraction" of works of art for the benefit of French museums, at once aroused the bitterest feelings. The loss of priceless treasures, such as the manuscript of Virgil which had belonged to Petrarch, and the masterpieces of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, might perhaps have been borne: it concerned only the cultured few, and their effervescence was soon quelled by patrols of French cavalry. Far different was it with the peasants between Milan and Pavia. Drained by the white-coats, they now refused to be bled ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the 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 it, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... Nuremberg, where he lived, 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 and ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... Hawthorne depended for this, as every artist does, was his imagination, and imagination is as easily disturbed as the electric needle. There is no fine art without sensitiveness. We see it in the portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, a man who could bend horseshoes in his hands; and Bismarck, who was also an artist in his way, confessed to the same mental disturbance from noise and general conversation, which Hawthorne felt at Brook Farm. It was the mental sensitiveness of Carlyle and Bismarck which caused their ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... in accordance with rational and seemly custom, or he must be brought to his senses. When a great man's ways are merely innocently different from those of ordinary people, by all means let him alone. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci used often to buy caged wild-birds from their captors and let them go free. What a lovely and lovable action! He hurt no one; he restored the joy of life to innocent creatures, and no one could find fault with his sweet fancy. In the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... human beings, a sort of little ghetto. He had often strolled through the neighborhood, catching sight of and feeling a sort of sympathy with certain types of women with hollow cheeks, and full lips, and wide cheek-bones, a da Vinci smile, rather depraved, while the coarse language and shrill laughter destroyed this harmony that was in their faces when in repose. Even in the dregs of the people, in those large-headed, beady-eyed creatures ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... than Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper," millions of copies of which have been circulated in engravings, oil paintings, and by photography. We find the original in the Dominican monastery, where the artist painted it upon the bare wall or masonry ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... late years have the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci seen the light and the many difficulties been overcome which long proved an obstacle to their publication. The labour of editing, deciphering and translating his many scattered and fragmentary codices was beyond the efforts of any single man. The gratitude ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... 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 ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... that it could enter 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 Week, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... therefore Victor Hugo is the author of the Chatiments. In such and such a picture gallery we see an unsigned picture whose frame has been furnished by the management with a tablet bearing the name of Leonardo da Vinci; therefore Leonardo da Vinci painted this picture. A poem with the title Philomena is found under the name of Saint Bonaventura in M. Clement's Extraits des poetes chretiens, in most editions of Saint Bonaventura's "works," and in a great number of mediaeval manuscripts; therefore ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... unaccomplished. Seven years later it was taken up by a painter of very different genius. Sodoma was a native of Vercelli, and had received his first training in the Lombard schools, which owed so much to Lionardo da Vinci's influence. He was about thirty years of age when chance brought him to Siena. Here he made acquaintance with Pandolfo Petrucci, who had recently established himself in a species of tyranny over the Republic. The work he did for this patron and other nobles of Siena, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Java, as the old Dutch settlers have told us. But we never hear of it as creating awe, or as being thought a fit instrument to use with the drum or trumpet in connection with religious rites. Leonardo da Vinci had a flute player make music while he painted his picture of Mona Lisa, thinking that it gave her the expression he wished to catch—that strange smile reproduced in the Louvre painting. The flute member of the pipe species, therefore, was more or less an emblem of ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... appeared to me in dreams; in that, considering the electric character of my dreams, and that they were far less like a lake reflecting the heavens than like the pencil of some mighty artist—Da Vinci or Michael Angelo—that cannot copy in simplicity, but comments in freedom, while reflecting in fidelity, there was nothing to surprise. But a change in this appearance was remarkable. Oftentimes, after ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... in 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 ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... some drawings by his hand in our book, made with much patience and very great judgment, among which are certain heads of women, beautiful in expression and in the adornment of the hair, which Leonardo da Vinci was ever imitating for their beauty. In our book, also, are two horses with the due measures and protractors for reproducing them on a larger scale from a smaller, so that there may be no errors in their proportions; and there is in my possession ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... 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, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... sang will care little about this. He usually rushes in and out during the daylight, and recalls but little except the fascinating staircase of the chateau attributed, as to its spiral formation, to Da Vinci; the ornamental chimney-pieces; and the fact that historical events of the past have intermingled inextricably the gruesome stories of the royal houses which bore respectively the arms of hedgehog and salamander. This only, with perhaps the memory that at one time or another a certain event took ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... "Born between two adoring women," says Michelet, "Francis was all his life a spoilt child." Money flowed through his hands like water[102] to gratify his ambition, his passions and his pleasures. Doubtless his interviews with Da Vinci at Amboise, where he spent much of his time in the early years of his reign, fired that enthusiasm for art, especially for painting, which never wholly left him; for the veteran artist, although old and paralysed in the right hand, was otherwise ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... who designed cartoons for tapestries, we find those of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, Guido and Giulio Romano, Albert Duerer, Rubens and Van Dyck. Indeed, there is hardly a great name among the painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which has not contributed to the value of the tapestries dating from those ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 64, January 18, 1851 • Various
... achievement nevertheless great, in having posed the 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
... Merezhkovsky: The Death of the Gods. This is the first part of a trilogy, and is an historical novel of the time of Julian the Apostate. The other parts (announced for publication) are: Resurrection (time of Leonardo da Vinci) and The Anti-Christ (time ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... 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 ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... secretive and moody. Said he was 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 ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... sufficient imagination to realize the unknown quantity of chance, the inevitable mistake of military scientists who are loath to admit the artist to their counsels, exemplified by men of genius, such as Napoleon and Leonardo da Vinci, who were both ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... the disaster has broken upon me. Oh! chefs-d'oeuvre without number! I see you devoured, consumed, reduced to ashes! I see the walls tottering, the canvases fall from the frames and shrivel up; the "Marriage of Canaan" is in flames! Raphael is struggling in the burning furnace! Leonardo da Vinci is no more! This was, indeed, an unexpected calamity! Fortune had reserved this terrible surprise for us! But I will not believe it, these rumours are false, doubtless! How should these people who inhabit this quarter know what I am ignorant of? Yet over our heads the sky ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... Mr Fagan, who was consul at Palermo, having made some interesting underground discoveries, was deprived of them. We saw here a fine Esculapius, in countenance and expression exceedingly like the Ecce Homo of Leonardo da Vinci, with all that god-like compassion which the great painter had imparted without any sacrifice of dignity. He holds a poppy-head, which we do not recollect on his statue or gems, and the Epidaurian snake is at his side. Up-stairs we saw specimens of fruits from Pompeii, barley, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... scientific thought had been, for a considerable period before the time of Bacon, turned in the direction which he, perhaps, did more than any other single investigator to follow out and confirm. Leonardo da Vinci, the completest and most comprehensive genius of Modern Italy, had anticipated, by more than a century, several of the prominent features of the Baconian system. Too little of Leonardo's scientific writings has been published to furnish material for a satisfactory ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... pass before another man was to take up the horse as a serious scientific study; and this was Leonardo da Vinci, a man in many ways very much like Aristotle. The distinguishing feature in these men—the thing that differentiates them from other men—was the great outpouring sympathy with every living creature. Everything they saw was related to themselves—it came ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... could tell from, where he had been. She kept it in her Bible. He had given it to her when she was a child as a reward the day she had kept her little brother from falling in the fire. She brought it out. It was a sketch, hasty, vigorous, suggestive, haunting as the original itself, of the Leonardo da Vinci Ste. Anne. ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... doubtful history carries up to the fifteenth century, and then came Leonardo da Vinci, first student of flight whose work endures to the present day. The world knows da Vinci as artist; his age knew him as architect, engineer, artist, and scientist in an age when science was a single study, comprising all knowledge from mathematics to medicine. He was, of course, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... the old Dominican Friary attached to the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, we saw Leonardo da Vinci's famous fresco of the Last Supper. It is on the wall of a large, bare, whitewashed room, this celebrated work being almost the only furniture and decoration. Although in a very bad state of decay and dilapidation, it is yet sufficient to draw hither ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... Phidias; that never again would men give shape to figures fit to be put, let us say, beside the Elgin Marbles. As some nineteen centuries passed by, another art came to its finest flowering in the Italian Cinquecento, when Raphael, Da Vinci, and Michael Angelo added color to form. They agreed that never again would paintings be produced fit to be classed with the Sistine Madonna. Another two centuries passed, and the Bachs began the great music which these three modern artists ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... was finishing his Cartoon, Lionardo da Vinci was painting his fresco. Circumstances may have brought the two chiefs of Italian art frequently together in the streets of Florence. There exists an anecdote of one encounter, which, though it rests upon the credit of an anonymous ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... back on with a purely admiring regret, as perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; the desirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most likely they are the fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the Aeolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with our redundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had been born in the age of Pitt, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... bending his arms only to the level of his face. The flat palms are 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 ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... The latter, embodying Sir William Armstrong's modern idea, though in a rude form, had been fished up from the bottom of the Adriatic, where the ship armed with them had been sunk hundreds of years ago. Even Perkins's steam-gun was an old invention revived by Leonardo da Vinci and by him attributed to Archimedes.[8] The Congreve rocket is said to have an Eastern origin, Sir William Congreve having observed its destructive effects when employed by the forces under Tippoo Saib in the Mahratta ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... second-rate order; the other, that he was a parvenu, not at home even amongst his second-rate splendor. So far there was nothing to distinguish Mr. W—'s papers from the papers of other triflers. But in this point there was, viz., that in his judgments upon the great Italian masters of painting, Da Vinci, Titian, &c., there seemed a tone of sincerity and of native sensibility, as in one who spoke from himself, and was not merely a copier from books. This it was that interested me; as also his reviews of the chief Italian engravers, Morghen, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... 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
... "Leonardo da Vinci? Really? Well, of course, there are exceptions, otherwise there would be no ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... time clear." It should rather be defined to be light in shadow; but it will be difficult to establish any other sense for it than the disposition of the light and shade in a picture. The inventor of it, for practical use, was Leonardo da Vinci. Of this chiaroscuro he says: "It is this, in fine, against which so many renowned Italian masters have sinned, but in which the immortal Correggio is so eminently distinguished, and which proves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... 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, too, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... on the same topic. It is therefore ridiculous to assume that an Italian judged of men or conduct in any sense according to our standards. Pinturicchio and Perugino thought it no shame to work for princes like the Baglioni and for Popes like Alexander VI. Lionardo da Vinci placed his talents as an engineer at the service of Cesare Borgia, and employed his genius as a musician and a painter for the amusement of the Milanese Court, which must have been, according to Corio's account, flagrantly and shamelessly corrupt. Leo Battista Alberti, one of the most ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... thought to myself, how these babes and sucklings do give us the go-by surely. Choosing his own epitaph at fifteen as for a man who "had been very sorry for things," and such a strain as that—why it might have done for Leonardo da Vinci himself. Then I set the boy down as a conceited young jackanapes, which no doubt he was,—but so are a great many other ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... all the masterpieces of Michel Angelo, Guercino, Titian, Paul Veronese, Correggio, Albarro, the two Carracci, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci." [Footnote: This wonderful banner was hung up in the hall of the Directory while the members of the latter were occupying the Luxemburg. It afterward accompanied the three consuls to the Tuileries, and was preserved there in the large reception-room. It is now in the "Dome des ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... pictures, most of them Flemish, covers the walls of these apartments. But nothing struck me more than a Medusa's head by that surprising genius Leonardo da Vinci. It appears just severed from the body, and cast on the damp pavement of a cavern: a deadly paleness covers the countenance, and the mouth exhales a pestilential vapour: the snakes, which fill almost the whole picture, beginning ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... tapestry of severe design. I saw works of great value, the greater part of which I had admired in the special collections of Europe, and in the exhibitions of paintings. The several schools of the old masters were represented by a Madonna of Raphael, a Virgin of Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph of Corregio, a woman of Titan, an Adoration of Veronese, an Assumption of Murillo, a portrait of Holbein, a monk of Velasquez, a martyr of Ribera, a fair of Rubens, two Flemish landscapes ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... of the famous artist in mosaic Rafaelli is well worth inspecting; and here I had an opportunity of beholding a copy in mosaic and nearly finished of the celebrated picture of Leonardo da Vinci representing the Caena Domini. What a useful as well as admirable art is the mosaic to perpetuate the paintings of the greatest masters! I recollected on beholding this work that Eustace, in his Tour thro' Italy,[55] relates ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... the Spaniard carries an anterior image in his mind, to which he submits his perceptions. A child is able to recognize a man or a horse more easily in a toy than in a painting by Raphael or by Leonardo da Vinci, because the form of the toy adapts itself more readily to the anterior image which he has ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... the finest portraits by Titian, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci, were the outcome of the enthusiastic sentiments by which, indeed, under various conditions, every masterpiece is engendered. The artist only bent ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... duties that he undertook in 1874 when he was appointed director of the British National Gallery in succession to Sir W. Boxall, R.A. During the twenty years that he held this post he was responsible for many important purchases, among them Leonardo da Vinci's "Virgin of the Rocks," Raphael's "Ansidei Madonna," Holbein's "Ambassadors," Van Dyck's equestrian portrait of Charles I., and the "Admiral Pulido Pareja," by Velasquez; and he added largely to the noted series of Early Italian pictures in the gallery. The number of acquisitions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... though he has read vast folios of controversial divinity, merely for the sake of the intricacy of style, and to save himself the pain of thinking. Mr. Lamb is a good judge of prints and pictures. His admiration of Hogarth does credit to both, particularly when it is considered that Leonardo da Vinci is his next greatest favourite, and that his love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal. His worst fault is an over-eagerness of enthusiasm, which occasionally makes him take a surfeit of his highest favourites.—Mr. Lamb excels in familiar conversation ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... arrived," says Lanzi, "at the most brilliant period of the Roman school, and of modern painting itself. We have seen the art carried to a high degree of perfection by Da Vinci and Buonarotti, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and it is remarkable that the same period embraces not only Rafaelle, but also Correggio, Giorgione, Titian, and the most celebrated Venetian painters; so that a man enjoying the common term of life ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... impoverishing Italy, as well as for his so-called contempt of art—a criticism which, in the face of this accurate version, must fall to the ground. The pictures were sent by him to Paris merely to preserve them, and, as he himself said, a propos of the famous Da Vinci, beneath which horses and men alike were quartered: "I'd have sent that too, but to do it I'd have had to send the whole chapel or scrape the picture off the wall. These Italians should rather thank than condemn me for leaving it where ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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 too grand a soul. A wretched woman in England, at the beginning ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... this the great 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 ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... drunk too much beer and eaten too much meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with erect heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves in loud voices, mad with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to romance: Da Vinci has drawn women who looked so and so ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... They 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
... bristling with a forest of statues and perforated spires; at the other, the monument to Leonardo da Vinci, and the famous Teatro de la Scala! Within the four arms of the Gallery, a continuous bustle of people, an incessant going and coming of merging, dissolving crowds: a quadruple avalanche flowing toward the grand square at the center of the cross, where the Cafe Biffi, known to ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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 the precious metals, and his skill was soon in ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... writer Mr. Collier is no less interesting. It is true that he is not eloquent, but then he censures with just severity 'the meaningless eloquence of the writers on aesthetics'; we admit that he is not subtle, but then he is careful to remind us that Leonardo da Vinci's views on painting are nonsensical; his qualities are of a solid, indeed we may say of a stolid order; he is thoroughly honest, sturdy and downright, and he advises us, if we want to know anything about art, to study the works of 'Helmholtz, Stokes, or Tyndall,' to which we hope ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... memor, Defuit mini symmetria prisca. Peregi Quod potui; Veniam da mihi, posteritas. —Lionardo da Vinci's epitaph ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... sound or into carved stone. The engineer transmutes his subconscious body into long buildings, into aisles of windows, into stories of thoughtful machines. Every great spiritual and imaginative genius is seen, sooner or later, to be the transmuted genius of some man's body. The things in Leonardo da Vinci that his unconscious, high-spirited, automatic senses gathered together for him, piled up in his mind for him, and handed over to him for the use of his soul, would have made a genius out of anybody. It is not as if he had had to work out every ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... you to know 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 together so like ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... 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 ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... said; "this is Giacomo Da Vinci; this Pietro Forzi: all knight commanders of the Order, and now for six years prisoners in the hands of these corsairs. Assuredly no one would know us, so changed are we." He looked round inquiringly ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... comparatively easy one. Our great mistake at present, in dealing with stone at all, is requiring to have all our work too refined; it is just the same mistake as if we were to require all our book illustrations to be as fine work as Raphael's. John Leech does not sketch so well as Leonardo da Vinci; but do you think that the public could easily spare him; or that he is wrong in bringing out his talent in the way in which it is most effective? Would you advise him, if he asked your advice, to give up his wood-blocks and take to canvas? I know you would not; neither would you tell him, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... 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; and four landscapes, two by Claude Lorraine, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... 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 ...
— The Theory and Practice of Perspective • George Adolphus Storey
... like the poet, is born, not made. If to the power to conceive, is added the ability to execute, then have we one of those rare geniuses who not only give a decided impulse to civilization, but add new glory to humanity. Such men were Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Watt, Wedgwood, Brunel, Stephenson and Bessemer; and such a man was John A. Roebling. It was his striking peculiarity, that while his conceptions were bold and original, his execution was always exact, and within the limits of cost which he assigned to the work of his ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... 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; ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... which was visible from where he sat, 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 ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... 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 untie the bald, prosaic roll of paper, and ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... first doors, representing John the Baptist preaching between a Pharisee and a Levite, are the work (either alone or assisted by his master Leonardo da Vinci) of an interesting Florentine sculptor, Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1474-1554), who was remarkable among the artists of his time in being what we should call an amateur, having a competence of his own and the manners of a patron. Placing himself under Verrocchio, he became closely attached ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... study of Greek and Latin classics stimulated a longing for the beautiful in art and literature. Fourteenth-century Italian writers, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, found increasing interest in their work. Sixteenth-century artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Raphael show their magnificent response to a world that had ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of the lime trees on the terraced garden of Amboise is a small bust of Leonardo da Vinci, for it was near here he died. His remains are laid in the beautiful chapel at the corner of the castle court, and the romantic story of his last moments at Fontainebleau becomes the sad reality of a tombstone covering ashes mostly unknown ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... inspiration have ever been drawn by the highest artists from religious ideas, let him add to the names above given, those of Fra Angelico, Fra Bartolomeo, Tintoret, Corregio, Murillo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and, in our own days, Overbeck; let him gaze into that divine face of godlike sorrow given us by an untaught monk, Antonio Pesenti, in his marvellous crucifix of ivory, let him listen to the pure ethereal ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a one now to exist, which is wholly unlikely. But then the best and most upright of men sought, without any scruples whatever, the presence and favors of the Borgias. Pinturicchio and Perugino painted for Alexander VI, and the most wonderful genius of the century, Leonardo da Vinci, did not hesitate to enter the service of Caesar Borgia as his engineer, to erect fortresses for him in the same Romagna which he had ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... dung-hill, whereas if 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 the grammar ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Crusades and voyages of discovery. Dante was not only the greatest poet of his time, but an astronomer; Petrarch was geographer and cartographer, and, at the end of the fifteenth century, with Paolo Toscanelli, Lucca Baccioli, and Leonardo da Vinci, Italy was beyond all comparison the first nation in Europe in ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... which are on range subjects. Ed Borein tells more in them than hundreds of windbags have told in tens of thousands of pages. They are beautiful and authentic, even if they are what post-impressionists call "documentary." Believers in the True Faith say now that Leonardo da Vinci is documentary in his painting of the Lord's Supper. Ed Borein was a great friend of Charlie Russell's but not an imitator. Etchings of the West will soon be among the rarities ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... now so old, so many eminent men have lived and thought for thousands of years, that there is little new to be discovered or expressed. Even my theory of colors is not entirely new. Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, any many other excellent men, have before me found and expressed the same thing in a detached form: my merit is, that I have found it also, that I have said it again, and that I have striven to bring the truth once ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... queer enough ones she often made, very likely. On the other hand, the American, who liked to talk to her in his own tongue, and to make her chatter to him in return, would tell her many a story of the old master painters, of Cimabue and the boy Giotto, of Lionardo da Vinci, and half a dozen others; old, old tales of the days when, as we sometimes fancy, looking back through the mist of centuries, there were giants on the earth, but all new and fresh to our little Madelon, and with a touch ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... pictures at M. de Marigny's. They are what are not disposed of in the palaces, though sometimes changed with others. This refuse, which fills many rooms from top to bottom, is composed of the most glorious works of Raphael, L. da Vinci, Giorgione, Titian, Guido, Correggio, etc. Many pictures, which I knew by their prints, without an idea where they existed, I ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... portrait by Leonardo da Vinci known as the Mona Lisa, and famous for its baffling smile. There is a tantalizing quality about it which makes one forever wonder what the lady is thinking about and why she is smiling. Nothing could be more in contrast than this smile of Miss Bingham. There is no ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... gaining the attention of the room. Mr. Adair ceased to listen to Lord Dungory, who was explaining why Leonardo da Vinci was a greater painter than Titian. Mr. Lynch left off talking to Alice; the little blonde honourable looked sillier and sillier as his admiration grew upon him. Mrs. Barton, to hide her emotion, engaged in an ardent ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... other? If, by chance of Nature's inscrutable working, the babe of the tenement 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 ignorance and greed ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... he ever saw the first time he ever saw it, would be a prodigy only second to him who could produce one without preliminary study. The picture which I think calculated to appeal most powerfully and universally is Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, where the grouping of the figures and the expression of each head, as well as the disposition of the whole, can hardly fail to produce a deep impression on any one of thought and feeling; yet even here there would be a first ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... 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, ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... the places 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 of the stages ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... 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 from ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 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
... graceful, beautiful, grave, cruel, dignified, reverential, magnificent, but all with an exuberance of life and power that gave to Italian art its great place in human culture. The great names of the period speak for themselves,—Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Machiavelli, Benvenuto Cellini, and ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... height of many thousand feet. It forms sharply-pointed conical mountains, clustered together in large numbers, but yet not in contact with each other. The contour of their forms recalls to mind the beautiful landscape with which the rich imagination of Leonardi da Vinci has embellished the back-ground of the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... 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 Romano, Ariosto, ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of the 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
... Raphael's own hand had communicated its magnetism to one of these sketches; and, if genuine, it was evidently his first conception of a favorite Madonna, now hanging in the private apartment of the Grand Duke, at Florence. Another drawing was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and appeared to be a somewhat varied design for his picture of Modesty and Vanity, in the Sciarra Palace. There were at least half a dozen others, to which the owner assigned as high an origin. It ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Giorgione's name is often associated with it; I know not with what accuracy, but 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 wish for. ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... Muzzio's return, Fabio had begun a portrait of his wife, depicting her with the attributes of Saint Cecilia. He had made considerable advance in his art; the renowned Luini, a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, used to come to him at Ferrara, and while aiding him with his own counsels, pass on also the precepts of his great master. The portrait was almost completely finished; all that was left was to add a few strokes to ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... herself welcome to the 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, and in very high flavour), ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... though they were, to Italy and Spain, that turned his observant eye to the luxury of woven story and made him desire that France should produce the same? The Sforza Castle at Milan had walls enough of tapestry, the pageants of Leonardo da Vinci, organised at royal command of the lovely Beatrice d'Este, displayed the wealth of woven beauty over which Francis had time to deliberate in those bad hours after the battle at Milan's noted ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... effect of the illuminations of an old missal. In their bold rejection of all principles of perspective, light and shade, and drawing, they are infinitely more ornamental to the page, owing to the vivid opposition of their bright colors and quaint lines, than if they had been drawn by Da Vinci himself: and so the Arena chapel is far more brightly decorated by the archaic frescoes of Giotti, than the Stanze of the Vatican are by those of Raffaelle. But how far it is possible to recur to such archaicism, or to make up for it by any voluntary ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... as I know, a man named Leonardo da Vinci invented it, in the Sixth Century Pre-Atomic. How soon can you get me half ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... 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 ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... our pace, making the branches fall off more than ever. Then—'The wheelbarrow,' said the professor, 'amazes us by its combined simplicity and perfection. The conception of a man of universal genius and vast erudition,—I allude to Leonardo da Vinci, the marvellous Florentine,—it has for upwards of three hundred years served mankind as a humble but valued ally. In every rank of life it finds its ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... as the exponent of corporeal beauty; the face of the Apollo Belvedere as that of intellectual and physical; and the Santo Sisto Madonna of Raphael, and the Christ of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, for spiritual. Through these radiant creations we look into the transcendent minds of their artists with a chastened, exalting joy, not unmingled with pride in our brotherhood with such ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert |
