"Leonardo da Vinci" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... incongruity, the whole effect was pleasing and harmonious. The frescoes on the walls were almost obliterated by age, and were partially covered by dull red stuff. Against this latter hung three pictures from the famous Sansevero collection: a Holy Family by Leonardo da Vinci, a triptych by Perugino, and a Madonna by Correggio. Hardly less celebrated, but sharply at odds with the ecclesiastical subjects of the paintings, was the mantle, carved in a bacchanalian procession of satyrs and nymphs—a model said to have been ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... having been gradually abstracted to adorn those 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 interest apart from their artistic merit. Loyola, Queen Elizabeth, ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... 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 ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... came crowding to the utterance, than in pondering whether they were worthy of admiration. In the annals of the Renaissance one gets almost weary of the records of brilliant persons, like Leo Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, who were architects, sculptors, painters, musicians, athletes, and writers all in one; who could make crowds weep by twanging a lute, ride the most vicious horses, take standing jumps over the heads ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his honor. "The plastic arts are 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. ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... portraits of those artists who have exalted one's ideas of human nature, and shewn what man can perform. Among these worthies a British eye soon distinguishes Sir Joshua Reynolds; a citizen of the world fastens his to Leonardo da Vinci. ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... sports of nature than to accept the necessary alternative, that all the inland regions and highlands, in the rocks of which marine shells had been found, had once been covered by the ocean. It is not so surprising, therefore, as it may at first seem, that although such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Bernard Palissy took just views of the nature of fossils, the opinion of the majority of their contemporaries set strongly the other way; nor even that error maintained itself long after the scientific grounds of the true interpretation of fossils had been stated, in a ...
— The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology - Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Primitive Greece, Greek Sculpture, Greek Vases, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, History of Mosaic; Medieval Illumination; Sienese Painters of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries; Florentine Painting; Domestic Architecture of Various Countries; Leonardo da Vinci and His Works; Art of the Netherlands; History of Mural Painting; History and Principles of Engraving; Prints and Their Makers; Chinese and Japanese Art; Colonial Architecture in America; Painting and Sculpture ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... 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 ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... 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 ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... "Leonardo da Vinci? Really? Well, of course, there are exceptions, otherwise there would be no rule. ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... defence at that 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
... combines her beauties, or corrects her defects. He 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
... make 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 ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... the Academy of Fine 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 the rest of the institution. The art gallery will ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael,—a magnificent volume illustrated by 167 drawings. Price, bound, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... and line happened to be combined with an interest in mechanics and hydraulics, the result was a Leonardo da Vinci, who painted his pictures, experimented with his balloons and flying machines, drained the marshes of the Lombardian plains and "expressed" his joy and interest in all things between Heaven and Earth in prose, in painting, in sculpture and in curiously conceived engines. When ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... 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 joy ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Florence is 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 ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... 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 ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo |
