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Leanardo (if i spelled it right) Da Vinci's paintings suck. They are the most ugly pathetic things i have ever seen. they hold no significance other than the came out of the whole reissance movement. there is no power or emotion to any that i have seen.
This kiddie will probably never study art, so I don't care if he and other ******** chodes spout this retarded crap, but for those of you who don't understand what Da Vinci's significance is let's set the record straight here:
(From the Art Discussion forum, as usual)
Here's a primer on Da Vinci and WHY he is significant beyond "his pictures r kewl" or "he painted the Mona Lisa":
1. Da Vinci apprenticed under an artist (forgot his name) who was one of the first ever to use (and specialize in) perspective. Da Vinci mastered this in his twenties and surpassed him. Humans, as a race, didn't figure it out until about the 1400's. Perspective was a new idea at this time.
2. He studied nature and anatomy extensively and depicted things as they actually appeared in life. He performed dissections to more intimately understand the human body and why it looks the way it does. He was also the FIRST person to study human proportion in order to determine some kind of standard for the idealized human being.
3. Sage and Guacamole are pretty much right-- shading/modeling as we know it today is influenced by Da Vinci. He did not invent sfumato (the idea that an object's color/shading became less detailed the further it receeded into the distance of a plane-- works quite well with his mastery of perspective) but adapted that idea (from Flemish painters) to his own ideas: that objects aren't formed by outlines like in paintings before-- they're three-dimensional, and defined by the light that falls on them. Again! A new idea at the time.
So, in short? Da Vinci did a bunch of s**t that nobody did before. Drawing is very much what it is today because of him and his scientific studies.
In that respect I think I have to disagree with anilmatheil. Da Vinci is so renowned and forever famous BECAUSE compared to the other artists from his time, he was centuries ahead.
Sometimes it's hard to realize just -how much- we take for granted in the way of drawing and observational techniques because they've been around for so long that we -think- it's common sense. It's just... KEY to remember that people had to figure this stuff out, and over the course of human existance.
