- Tweeter
republish
The largest retrospective dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci, 500 years after his death, opens this Thursday, October 24 at the Louvre Museum in Paris. More than 180,000 people have already booked a ticket to admire the 162 works, paintings, drawings, sculptures, gathered around the master of the Italian Renaissance. Eleven paintings are presented, including The Mona Lisa and The Man of Vitruvius . Pascal Brioist, author of Leonardo da Vinci's The Bold (Stock), is one of the best painters and inventors. He returns to the fascination exerted by this genius.
Five hundred years after his death, do we really know who Leonardo da Vinci was ?
Pascal Brioist : He is an illegitimate son of a notary, a town that is about forty kilometers from Florence. His mother is unknown to us. We know her name was Caterina, she was a good family, but we do not know much more.
Why did Leonardo da Vinci revolutionize the art of the Renaissance ?
As for art, we will never paint the same way after Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo practices not only a technique of oil painting with micro-keys, the famous sfumato , that is to say the idea of creating contours a little faded, vaporous. And, moreover, Leonardo sees himself as a demiurge when he paints. That is to say that all his scientific knowledge in anatomy, geology, hydraulics, are integrated into his paintings. This is a synthesis of all the sciences of the moment.
To come back to this technique of sfumato, which gives these gauzy contours to characters and decor, it's really revolutionary : the characters are no longer static and frozen as before.
There is the technique itself, which actually takes into account the thickness of the air, and makes that all the figures are not drawn as the line. We present a kind of vibration that says something about what the living is. But there is also the fact that he invents postures. For example, this posture where we turn, which we call the " contrapposto " in Italian. Very young, when he paints the angel of a Verrocchio painting, there is already something new and above all, he is able to represent the movement of the soul.
How many paintings did Leonardo da Vinci paint ? The experts are still debating it.
If we say fifteen, I think we are wide.
Leonardo da Vinci paints few paintings. On the other hand, he draws all the time. What does he draw ?
He draws everything. He draws the nature, the days and the pains of the Tuscan peasants, all the plants and even the fossils. He draws everything around him.
►To listen too: Leonardo da Vinci, painter or scientist ?
Leonard is also a sculptor, a composer, an engineer and an inventor. Maybe he is not the father of the tank or the helicopter, which some have attributed to him, but Leonardo da Vinci is still a very imaginative machine designer, right ?
Of course. He was born in a village where there were no machines. But when, at the age of 14, he arrives in Florence, he discovers the world of the mechanical arts: there are a lot of fabulous machines, able to climb the top of Florence's dome the weight of a bus. All this mechanics fascinates him. He will go very far, imitating the work of all his contemporaries and especially being able to make a synthesis.
Leonardo da Vinci is 64 when he arrives in France at the Court of Francis I. He has in his luggage The Mona Lisa which is not finished. Is Leonardo da Vinci the most French of Italian painters ?
Other Italian artists have crossed the mountains, we think of Rosso Fiorentino thereafter. But Leonard is one of the first to be recognized with such mastery. He spends only three years in France, it is not much. But during these three years there is the painter, the artist who plans to make a palace in Romorantin, there is the organizer of parties. Leonardo da Vinci is all this at the same time: engineer, architect and great painter.