How Leonardo da Vinci's angels pointed the way to the future
The atheist innovator used religious commissions to test-drive his greatest invention – the flying machine
Flight of fancy ... detail from Leonardo da Vinci's The Annunciation. Photograph: Francesco Bellini/AP
Leonardo da Vinci painted the
most beautiful angels in the world.
Since there are no actual angels, his pictures of them are literally
the most real, the most gorgeous, the most magical that exist.
This is strange, because Leonardo was not a religious man. Although the National Gallery made a
vivid case for him as a religious artist in its 2011 exhibition of his paintings, there is very little in his notebooks to suggest that
Christianity was part of his everyday, personal life. Shopping lists are more prominent than prayers among his notes.
However
compelling Leonardo's religious paintings are, it has to be remembered
that all are commissioned works. No painter could have a career in
Renaissance Italy without
creating altarpieces. It is therefore important to distinguish between a
passionately Christian artist like Michelangelo and someone like Leonardo who left plenty of written evidence that he was more curious about
Archimedes than
St Augustine.
Leonardo conceals his heterodoxy within his paintings – his composition
The Virgin of the Rocks is an idiosyncratic image with no parallel in Christian art.
He puts his own ideas and interests into his angels, too.
Leonardo painted the most electrically alive angel wings imaginable in his early work
The Annunciation. These wings seem practical – the artist has thought deeply about how a pair of wings might fit on to a human body.
When the young Leonardo painted this, he could see a picture of a flying man in Florence – a
medieval carving of the legendary inventor Daedalus wearing wings on the city's bell tower. Daedalus flew with science, not magic. He made wax wings but when his son
Icarus flew near the sun, the wings melted.
The
wings of Leonardo's Annunciation angel are Daedalan. They are designs
for real wings. In this early painting, he is already pondering the
mystery that would fascinate Leonardo all his life –
how to build a flying machine.
Leonardo's Annunciation angel is a prototype of the
flying machines whose designs he lays bare in his notebooks.
From the 1480s to the early 1500s he designed flying machines with
bat-like wings and systems of stirrups, levers and pulleys for the
pilot to power them with his own arms and legs. He planned a test flight in 1505 from a mountain outside Florence. The results are not recorded.
In the same years he worked on a
second version of his painting The Virgin of the Rocks.
The angel in this picture is subversive in a new way: it is
androgynous. Leonardo melts gender in his image of this unearthly being.
He creates a beauty so sensual it transcends male and female – a daring expression of his own sexual identity.
Flight,
for Leonardo, is the ultimate human dream, and angels are futuristic
glimpses of airborne humanity. In that release from earth, he glimpses
liberation from the religious bonds that saw him twice accused of the
crime of sodomy.
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Como es nuestra costumbre, actualizamos este post cada vez que se presenta la oportunidad: el día de ayer, 3 de febrero, 2013, se cumplieron 510 del inicio del retrato más famosos del mundo, la Mona Lisa; por este motivo el Dominical de El Comercio, año 59, No. 45 publicó su suplemento dedicado a este acontecimiento, así como a otros eventos de la época del Renacimiento, el cuadro La última cena, el robo del cuadro de la Gioconda en 1911 y su posterior aparición en 1913, Florencia, identificada como una tierra de genios, Leonardo, el genio total, la bella sonriente, en la página central, Giocondas alteradas, una pasión botánica, sabiduría e invención, el artista científico y hasta recetas de cocina.
Todo el universo en la mente y creatividad de este genio excepcional.
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Hoy, 15/4/2013 copio el aporte de mi amigo Wayqui en FB, con las gracias correspondientes:
Un
día como hoy, el 15 de abril de 1452, nació Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo
di ser Piero da Vinci). Notable polímata del Renacimiento italiano (a
la vez anatomista, arquitecto, artista, botánico, científico, escritor,
escultor, filósofo, ingeniero, inventor, músico, poeta y urbanista)
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