Leonardo da Vinci was an impatient genius who often went after projects with unbridled voracity only to abandon them when new ideas caught his attention. Or in the case of the fresco, Battle of Anghiari, when irritating difficulties presented themselves. In 1504, Leonardo was commissioned to paint a fresco in the Hall of Five Hundred in the Palazzo ... Read More »
Whether or not they’re wholly truthful, Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio” and Robert Altman’s “Vincent and Theo” are at least faithful to the stories of the artists they portray—delivering the tone, the feeling of those real lives if not their exact details. Wonderful and effective as they are, these and other films following the histories of these great painters do lack ... Read More »
After the Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda in Europe, was subjected to hyper-magnification, it has been discovered that two letters were painted onto each of the mysterious woman’s eyes. In the right eye, the letters LV are visible, which can be presumed refer to the artist’s initials, Leonardo da Vinci. In the left eye are letters much more intriguing, ... Read More »
Renaissance artist, inventor and all around genius Leonard da Vinci left many clues to his numerous experiments, much of which is written in a backwards handwriting he invented in order to keep his discoveries secret. Now, a fragment of his manuscript that had been forgotten for nearly 150 years has been rediscovered in the local archives in Nantes, France, uncovered ... Read More »
In what was part performance art and part serious debate about art today, five psychics were invited to an event during the London Frieze art fair organized by American multidisciplinary artist Jeffrey Vallance. Each psychic channeled the spirit of a different Western artist to participate in a panel where questions were posed to the deceased such as “Is there ... Read More »
The company that captured a high-res version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper three years ago is back at it again, this time at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. HAL9000, a company specializing in art photography, has created new multi-billion-pixel images of Bacchus by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci, Eleanor of ... Read More »
Ever since 2003 when Dan Brown published his international sensation The Da Vinci Code, fans and conspiracy theorist have been flocking to Rosslyn Chapel outside of Edinburgh, Scotland. The chapel plays a pivotal role in the book and the film starring Tom Hanks, which came out in 2006 and since then, tourism to the site has risen by 56% ... Read More »
It’s no secret (or Papal conspiracy for that matter) that, on the whole, humankind is slowly evolving from the slim figure of the Vitruvian Man into something more resembling Homer Simpson. Yes, many people on this earth still live in Medieval conditions with bony, underfed bodies to match. But looking around the more familiar backdrops of, say, modern Rome ... Read More »
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