Disclaimer: The information stated below are not from my own knowledge and all of them are from the internet from various sources and sites which I included after this article. All credit are given to them.
FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTED TO LEONARDO DA VINCI'S GREATNESS:
- During the Renaissance, European artists began to study the model of nature more closely and to paint with the goal of greater realism. They learned to create lifelike people and animals, and they became skilled at creating the illusion of depth and distance on flat walls and canvases by using the techniques of linear perspective.
- Leonardo da Vinci trained as a painter during the Renaissance and became a true master of the craft. His amazing powers of observation and skill as an illustrator enabled him to notice and recreate the effects he saw in nature, and added a special liveliness to his portraits. Curious as well as observant, he constantly tried to explain what he saw, and described many experiments to test his ideas. Because he wrote down and sketched so many of his observations in his notebooks, we know that he was among the very first to take a scientific approach towards understanding how our world works and how we see it.
- Leonardo recognized that one way to paint scenes realistically was to observe with great care how animals, people, and landscapes really looked. He was also careful to notice the differences in how an object looked when it was close by and when it was farther away, and when it was seen in bright light and in dim light. He turned his attention to nature during long walks. He wrote detailed notes on his observations and made sketches of the things he saw in his notebooks throughout his life.
- Leonardo was born in the small town of Vinci, in Tuscany, near Florence. He was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid-1460s the family settled in Florence, where Leonardo was given the best education that Florence, a major intellectual and artistic center of Italy, could offer. He rapidly advanced socially and intellectually. He was handsome, persuasive in conversation, and a fine musician and improviser. About 1466 he was apprenticed as a garzone (studio boy) to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. In Verrocchio's workshop Leonardo was introduced to many activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble and bronze. In 1472 he was entered in the painter's guild of Florence, and in 1476 he was still considered Verrocchio's assistant. In Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (1470?, Uffizi, Florence), the kneeling angel at the left of the painting is by Leonardo.
- Leonardo got his start as an artist around 1469, when his father apprenticed him to the fabled workshop of Verocchio. Verocchio's specialty was perspective, which artists had only recently begun to get the hang of, and Leonardo quickly mastered its challenges. In fact, Leonardo quickly surpassed Verocchio, and by the time he was in his early twenties he was downright famous.
- Renaissance Italy was centuries away from our culture of photographs and cinema, but Leonardo nevertheless sought a universal language in painting. With perspective and other realistic elements, Leonardo tried to create faithful renditions of life. In a culture previously dominated by highly figurative and downright strange religious paintings, Leonardo's desire to paint things realistically was bold and fresh. This call to objectivity became the standard for painters who followed in the 16th century.
- Ever the perfectionist, Leonardo turned to science in the quest to improve his artwork. His study of nature and anatomy emerged in his stunningly realistic paintings, and his dissections of the human body paved the way for remarkably accurate figures. He was the first artist to study the physical proportions of men, women and children and to use these studies to determine the "ideal" human figure. Unlike many of his contemporaries -- Michelangelo for example -- he didn't get carried away and paint ludicrously muscular bodies, which he referred to as "bags of nuts."
HOW IS SFUMATO APPLIED IN MONA LISA?
- The Mona Lisa, Leonardo's most famous work, is as well known for its mastery of technical innovations as for the mysteriousness of its legendary smiling subject. This work is a consummate example of two techniques—sfumato and chiaroscuro—of which Leonardo was one of the first great masters. Sfumato is characterized by subtle, almost infinitesimal transitions between color areas, creating a delicately atmospheric haze or smoky effect; it is especially evident in the delicate gauzy robes worn by the sitter and in her enigmatic smile. Chiaroscuro is the technique of modeling and defining forms through contrasts of light and shadow; the sensitive hands of the sitter are portrayed with a luminous modulation of light and shade, while color contrast is used only sparingly.
- Thanks to this technique the subjects painted by Leonardo seem to breathe, to undergo transformation, revealing new details at each glance. He was aware that changeability was the very essence of life, something he saw through his observation of the waters, plants and the light. This was part of the reason why he considered mathematical perspective insufficient. It is not just calculations but the"aria grossa" that colours with blue the landscapes behind the people portrayed, conceived and given substance for the first time in his paintings, and that adds depth to the view. This is the case for example of the Last Supper, where Leonardo combines the two methods to obtain a unique and radically new effect: the internal architectural space is rendered by means of mathematical perspective but the windows extend the gaze over a perfectly proportioned landscape constructed through the use of sfumato and dabs of colour.
- Sfumato refers to the subtle gradation of tone which was used to obscure sharp edges and create a synergy between lights and shadows in a painting. As Ernst Gombrich, one of the twentieth-centuries most famous art historians, explains: "[t]his is Leonardo's famous invention … the blurred outline and mellowed colours that allow one form to merge with another and always leave something to our imagination."Leonardo da Vinci used the technique with great mastery; in his painting the Mona Lisa those enigmatic aspects of her smile have been achieved precisely by this method, and we are left to fill in the detail.
- How, exactly, did Leonardo achieve this effect? For the painting as a whole he selected a range of unifying midtones, especially the blues, greens, and earths, which had similar levels of saturation. By avoiding the most luminous of colors for his brights, which could break the unity, the midtones thus created a subdued flavor to the picture. Leonardo da Vinci is quoted as saying "[w]hen you want to make a portrait, do it in dull weather, or as evening falls.".
Sources:
•http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/8197896/Mona-Lisa-painting-contains-hidden-code.html
PS: The info about the other option for question 3 is in Ms. Itong's blog. Thank you classmates!
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