Remarkable, extraordinary, almost always favorable - that is the picture of I Leonardo da Vinci handed down by the writers and critics of the past. They describe a multi-talented, endearing, attractive young man, who not only astonished his contemporaries as a visual artist, but was equally impressive as a scientist and a musician. While it was widely known that he also had other I characteristics which might have caused concern in those days, for already as a young man he was reputed to have...
Remarkable, extraordinary, almost always favorable - that is the picture of I Leonardo da Vinci handed down by the writers and critics of the past. They describe a multi-talented, endearing, attractive young man, who not only astonished his contemporaries as a visual artist, but was equally impressive as a scientist and a musician. While it was widely known that he also had other I characteristics which might have caused concern in those days, for already as a young man he was reputed to have homosexual inclinations (Beltrami, nos 8-9) - a criminal offence at the time - by the 16th century these were accepted ; almost as a matter of course as part of his make-up as a genius (Lomazzo, I, p. I 104). The only thing that people really held against him was his tendency to start works but not to finish them. Again and again his biographers bemoan the I breadth of his interests because of the consequences this multitude of interests had for his art: "But while he was spending time on his researches in areas that are no more than of passing interest to art, his inconstancy and unreliability I meant that he finished very few of his works; his talent strove so strongly for perfection and he was so demanding of himself, that he started numerous things I but then cast them aside again" (Chastel, p. 72) - as reported by the humanist Paolo Giovio in his 1527 collection of lives of famous men, which also included other artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael. Giorgio Vasari made similar comments in his Lives of the Artists which first appeared in 1550: "He would have been very proficient at his early lessons if he had not been so volatile and unstable; for he was always setting himself to learn many things only to abandon them almost immediately."
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