“Do you not see how many different animals and trees, too, and grasses and flowers there are, the diversity of mountainous regions and plains, fountains, rivers, cities, public and private buildings, machines designed to benefit mankind, various costumes, decorations and arts? … [The painter] should be like a mirror which is transformed into as many colours as are placed before it, and doing this, he will seem to be a second nature.” - Leonardo da Vinci1
In summer, on these hot, lush days, I want to soak the colors into my skin. Shades of green, azure, emerald; high-flying thunderheads tinged blush-pink; the pink and white roses that grow in the sweetest smelling thicket in my garden; the scent of just-open milkweed lips laden with the golden hum of bees.
I am primarily a writer, but sometimes I also call myself a bit of an artist, and a few years ago I spent a lot of time writing about art through the fictional lens of Leonardo da Vinci. I studied his art, of course, and read a lot of his writing (the man may not have published, but he was prolific—he walked around with a notebook on his belt so he could take notes and make sketches about all of his observations, for heaven’s sake). It may sound strange to say, but when you are doing art, or reading advice from a dead Italian about how to do art, it alters your perception of the world.
This summer greening—the greens are a hundred shades, a thousand. My eye travels over shadows and light, and I think about Leonardo writing that painters must avoid the temptation to outline things like trees, because trees do not have hard edges; they are curved and it is the shading of their curvature that creates the illusion of a line. (He does get a bit preachy sometimes.)
I find myself looking for the spot where light delineates the edges of things; for the delicacy of coloration, the endless variety of greens and yellows, the violet undertone that makes a leaf seem to glow. How different the colors and the light are now, in the height of summer, than they will be in just six months’ time.
If you are looking for a way to see the world a bit differently, I do recommend reading some advice from a long-dead, rather famous, Italian polymath. At the very least you will wonder how on earth he found the time to be curious about so many things—and the answer is probably because a) he had someone else to cook and clean for him, and b) he didn’t have Facebook.
Leonardo also advised the aspiring painter to pursue solitude. This is one of my favorite asides in his book on painting. Obviously the much sought-after master, at the center of a bustling studio, who otherwise presented painting as a sophisticated activity involving musical accompaniment, done while wearing your favorite rose-colored suit with a dab of lavender scent (have I mentioned that Leonardo was also flamboyantly gay), longed for some good ol’-fashioned peace and quiet.
“If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself,” he noted. “And if you say I shall withdraw [from companionship] so far apart that their words will not reach me…I for my part would say that you would be held to be mad. But consider: by doing it you would at least be alone.”
It’s refreshing to find someone five centuries gone expressing many of the same feelings that plague creative people today: worrying about what other people are thinking, what they’re going to say about your art, whether your art is good enough (but is it better than Apelles? IS IT???2), and above all, a longing to simply be alone so you can CREATE STUFF.
Right now, the sun has sunk away in a glory of Maxfield Parrish purples beyond the white pines. Shadows are settling over the garden. We are passing beyond twilight and night is coming to wrap us in her cool cloak, whispering over all our creative dreams.
From Leonardo on Painting, edited by Martin Kemp, translated by Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker.
Apelles was a famous painter in Ancient Greece. The Renaissance artists got themselves into a lather painting hyperrealistic flies and such in homage to this putative genius, whose work does not survive. And now, because I am a super nerd and cannot freaking help myself, here are two examples of work that MAY have been inspired by him: the Battle of Issus mosaic and a Venus mural from Pompeii.
This is another good one. The picture reminds me of the St. Croix River. My brother lives in (near) Gordon, where we can watch the river from his deck. What a gorgeous part of the state!
Excellent!