"Leonardo da Vinci" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... feathers, which had an "affinity'' for the 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, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 with a pious horror that the French soldiers used ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... master gravity and navigate the air are worthy of brief mention if only to show how persistent were the efforts from the earliest historic ages to accomplish this end. Passing over the legends of the time of mythology we find that many-sided genius, Leonardo da Vinci, early in the sixteenth century, not content with being a painter, architect, sculptor, engineer and designer of forts, offering drawings and specifications of wings which, fitted to men, he thought would enable them to fly. The sketches are still ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael,—a magnificent volume illustrated by 167 drawings. Price, bound, 15 francs. (Publisher, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... delusion is that success is attained by what I may call the "Benjamin Franklin" method. Franklin was a very great man; he united in his character a set of splendid qualities as various, in their different ways, as those possessed by Leonardo da Vinci. I have an immense admiration for him. But his Autobiography does make me angry. His Autobiography is understood to be a classic, and if you say a word against it in the United States you are apt to get killed. I ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... Psalterion," now at 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 Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... 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 ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... instrument is caricature—which strictly means an "overload," as Johnson says, "an exaggerated resemblance." Caricature is a likeness having some comical exaggeration or distortion. Now, caricature is a legitimate and potent instrument of humour, which great masters have used with consummate effect. Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, Hogarth, use it; but only at times, and in a subsidiary way. Rabelais, Swift, Fielding, use this weapon not unfrequently; Shakespeare very sparingly; Goldsmith and Scott, I think, almost never. Caricature, the essence of which is exaggeration ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... most instructive and encouraging thing in the whole annals of progress to note how the men of the Renascence were able to pick up the threads of the Greeks and continue their work. The texture held good. Leonardo da Vinci, whose birth coincides with the invention of the printing-press, is the most perfect reproduction in modern times of the early Greek sophos, the man of universal interests and capacity. He gave careful and admiring study to Archimedes, the greatest pure man of science among the Greeks, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... inventor of the ottava rima. Two centuries after the last of these parents of modern literature had nearly elapsed, ere he who has been styled the Dante of the arts, Michael Angelo, and his contemporaries, among whom were Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, appeared upon the stage. Thus language, the first great want of man, the necessary instrument of reason, by which its possessor is distinguished from the rest of creation, the vehicle of human thoughts, the means by which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... contemporaries, which did not in a greater or less degree contribute to the developement of his powers; not as presenting models of imitation, but as shedding new light on his own mind, and opening to view its hidden treasures. Such to him were the forms of the Antique, of Leonardo da Vinci, and of Michael Angelo, and the breadth and color of Fra Bartolomeo,—lights that first made him acquainted with himself, not lights that he followed; for he was a follower of none. To how many others he was indebted ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... 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 through which all ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... 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
... its mysterious seal upon her face, and to make itself perceptible to sensitive observers in her manner and carriage. A young Italian artist, who frequented the same galleries which Hilda haunted, grew deeply interested in her expression. One day, while she stood before Leonardo da Vinci's picture of Joanna of Aragon, but evidently without seeing it,—for, though it had attracted her eyes, a fancied resemblance to Miriam had immediately drawn away her thoughts,—this artist drew a hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated into a finished ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in Prussian professors such as the one I have quoted. They can get no further than the notion of stealing giants. I will not bore you now with all the other giants they have tried to steal; it is enough to say that St. Paul, Leonardo da Vinci, and Shakespeare himself are among the monstrosities exhibited at Frederick-William fair—on grounds as good as those quoted above. But I have put this particular case before you, as an artist rather than an Italian, to show what I mean when I object to a "German ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... represented by a charming Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci, almost identical with that of the Louvre; and six admirable pictures of Andrea del Sarto. But the one which most attracts and holds all those who regard the Faultless Painter with sympathy, and who admiring his genius regret his errors, is a portrait of his wife Lucrezia Fede, whose ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been happily working. She has failed; but that has not clouded ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... 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, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... flowers, terra cotta, movie-films, telephones, and printed matter than those Florentines did, but we have, with our 100,000,000 inhabitants, yet to produce that little town, her Dante, her Andrea del Sarto, her Michael Angelo, her Leonardo da Vinci, her Savonarola, her Giotto, or the group who followed Giotto's picture. Florence had a marvelous energy—re-lease experience. All our industrial formalism, our conventionalized young manhood, our ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... 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, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... numerous monuments which it has produced make on his imagination! First, he admires the beautiful tomb erected to the memory of FRANCIS I, the restorer of literature and the arts; who, by inviting to his court LEONARDO DA VINCI and PRIMATICCIO, and establishing schools and manufactories, consolidated the great ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... 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
... 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 Invalides" in ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... in which the Apostles appear are modeled more or less after the great religious paintings, especially those of the Bavarian artist, Albrecht Duerer. The Last Supper is a living representation of the famous painting of Leonardo da Vinci in the refectory at Milan. Peter and Judas are here brought into sharp contrast. Next to Christ, is the slender figure of the beloved disciple. The characters of the different Apostles are placed in ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... As someone has called Leonardo da Vinci "the great Italian Yankee," because of his multifarious and ingenious suggestions in the world of material things, so our own Edison may be called "the Yankee Leonardo," for, with a curiosity ranging ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... the civil strife, he wrote no poetry, or none deserving the name. All artists have intervals of non-productiveness, usually caused by exhaustion. This was not Milton's case. His genius was not his master, nor could it pass, like that of Leonardo da Vinci, unmoved through the most tragic scenes. He deliberately suspended it at the call of what he believed to be duty to his country. His unrivalled power of expression was placed at the service of a passionate political conviction. This prostitution of faculty avenged itself; for when he did turn ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... by Michael Angelo in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which I here reproduce.(*) Durer's famous work on "Human Proportion," published in 1528, contains excellent figures, but no sketches of dissections. But greater than any of these, and antedating them, is Leonardo da Vinci, the one universal genius in whom the new spirit was incarnate—the Moses who alone among his contemporaries saw the promised land. How far Leonardo was indebted to his friend and fellow student, della Torre, at Pavia we do not know, nor does it matter in face of the indubitable fact that in the ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... 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 ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... which is softened by exposure to the air, renders the durability of the statue doubtful." Messer Angelo de Lorenzo Manfidi (second herald) objected because it would break the order of certain ceremonies held in the Loggia. Leonardo da Vinci followed San Gallo; he did not think it would injure the ceremonies. Salvestro, a jeweller, and Filippino Lippi supported Piero di Cosimo, who proposed that the precise spot should be left to the sculptor who made it, "as he will know better how it should ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... and 36. In spite of their familiarity it has seemed impossible to omit the set of capitals, with variants, by Albrecht Duerer, 37 and 38; for Duerer's letters were taken as a basis by nearly all such Renaissance designers of lettering as Geoffrey Tory, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. It should be observed in the Duerer [32] alphabet that among the variant forms of individual letters shown, one is usually intended for monumental use, while another exhibits pen treatment in the characteristic swelling of the ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... emperor." Leo X. threatened with excommunication whoever should print and sell the poems of Ariosto without the author's consent. The same pope attended the deathbed of Raphael, as Francis I. did that of Leonardo da Vinci. ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... 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 only gives her creatures ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... excitement, and by abuse of wild analogies lose the vital art of balance and sane comparison. Only the greatest minds, endowed as it were with some divine genius of extrication, may dare to practise the two together. So Leonardo da Vinci drove inference and intuition abreast without disaster, and gathered from purple distances of thought their wildest and most splendid flowers. To him, as has been well said, philosophy was something giving strange ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... across his mind 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 ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... knew that 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 ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... neglected point. After that I never saw him again in Dresden; but I presume that he carried out the strategic works entrusted to him by that committee with all the conscientiousness of a Michael Angelo or a Leonardo da Vinci. ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... that the deepest draughts of 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 strains of Palestrina, Pergolese, Marcello, Stradella, and Cherubini, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... epithet can be properly 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... 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 discussion concerning the rearing of calves with Mrs. Gould. Lady Sarah bit her ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... depths of life. It can be read, re-read, learned by heart, and the more it is known the wider 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 rest, are ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... reflex vision. The idea was suggested to me in consequence of certain effects noticed in employing the stereoscope. Professor William B. Rodgers has since called the attention of the American Scientific Association to some facts bearing on the subject, and to a very curious experiment of Leonardo da Vinci's, which enables the observer to look through the palm of his hand (or seem to), as if it had a hole bored through it. As he and others hesitated to accept my explanation, I was not sorry to find recently the following words in the "Observations ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Arts, generally spoken of as the Academy of San Carlos,—named in honor of Carlos III. of Spain,—which contains three or four well-filled apartments of paintings, with one and, in some instances, two pictures each of such masters as Leonardo da Vinci, Velasquez, Titian, Van Dyck, Rubens, Perugino, and others. There is also a large hall of sculpture attached, which presents casts of many well-known and classic originals. This department, however, does not compare well with ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... faculty on which 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 ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... called the stone of sorrow. Here she is represented in her later state of 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
... of which we have spoken hung against the rough wall in one place, and in another appeared an old engraved head of one of the Madonnas of Leonardo da Vinci, a picture which to Mary had a mysterious interest, from the fact of its having been cast on shore after a furious storm, and found like a waif lying in the sea-weed; and Mrs. Marvyn, who had deciphered the signature, had not ceased exploring till she found ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... right, when an inferior master would have used curved ones. Fig. 11 is a fair facsimile of part of a sketch of Raphael's, which exhibits these characters very distinctly. Even the careful drawings of Leonardo da Vinci are shaded most commonly with straight lines; and you may always assume it as a point increasing the probability of a drawing being by a great master if you find rounded surfaces, such as those of cheeks or ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... treasures to Antwerp, where now the gay youth whom the aged domestic had known from a child was in want and exile. The pictures were eagerly bought by a foreign collector named Duart. The proceeds gave poor Villiers bread; but the noble works of Titian and Leonardo da Vinci, and others, were lost for ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... 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 while perfecting itself materially ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... 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 ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... 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 times. Among them all none have ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... austere design. There I saw canvases of the highest value, the likes of which I had marveled at in private European collections and art exhibitions. The various schools of the old masters were represented by a Raphael Madonna, a Virgin by Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph by Correggio, a woman by Titian, an adoration of the Magi by Veronese, an assumption of the Virgin by Murillo, a Holbein portrait, a monk by Velazquez, a martyr by Ribera, a village fair by Rubens, two Flemish ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Jennie's words, answers with a scarcely perceptible smile, which barely distends her lips, but makes little, sly, ambiguous depressions at their corners, altogether as with Monna Lisa in the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... isn't so well known because he spreads his abilities over a broad area. Some—like Leonardo da Vinci—have made a name for themselves, but, in general, they have remained ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Titian, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Annibal Caracci, Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Carlo Cignani, Vandyke, Rubens, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of Leonardo da Vinci as we now read it there are some variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding lightly by other men's beliefs, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... 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 ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... of Regio Montanus (1437-1472), although his actual scientific attainments would appear to have been important only in comparison with the utter ignorance of his contemporaries. The most distinguished worker of the new era was the famous Italian Leonardo da Vinci—a man who has been called by Hamerton the most universal genius that ever lived. Leonardo's position in the history of art is known to every one. With that, of course, we have no present concern; but it is worth our while to inquire at some length as to the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... small 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, ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... color deepens the farther and interior horizon 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, tangents with the illumined atmosphere beyond, it affords a finer filter for these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... mediaeval times; and indeed, as respects the number of her great men, 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
... On the Improvement of the Genius, illustrated in the characters of Lord Bacon, Mr. Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, and Leonardo da Vinci.—We have not been able to learn, what papers in the Guardian were written by him, besides Number 37, Vol. I. which contains Remarks on the Tragedy ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... at Gemma, smiling with half-shut eyes, in the subtle, sphinx-like way that gave him the look of a Leonardo da Vinci portrait, the instinctive distrust with which he inspired her deepened into ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... Ruskin, on the strength of one picture, averred that Tintoretto was the greatest of painters. For William Blake, England's visionary painter, Rubens was an emissary from Satan let loose on this sinful globe to destroy art. And Leonardo da Vinci—what of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 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 ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... of 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 his solitary hours ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... is supplied with a list of the authorities he should consult for the "History and Progress of his Art." He avoids expatiating on the books purely elementary—"the van of which is led by Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Durer, and the rear by Gherard Lavresse—as the principles which they detail must be supposed to be already in the student's possession, or are occasionally interwoven with the topics of the lectures;" and proceeds "to the historically critical writers, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... 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 of ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... in worldly wisdom were looking straight across the table at the Leonardo da Vinci girl with the grave reflective eyes and the over-emphasised air of repose. Francesca felt a quick throb of anger against her match-making neighbour; why, she asked herself, must some women, with no end or purpose of their own to serve, except the sheer love of meddling in the affairs ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... 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, and then ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... blackness, are the common 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 ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... had not been a cultivator of mechanical philosophy until Leonardo da Vinci, who was born A.D. 1452. To him, and not to Lord Bacon, must be attributed the renaissance of science. Bacon was not only ignorant of mathematics, but depreciated its application to physical inquiries. He contemptuously rejected the Copernican system, ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries - [This is our volunteer's translation of the title] • Albrecht Durer
... is better known 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
... single painting, the Mona Lisa, of a single individual, Leonardo da Vinci, less important than the millions of paintings made during countless generations throughout the ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... the expression of modern painters was often theatrical, and that it bore the stamp of their age, in which was no longer found, as in Andrea Mantegna, Perugino, and Leonardo da Vinci, the unity and simplicity which characterised the repose of the ancients; a repose to which is joined that profundity of sentiment which is the characteristic of Christianity. She admired the artless composition of ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... on 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 great request. But ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles |
