|
|
Article: Leonardo da Vinci on beauty and ugliness: Carmen C. Bambach praises a ground-breaking exhibition of Leonardo's drawings from the Royal Collection.
- Article from:
- Apollo
- Article date:
- March 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Apollo Magazine Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Very few artists other than Leonardo appear to have felt a life-long need to articulate their ideals of beauty in drawings, along with seemingly endless variations on the theme of supine ugliness, and certainly none did so with comparable persistence or coherence of vision. As the great master's words intimate, 'beauty (bellezza) and ugliness (brutteza) appear each more powerful when seen in contrast, one with the other'. (1) In his conception of the 'ages of man', Leonardo would often juxtapose the ideally perfect beauty of youth with the grotesque deformity and decay of old age, because--as he inscribed below the sketch of an old hag--'a beautiful thing that is mortal ...