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Conceptions of Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the great artists, architects, inventors, and revolutionary thinkers of all time, and for many people Leonardo da Vinci is the Renaissance. When we speak of a Renaissance man as someone who is able to do a lot of different things well, we are thinking of Leonardo. Leonardo died in 1519, but he revived in 1919 and looked at the world that had been created in the 400 years of his "sleep." He would certainly set out to learn all he could about this twentieth century, just as he had tried to learn all he could about his own time when he was first alive. He would be intrigued in particular by the new conception of the self that had emerged from the nineteenth century and the beginning work of Freud on developing an understanding of the human mind, and he would be interested in the new conceptions of architecture that were then being developed, notably by men like Walter Gropius and Otto Wagner. Leonardo would find that the twentieth century had a different conception of reality than did his fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In some ways, the twentieth century was more like what men of the Renaissance were groping for as the moved away from the medieval conceptions of the world, but in other ways the change would be so great as to be disconcerting. What would Leonardo think of this century and its new conceptions of the relationship between the human being and the world?

To consider this question, it is first important to analyze what Leonardo thought about his own century and what were the prevailing styles and views of his day. The development of the High Renaissance had as its impetus the political developments in Italian society during that period. The Italian states had become powerless and divided, and the art of the time is described by Hart as offering a way of compensating on a symbolic plane for this powerlessness by creating a vision of human grandeur and heroic action (Hart 33-34). Le...

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Conceptions of Leonardo Da Vinci. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:46, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1700916.html