Today(Apr15) on Founders day We Celebrate Leonardo Da Vinci
In memory of Leonardo, his talents and orientation towards Young men also for the founder of adamfoxie.blogspot.com, both born on April 15. We will stop the printers (computers) until the 16 to publish on the 17(Sun.) Thank you for clicking in and reading. We can be so much bigger and print so more information and make money but that is not the calling. We think we are doing what we are supposed to do. Just a little every day which turn into a flowing river at the end of the week or a sea at the end of the month. It’s been like that for a few years.
The hardest part is to judge what is not going to be printed or printed differently so we can go ahead and give you, post or repost for you. The best part is to write something no one is writing about but you will be grateful to read it here because it needed to be said. We are always open to have someone unknown write a piece. [Just email adamfoxie*or leave message on the last story posted for instructions and rules]
| Leonardo da Vinci | |
|---|---|
Portrait by Francesco Melzi.
| |
| Born | Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci 15 April 1452 Vinci, Republic of Florence(present-day Italy) |
| Died | 2 May 1519 (aged 67) Amboise, Kingdom of France |
| Known for | Diverse fields of the arts and sciences |
| Notable work | |
| Style | High Renaissance |
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, more commonly Leonardo da Vinci or simply Leonardo (Italian: [leoˈnardo da (v)ˈvintʃi] (
listen); 15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519), was an Italian polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography.
listen); 15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519), was an Italian polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography.
He has been variously called the father of paleontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time.Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter and tank,his genius epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal.
Many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man", an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination".According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci, however, notes that while there is much speculation regarding his life and personality, his view of the world was logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unorthodox for his time.
Born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, in Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter Andrea del Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded to him by Francis I.
Leonardo was, and is, renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings have survived.Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull, also outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics[citation needed]. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are nowadays displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on later science.
Today, Leonardo is widely recognized as one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived.
Leonardo’s sexuality
Little is known about Leonardo's sexuality, as, although he left hundreds of pages of writing, very little of it is personal in nature. He left no letters, poetry or diary that indicate any romantic interest. He never married and it cannot be stated with certainty that he had a sexually intimate relationship with any person, male or female. One of the few references that Leonardo made to sexuality in his notebooks states: "The act of procreation and anything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions." This statement has been the subject of various extrapolations and interpretations in attempts to gain a picture of his sexuality.
The only historical document concerning Leonardo’s sexual life is an accusation of sodomy made in 1476, while he was still at the workshop of Verrocchio.Florentine court records show that on April 9, 1476, an anonymous denunciation was left in the tamburo (letter box) in the Palazzo della Signoria (town hall) accusing a young goldsmith and male prostitute, Jacopo Saltarelli (sometimes referred to as an artist's model) of being "party to many wretched affairs and consents to please those persons who request such wickedness of him". The denunciation accused four people of sodomizing Saltarelli: Leonardo da Vinci, a tailor named Baccino, Bartolomeo di Pasquino, and Leonardo Tornabuoni, a member of the aristocratic Tornabuoni family. Saltarelli's name was known to the authorities because another man had been convicted of sodomy with him earlier the same year.Charges against the five were dismissed on the condition that no further accusations appear in the tamburo. The same accusation did in fact appear on June 7 but charges were again dismissed.The charges were dismissed because the accusations did not meet the legal requirement for prosecution: all accusations of sodomy had to be signed, but this one was not. (Such accusations could be made secretly, but not anonymously.) There is speculation that since the family of one of the accused, Leonardo Tornabuoni, was associated with Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal.Sodomy was theoretically an extremely serious offense, carrying the death penalty, but its very seriousness made it equally difficult to prove. It was also an offense for which punishment was very seldom handed down in contemporary Florence, where homosexuality was sufficiently widespread and tolerated to make the word Florenzer (Florentine) a slangword for homosexual in German.
Michael White points out that willingness to discuss aspects of Leonardo's sexual identity has varied according to contemporary attitudes.His near-contemporary biographer Vasari makes no reference to Leonardo's sexuality whatsoever.In the 20th century biographers made explicit reference to a probability that Leonardo was homosexual though others concluded that for much of his life he was celibate.]
Elizabeth Abbott, in her History of Celibacy, contends that, although Leonardo was probably homosexual, the trauma of the sodomy case converted him to celibacy for the rest of his life.A similar view of a homosexually-inclined but chaste Leonardo appears in a famous 1910 paper by Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood, which analysed a memory Leonardo described of having been attacked as a baby by a bird of prey that opened his mouth and "stuck me with the tail inside my lips again and again". Freud claimed the symbolism was clearly phallic, but argued that Leonardo's homosexuality was latent: that he did not act on his desires. Freud's work, and other, more recent, attempts to psychoanalyse Leonardo, are discussed at length in Bradley Collins's book Leonardo, Psychoanalysis and Art History.
Other authors contend that Leonardo was actively homosexual. Serge Bramly states that "the fact that Leonardo warns against lustfulness certainly need not mean that he himself was chaste".David M. Friedman argues that Leonardo's notebooks show a preoccupation with men and with sexuality uninterrupted by the trial and agrees with art historian Kenneth Clark that Leonardo never became sexless. Michael White, in Leonardo: The First Scientist, says it is likely that the trial simply made Leonardo cautious and defensive about his personal relationships and sexuality, but did not dissuade him from intimate relationships with men: "there is little doubt that Leonardo remained a practising homosexual".Other homosexual relationships, with a man named Fioravante di Domenico and a young falconer, Bernardo di Simone, are suggested in Michael White's biography.
Leonardo's late painting of John the Baptist is often cited as support of the case that Leonardo was homosexual. There is also an erotic drawing of Salai known as the The Incarnate Angel, perhaps by the hand of Leonardo, which was one of a number of such drawings once among those contained in the British Royal Collection, but later dispersed. The particular drawing, showing an angel with an erect phallus, was rediscovered in a German collection in 1991. It appears to be a humorous take on Leonardo's St. John the Baptist.The painting of John the Baptist was copied by several of Leonardo's followers, including Salai. The drawing may also be by one of Leonardo's pupils, perhaps Salai himself, as it appears to have been drawn by the right, rather than the left hand, and bears strong resemblance to Salai's copy of the painting.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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