tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post6349101515650934234..comments2024-01-23T13:58:48.688-08:00Comments on The Trenches of Discovery: Leonardo: A Painter at the Court of Milan, for the Twenty-First CenturyShaun Hotchkisshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04832423210563130467noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-22870124069513481802011-12-01T03:56:34.331-08:002011-12-01T03:56:34.331-08:00I'm feeling dense again. I don't understan...I'm feeling dense again. I don't understand.<br /><br />In Leonardo's time he could be creative and do things with everything. Today, he would have to specialise or be mediocre at a bunch of things. You can't even know all of high-energy physics today, let alone all of physics, all of science, or all of human knowledge. Just being creative isn't going to get you far today, you have to be creative in something.<br /><br />I also have to admit that, in my mind, statements with "... what Leonardo represents *fundamentally* is..." in them are inevitably going to glorify what was just a human being to a level that doesn't make sense. This guy still ate and used a toilet, he wasn't sent by God. To say he represents something, *fundamentally* makes no sense to me. A human being isn't really fundamental to anything.<br /><br />I'm still curious about what he would have chosen to devote his life to. Even if it was "the experience of creative possibilities as a way of life"... what creative possibilities would he have chosen to realise?<br /><br />I'm also curious, because I can't understand from your comment alone, how was my comment illuminating? What did it illuminate? It doesn't seem to have any relation at all to your comment or Dan's.<br /><br />I think the use of language in the world I come from is quite different to the use of language in yours. Words like fundamental and impossible have a clear meaning. Surely it is misleading to use these words in a way that doesn't reflect this meaning? I still feel like a pedant for pointing this out. But I am genuinely confused and I'm trying to understand why.<br /><br /><i>[Edit: I removed my horribly condescending comment about not wanting to sound condescending. Second Edit, changed the wording a bit, here and there.]</i>Shaun Hotchkisshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04832423210563130467noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-83386952453645189242011-11-30T09:20:08.675-08:002011-11-30T09:20:08.675-08:00Dan: And there is a sense, in the repetitions and ...Dan: And there is a sense, in the repetitions and sense of speed involved in their production, of something like the experience of creative possibilities.<br /><br />Shaun: I wonder which of his disciplines he would have chosen today to work on.<br /><br />I find Leonardo quite endless -- poetry in action, as a method of practical approach -- but these two comments are illuminating. Perhaps what Leonardo represents fundamentally is the principal of creativity -- the experience of creative possibilities as a way of life.Michelle Menzieshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04247049669215697236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-8050570597021559932011-11-30T08:15:48.248-08:002011-11-30T08:15:48.248-08:00When I think about da Vinci it makes me sad that n...When I think about da Vinci it makes me sad that nobody alive today or ever in the future (unless future human minds get engineered in some way to be better than today's human minds are) could know as large a proportion of what all of humanity knows as he did then. He was able to be a leader in so many different realms of human knowledge. <br /><br />And it isn't that the minds of today are in any way mediocre compared to him, we just know too much as a species for any individual human to master it.<br /><br />On the other side though I always feel kind of sad for guys like that because I imagine how amazing they would find the wealth of knowledge we do have now (then again we are in the same position - 100 years from now some incredible new stuff will inevitably be known). <br /><br />I wonder which of his disciplines he would have chosen today to work on.Shaun Hotchkisshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04832423210563130467noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-60080440725294874492011-11-29T21:42:06.440-08:002011-11-29T21:42:06.440-08:00Some more back and forth..
Me: I do think it is t...Some more back and forth..<br /><br />Me: I do think it is the speed that is so mesmerizing about the drawing, the sense of the line.. and with the fabric images you are talking about, you get it also with the white highlights. There is a sort of (cinematic?) transience there that drawing embodies and painting, in that it is oil, a fat, just cannot.<br /><br />Dan: It's not just the speed, though -- there are tons of sketches done by other artists, many done with great assurance, that don't have the same effect of Leonardo's. I wonder if it has to do with the ability to suggest solidity, the way that (in the images I sent you) the material seems to set, almost as if it were cast in plaster or concrete and left to stand on its own. A dialectic between transience and calcification?Michelle Menzieshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04247049669215697236noreply@blogger.com