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| Leonardo da Vinci |
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| Painting: Mona Lisa
Artist and Art
Leonardo da Vinci & Mona
Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci an Italian
painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer. And one of his paintings
Mona Lisa or (Monna Lisa, La Gioconda in Italian; La Joconde in French) is a
half-length portrait of a woman, which has been acclaimed as “the best known,
the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most
parodied work of art in the world”. Mona Lisa thought to be a portrait of Lisa
Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, is in oil on white Lombardy
poplar panel, and is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506, when
Leonardo da Vinci was living in Florence, and it now hangs in the Louvre, in
Paris, where it remains an object of pilgrimage in the 21st century.
The Mona Lisa and its influence
These signs of aging distract little from the
painting’s effect. In its exquisite synthesis of sitter and landscape, the Mona Lisa set the standard for all future
portraits. The painting presents a woman in half-body portrait, which has as a
backdrop a distant landscape. Yet this simple description of a seemingly
standard composition gives little sense of Leonardo’s achievement. The sensuous
curves of the sitter’s hair and clothing, created through sfumato (use
of fine shading), are echoed in the shapes of the valleys and rivers behind
her. The sense of overall harmony achieved in the painting—especially apparent
in the sitter’s faint smile—reflects Leonardo’s idea of the cosmic link
connecting humanity and nature, making this painting an enduring record of
Leonardo’s vision.
The Aesthetics of Mona Lisa
Leonardo
used a pyramid design to place the woman simply and calmly in the space of the
painting. Her folded hands form the front corner of the pyramid. Her breast,
neck and face glow in the same light that models her hands. The light gives the
variety of living surfaces an underlying geometry of spheres and circles.
Leonardo referred to a seemingly simple formula for seated female figure: the
images of seated Madonna, which were widespread at the time. He effectively
modified this formula in order to create the visual impression of distance between
the sitter and the observer. The armrest of the chair functions as a dividing
element between Mona Lisa and
the viewer.
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Vincent Van
Gogh and the Starry Night
The Starry Night is an oil on canvas painting by the Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June, 1889, it depicts the view (with the notable addition of an idealized village) from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise. Although The Starry Night was painted during the day in Van Gogh's ground-floor studio, it would be inaccurate to state that the picture was painted from memory. The view has been identified as the one from his bedroom window, facing east, a view which Van Gogh painted variations of no fewer than twenty-one times, including The Starry Night. "Through the iron-barred window," he wrote to his brother, Theo, around 23 May 1889, "I can see an enclosed square of wheat . . . above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory.” Even given the large number of letters Van Gogh wrote, he said very little about The Starry Night.
As an artist devoted to working whenever possible from prints and
illustrations or outside in front of the landscape he was depicting, the idea
of painting an invented scene from imagination troubled Van Gogh.
Arguably, it is this rich mixture of invention, remembrance, and observation combined with Van Gogh’s use of simplified forms, thick impasto, and boldly contrasting colors that has made the work so compelling to subsequent generations of viewers as well as to other artists. Inspiring and encouraging others is precisely what Van Gogh sought to achieve with his night scenes. When Starry Night over the Rhône was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, an important and influential venue for vanguard artists in Paris, in 1889, Vincent told Theo he hoped that it “might give others the idea of doing night effects better than I do.” The Starry Night, his own subsequent “night effect,” became a foundational image for Expressionism as well as perhaps the most famous painting in Van Gogh’s oeuvre.
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