Leonardo Da Vinci: The Vitruvian Man

Leonardo da Vinci is a man, who to this day, influences the future. Leonardo da Vinci was a Florentine artist and one of the great masters of the High Renaissance; he is celebrated as a painter, a sculptor, an architect, an engineer, and a scientist. Leonardo da Vinci is considered one of the most influential people of all time. Leonardo da Vinci set a course for future artists, scientists, and engineers. Mr. da Vinci was a true genius that excelled in everything he did and whose paintings influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death (Funk 1). “Leonardo’s mastery of drawing and pictorial mood ranks him as on of the greatest painters ever to live” (Bishop 207).

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in

According to Podles, the illustrated Vitruvian Man was da Vinci’s study of human anatomy as an artist, a scientist, and a philosopher, in an age when the three were not as separate as they might be today (62). The Vitruvian Man shows us how very diversified da Vinci is with his views of the world. In other words, da Vinci believed in Christ, as his painting of The Last Supper shows, but he also was a man of science. “By fitting the human figure in both a circle and a square, da Vinci set out to demonstrate that the ideal human proportions correspond to the two ideal geometric figures” (Podles 62). According to Bishop, da Vinci was a Renaissance humanist (187). A Renaissance Humanist reconciled Christian belief with the moral teachings of the ancients as well as challenging the notion that the material world was evil, and showed the beauty and order in nature (Bishop 187). This piece of artwork was chosen to show the varying views of Leonardo da Vinci as both a religious man and a

In this artwork, da Vinci once again had the complexity of foreground and background and the deeply symbolic effects of light and dark (Bishop 207). “No artist’s eye has seen more profoundly than his into the mysteries of light; no artist’s brain has more clearly formulated its rules” (Müntz 62). Leonardo da Vinci uses sfumato and chiaroscuro in the paining of the Madonna of the Rocks just as he did in painting the Mona Lisa. The foreground of the Madonna of the Rocks shows the Madonna, the baby John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, an angel, and the Christ Child (Bishop 207). The forming of a classical triangle by the foreground group is a technique used in the Renaissance (Bishop 207). The background shows rocks, where an arch is formed, and opens to a landscape (Bishop 207). Bleiberg sees the background as “a mysterious crag filled landscape that is illuminated by two different sources of light, one in the distance and another that throws an ethereal glimmer upon the faces of the subjects in the foreground” (388-389). The Madonna of the Rocks shows how talented Leonardo da Vinci was with the use of shadows and