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The grotesque side of Leonardo da Vinci
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoOh, yeah. He liked his ugly. His ugly old men made his ugly old women look like models, but I usually hear about his women.
- FredPret 4y agoWhat a nothingburger. A man who lived centuries ago made comments about people who look different that we now interpret as unkind. He also drew some of these people.
- namdnay 4y agoSometimes “nothing burgers” make for an interesting read. TAL is basically a podcast of nothing burgers, doesn’t stop it from being great And the fact that there’s an exhibition on with these works is always good to know from a “news” perspective
- coldtea 4y ago>Sometimes “nothing burgers” make for an interesting read. That's the problem. It's how a Big Mac makes for an interesting eat. Interesting but not nutricious...
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- throwaway4aday 4y agoNot so much a nothingburger as simply poorly written. The focus of the article seems to be on the possibly "problematic" side of da Vinci going so far as to hint at his supposed pretty privilege and wonder if he chuckled at his own caricatures which is an absurdly retrospective judgement. There are far more interesting facets to da Vinci's work and life than whether or not his attitudes towards ugly people would be acceptable in the morality du jour. The article even admits that da Vinci's notes make no mention of ugliness in a pejorative sense, highlighting that he referred to one of them as a viso fantastico. They make a U turn and attempt to climb up out of the hole they've dug for themselves talking about his interest in anatomy and ageing and tries to make a worn out point about the Mona Lisa's possible androgyny but it's about as striking as a wet noodle. Anyone who thinks the Mona Lisa is overly masculine is probably just a man who hasn't seen many women without makeup on. It's all rather transparent click bait that's aimed at riling people up. Incredibly dull when compared to even the most factual and plainly written biography of da Vinci.
- bangkoksbest 4y agoThat is not the focus of the article at all. The very first paragraph starts with a sympathetic quote of Da Vinci's. The third paragraph approvingly suggests his drawings were foreshadowing Munch and Bacon's art. Almost every other paragraph is also a sympathetic reading of Da Vinci's drawings that are being featured an upcoming art exhibition. You've invented a strawman and then sneered at the author for not following through with it, and then, it seems, you became overly sensitive about the comment on androgyny with Mona Lisa, as if that comment is offensive and denigrating (it's not, and the author didn't intend it as such, but it does reveal that you think it is offensive).
- JohnClark1337 4y ago[dead]
- throw-8462682 4y ago[flagged]
- jdthedisciple 4y agoExactly the vibe I'm getting. I think it's important being aware of this current craze.
- bangkoksbest 4y agoAh yes, the current craze of Da Vinci art exhibitions that show him humanising unconventional subjects. It's very important to be aware of this craze!
- sophacles 4y agoOh hell, this might turn into a renaissance. What's next? A growing interest to understand the natural world?
- striking 4y ago> The man with a mad whirlpool in his hair, looking at the world from a bulging eye, is a figure of loneliness and isolation: Leonardo feels for him. Even identifies with him. Far from cruel mockery, this is a sympathetic study of an outsider. What part of this article reads as discrediting or decoupling?
- bangkoksbest 4y agoWhat are you talking about? This is completely unrelated whining to what the article actually talks about, which is Da Vinci's artistic interest in humanising the traditionally "grotesque". Very far from discrediting. You're not only ignoring the link, but you're going out of your way to write up an irrelevant sanctimonious comment.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoDeliberately misinterpreted? The article is titled in a pejorative way. The article represents him as laughing at the disabled, the disfigured, and speculates on how we should not think kindly of him today for his cruelty. Then it dips its toe into the pool of accuracy and mentions he never actually said anything cruel (or wrote).
- asimpletune 4y agoSometimes it blows my mind how good Leonardo is at drawing. It's really striking when you go to a museum that has artists from the same time period. Leo's stuff is just head and shoulders above the rest. In a way, it's like he knows exactly what detail to capture that makes something look realistic. It's a form of compression I guess, but done by a human. In a way, it's better than a photograph because it captures how we judge a subject. To see what I mean, try tracing a photograph.
- promptdaddy 4y agoWith photography, judgement, otherwise referred to as perspective, is achieved by composition. All things relayed through a human are bottlenecked through perspective.
- briandear 4y ago> it's like he knows exactly what detail to capture that makes something look realistic Picasso’s bull drawings were a great example of this as well. It’s like you said, an exercise in compression: https://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/animals_in_art/pablo_picasso.htm https://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/animals_in_art/...
- LegitShady 4y agobut none of that looks realistic. It's becoming more and more symbolic. The thing that he was lauding about leonardo was not symbolism, but his ability to portray a realistic visual perspective as if your eye was seeing it. Picasso's bull has nothing to do with that, and really picasso was uninterested in it and it wasn't what he was trying to do. None of those bull images try to portray a realistic looking bull the way your eyes would see it.
- Pulcinella 4y agoI do like how Picasso’s more symbolic bulls mimic the Aurochs on the walls at Lascaux. Definitely not realistic though, as you said. Pretty cool that I can easily recognize what someone from 17,000 years ago was trying to depict, though.
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- ronnykylin 4y agoIt's Yoda in Mona Lisa's outfit with the hairstyle of Red queen...
- akomtu 4y ago"What are these drawings? Are they just cruel jokes?" Some of the great artists have the skill of capturing "adjacent worlds" for the lack of a better word. The works "David" and "Venus" are super-human portraits of those winged guys, while these Leonardo's works are infernal portraits. That's what gives them the eerie vibe. "They are not really funny, for one thing. They have a despairing, even scary, power." He adds: "Of monstrous faces I shall say nothing because they naturally stay in the mind." He's tacitly saying that those are visions, not drawings of something he made up. There are other artists with this skill. A famous modern example is Giger's "alien" portrait that he saw in a dream. Edit: as for Mona Lisa, it's a mix of the two worlds, it's like drawing a face of a real pharaoh on the body of a real lion.
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- havefunbesafe 4y agoThe only thing more grotesque is how boring the rest of this writer's articles are https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jonathanjones https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jonathanjones
- joshuaheard 4y agoDa Vinci made a living drawing and painting the rich people of his day. I'm sure they all didn't look like the young and beautiful Mona Lisa.
- josefresco 4y ago> Da Vinci made a living drawing and painting the rich people of his day. From what I read, he hated every minute of it. Chose instead to draw/paint things/people he liked, often holding onto his paintings for years to make refinements, only to never deliver them.
- actinium226 4y agoYes he kept putting off Isabella d'Este, who really wanted him to make a portrait of her, but it sounds like it was more for status then because she had any taste in art. He painted some of Ludovico Sforza's mistresses. I think 'Lady with an Ermine' is very nice. There's speculation that he took the Mona Lisa commission specifically because it was just a silk merchant who wanted a portrait of his wife. I.e. not a power player. He never delivered the commission, it was with him when he died in France.
- pibechorro 4y ago[flagged]
- steve76 4y ago[dead]
- Tao3300 4y agoIt really makes you wonder how far "ahead of their time" artists throughout history might have been if only we could see their sketchbooks.
- klyrs 4y agoThe author seems to be projecting modern mores onto da Vinci, imagining him sneering at his subjects, including a bizarre swipe at Mona Lisa's "mannish" face. What I see is a scientifically-minded artist who was interested in the vast range that the human form could take, bucking the contemporary trend to focus on idealized beauty. Reworked title, perhaps: The Fashion Industry is Still Not Ready for Leonardo DaVinci's Models.
- madaxe_again 4y agoAgreed. It seems as though the author has perhaps not seen that many people, as both the works shown and referenced depict entirely plausible humans. The “duchess” could be a middle aged woman with untreated acromegaly. Hell, maybe she was, as a male acromegalic ancestor could have done well on the battlefield. Today’s dysgenic traits are yesterday’s eugenic. The woman depicted looking left in the sketch is either missing her upper teeth due to decay, or has a cleft pallet. An awful lot of the variety of the human form that once was is no more in the developed and even developing world, as disease and treatable deformity are generally avoided where possible - and back then, if you were covered in pox scars, syphilitic, toothless and half blind from cataracts - well, you were 35, and lucky to be alive with a thriving family. I’m struggling to think of anywhere on earth where the kind of conditions Renaissance cities still persist, and I am drawing a blank. We just don’t have that point of reference as a tangible reality any more.
- LordDragonfang 4y agoIndeed. The author's takeaway from Leonardo's lovingly detailed renderings of the variety of the human form being "he must have been mocking them" perhaps reflects more negatively on the author's point of view than of DaVinci's.
- tomcam 4y agoThat is correct. Beggars the imagination to think that da Vinci was exaggerating some of these faces. The Author has clearly not lived in a poor area.
- gverrilla 4y agoVery bad quality click baiting writing.
- archagon 4y agoFYI, the original was likely created by Quentin Matsys, with da Vinci's version being a copy/study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Duchess#Quentin_Matsys_and_Leonardo_Da_Vinci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Duchess#Quentin_Matsy...
- janzer 4y agoSince the article starts right off by stating almost the direct opposite, I'd guess the matter is at least less certain/more debated than the wikipedia article makes it out to be.
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- olliecornelia 4y agoNo more grotesque than what Jonathan Jones sees in a mirror.
- Shaggy2000 4y ago[dead]