NATIONAL EDITION OF THE MANUSCRIPTS AND DRAWINGS BY LEONARDO DA VINCI

The masterpieces of Leonardo

The emotions the works of Leonardo da Vinci’s art works are able to arouse are infinite. His entire oeuvre is a play of references: paintings, nature, machines, his writings, reality, his studies and inventions are all like pieces of the same, complex mosaic. The fabric of Leonardo's works is made from the fibres of his very life, from a wide variety of fields of knowledge, of science and art, all of which come together in his drawings and paintings and in the incredible machines that his genius allowed him to design.

A highly detailed observation of nature led Leonardo da Vinci to an important conclusion that was to strongly characterise his paintings, and this is that the line does not exist in nature. By using sfumato, by placing colours next to one another rather than demarcating contours with clear cut lines, Leonardo reaches a point that nobody before had reached: a way of representing living and vivacious reality. Famous paintings like the Annunciation, the Mona Lisa, the Lady with an ermine, Leda and the swan, or the sweetness of the Madonna in the Virgin of the rocks, the Madonna Litta or the Madonna of the carnation, all seem vibrantly alive.

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.

These remarkable results are undoubtedly the fruit of a brilliant and singularly intuitive mind that was, however, always accompanied by constant and meticulous application to the study of real life. Rather than being limited, like his contemporaries, to exercises of theory, it was transformed directly by experimentation. The notes and notebooks of the master recount a painstaking exploration of reality in all its forms.

Surprisingly, the number of paintings executed by Leonardo is quite limited although of fundamental importance to the history of art, especially if compared to the impressive number of studies and drawings. Among these, his anatomical studies stand out for their analytical precision: the study of the proportions of a dog's head, studies on the heart and cardiovascular system, his study of drapery or horses and riders. Not only are his drawings striking for their beauty but they provide an insight into his investigating mind. Unreliable as a 'supplier', Leonardo followed his own interests rather than finish the consignments that were asked of him - an extremely obvious detail that emerges noticeably from the various "codices", the subjects of which vary according to his line of interest at the time. Perhaps due to a sort of intellectual snobbism - he did not wish to be considered by the same standards as a shopkeeper from whom one could commission any old work - or perhaps because of a genuine passi on for discovery, even among Leonardo's preparatory studies there are art works of considerable calibre, such as the one for the Adoration of the Magi, the study of a young woman with child, the setting for Orpheus or the studies for two warrior heads that were intended as part of an enormous painting of the Battle of Anghiari in Palazzo Vecchio.

We see the same method again as he perfects fortifications, war machines, pumps for raising water, machinery for making mirrors: the inventions realised by Leonardo da Vinci as well as those that remained only at design level are considered to be some of the most exceptional examples of what the human mind can produce.