The grotesque side of Leonardo da Vinci | Hacker News Reader

The grotesque side of Leonardo da Vinci

theguardian.com

108 pointsprismatic63 comments

Sometimes it blows my mind how good Leonardo is at drawing. It's really striking when you go to a museum that has artists from the same time period. Leo's stuff is just head and shoulders above the rest. In a way, it's like he knows exactly what detail to capture that makes something look realistic. It's a form of compression I guess, but done by a human. In a way, it's better than a photograph because it captures how we judge a subject. To see what I mean, try tracing a photograph.

With photography, judgement, otherwise referred to as perspective, is achieved by composition. All things relayed through a human are bottlenecked through perspective.

> it's like he knows exactly what detail to capture that makes something look realistic

Picasso’s bull drawings were a great example of this as well. It’s like you said, an exercise in compression: https://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/animals_in_art/...

but none of that looks realistic. It's becoming more and more symbolic. The thing that he was lauding about leonardo was not symbolism, but his ability to portray a realistic visual perspective as if your eye was seeing it. Picasso's bull has nothing to do with that, and really picasso was uninterested in it and it wasn't what he was trying to do. None of those bull images try to portray a realistic looking bull the way your eyes would see it.

I do like how Picasso’s more symbolic bulls mimic the Aurochs on the walls at Lascaux.

Definitely not realistic though, as you said. Pretty cool that I can easily recognize what someone from 17,000 years ago was trying to depict, though.

The point was that just as Leonardo knew the key aspects of a figure to highlight for realism, Picasso used them for deconstruction. Picasso here, is not about symbolism, but about the interaction of the shape of objects with our experience of looking at it.

They're not even related concepts. For sure Leonardo knew the basic form of a bull. But 100% Picasso's entire exercise was to remove the bull and leave only a symbol you interpret as bull. You can dress it up as "experiential bull" but even his detailed bulls don't really have 3d surfaces.

Leonardo wa dealing with three dimensional forms, lighting, the interaction of light and materials, etc. It's what makes even the picture in the article look "real". It's got nothing at all to do with what Picasso was doing.

From plate 6:

"At this stage, another new head and tail are created to conform to the style and direction of the developing image. Picasso introduces more curves to soften the network of lines that crisscross the creature. Once again he adjusts the line of the back which now begins as wave on the shoulders and flows like a pulse of energy along the length of its body. The two counterbalancing lines discussed in the previous plate are extended down the front and back legs to act like structural supports for the weight of the bull. All three of these lines intersect at a point that suggests the bull's centre of balance. Through the development of these drawings, Picasso is beginning to understand the displacement of weight and balance between the front and rear of the animal."

I agree that Picasso's intention with the bull drawings was mainly to draw a mythological or symbolic looking bull, and then deconstruct it into a more abstract, simple looking bull. He was almost flicking through the range of aperture changes in our symbolic internal representations of things, from finer and crisper to simpler and more abstract.

But I also think part of what informs him and his cubism, his method for dissecting and understanding these ideas, takes greatly into account "three dimensional forms, lighting, the interaction of light and materials, etc" as you like to put it. Unlike Leonardo, he was uninterested in merely making them faithful to reality, instead he was trying to put many instances of reality into one instance, like a prism. I think you are underselling the overlap in their interest about reality and the value in faithfully depicting it. Both are clearly obsessed with it. Even if they both go radically different directions, since of course they lived in different worlds basically.

Picasso could have done a beautifully rendered bull, as his very early work demonstrates - he chose instead to capture energies, emotions, motions, rather than form.

Perhaps there is something more real in a representation in depth than in a “realistic” image.

Or maybe his dad did all the early work.

Tbh as someone whos drawn their whole life(worthless anecdotal exp i know) i think he was just having fun experimenting

Degas knew how to draw:

https://harvardartmuseums.org/index.php/article/homecoming-f...

https://www.pubhist.com/person/286/edgar-degas/works/drawing...

Sargent knew how to draw:

https://www.pubhist.com/w24267

That's the best "draw a circle, now draw the rest of the owl" i've seen in practice yet

Except it's in reverse - he drew "the owl" first, then the circle.

only if you read left-to-right. reading it from right-to-left it's draw the circle first

I doubt Picasso was a manga reader.

When Picasso went to the cave of Lascaux, he said, "We have invented nothing." I wonder if this was due to seeing just how similar his bull drawings were to the ~20kya drawings.

That may not be what GP was talking about, but that should be a separate post. I've never seen those lithographs before, and it's like having Picasso explain his work personally, with demonstrations. Amazing. I've never felt like I quite got what Picasso was driving at in any of his work before.

By comparison, when I saw a few of Donatello’s sculptures I was surprised by how poorly he was able to convey faces compares to other artists. I am no art historian, I am just a big fan of TMNT :)

I guess there's a reason Donatello has much more notoriety as a ninja turtle than as a renaissance artist[1]

[1]https://xkcd.com/197/

I know it’s bending the rules a bit, but a mere upvote doesn’t do your great service justice. Thank you, I love learning about xkcd gems. I guess I should go through them all!

Compared to his contemporaries? He is possibly the most influential sculptor of the Renaissance. Michelangelo wasn't even born yet when Donatello died.

That’s fair. I saw his sculptures in Florence as a part of a larger exhibit and his were by far the most abstract looking. But I don’t remember the dates.

I'd say Albrecht Dürer is up there as well.

I Found that using "in the style of Albrecht Dürer" (probably without the umlaut, tbh) was a great way to get some pretty fantastic stuff out of Stable Diffusion.

I'm always surprised at how long it took to be able to draw perspective as we see it with our own eyes. Its not like ancient artists struggled with realism or anatomy, since the ancient Greeks were chiselling perfect human forms dozens of feet tall sometimes. Maybe it was just extremely challenging to think about converting a 3d field of view into something 2d until more drawing techniques were established?

everything is obvious after the first time something is done.

Congratulations on moving the goalposts. Further away. So they looked smaller.

Wasn’t there that theory about Vermeer (Dutch 17th century), that he was able to “crack the code” by using special lenses that allowed him to see how an image should look on paper?

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7872661

Part of it was also what was in vogue and what humans wanted to depict with art. Or allowed by the Church (idol worship and whatnot). Not to say it wasn't a skill to be discovered and pioneered. But there were reasons in addition skill floor why it developed when and how it did.

The author seems to be projecting modern mores onto da Vinci, imagining him sneering at his subjects, including a bizarre swipe at Mona Lisa's "mannish" face. What I see is a scientifically-minded artist who was interested in the vast range that the human form could take, bucking the contemporary trend to focus on idealized beauty.

Reworked title, perhaps: The Fashion Industry is Still Not Ready for Leonardo DaVinci's Models.

Agreed. It seems as though the author has perhaps not seen that many people, as both the works shown and referenced depict entirely plausible humans. The “duchess” could be a middle aged woman with untreated acromegaly. Hell, maybe she was, as a male acromegalic ancestor could have done well on the battlefield. Today’s dysgenic traits are yesterday’s eugenic. The woman depicted looking left in the sketch is either missing her upper teeth due to decay, or has a cleft pallet.

An awful lot of the variety of the human form that once was is no more in the developed and even developing world, as disease and treatable deformity are generally avoided where possible - and back then, if you were covered in pox scars, syphilitic, toothless and half blind from cataracts - well, you were 35, and lucky to be alive with a thriving family.

I’m struggling to think of anywhere on earth where the kind of conditions Renaissance cities still persist, and I am drawing a blank. We just don’t have that point of reference as a tangible reality any more.

Indeed. The author's takeaway from Leonardo's lovingly detailed renderings of the variety of the human form being "he must have been mocking them" perhaps reflects more negatively on the author's point of view than of DaVinci's.

That is correct. Beggars the imagination to think that da Vinci was exaggerating some of these faces. The Author has clearly not lived in a poor area.

"What are these drawings? Are they just cruel jokes?"

Some of the great artists have the skill of capturing "adjacent worlds" for the lack of a better word. The works "David" and "Venus" are super-human portraits of those winged guys, while these Leonardo's works are infernal portraits. That's what gives them the eerie vibe.

"They are not really funny, for one thing. They have a despairing, even scary, power."

He adds:

"Of monstrous faces I shall say nothing because they naturally stay in the mind."

He's tacitly saying that those are visions, not drawings of something he made up.

There are other artists with this skill. A famous modern example is Giger's "alien" portrait that he saw in a dream.

Edit: as for Mona Lisa, it's a mix of the two worlds, it's like drawing a face of a real pharaoh on the body of a real lion.

Very bad quality click baiting writing.

It really makes you wonder how far "ahead of their time" artists throughout history might have been if only we could see their sketchbooks.

FYI, the original was likely created by Quentin Matsys, with da Vinci's version being a copy/study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Duchess#Quentin_Matsy...

Since the article starts right off by stating almost the direct opposite, I'd guess the matter is at least less certain/more debated than the wikipedia article makes it out to be.

No more grotesque than what Jonathan Jones sees in a mirror.

Da Vinci made a living drawing and painting the rich people of his day. I'm sure they all didn't look like the young and beautiful Mona Lisa.

> Da Vinci made a living drawing and painting the rich people of his day.

From what I read, he hated every minute of it. Chose instead to draw/paint things/people he liked, often holding onto his paintings for years to make refinements, only to never deliver them.

Yes he kept putting off Isabella d'Este, who really wanted him to make a portrait of her, but it sounds like it was more for status then because she had any taste in art.

He painted some of Ludovico Sforza's mistresses. I think 'Lady with an Ermine' is very nice.

There's speculation that he took the Mona Lisa commission specifically because it was just a silk merchant who wanted a portrait of his wife. I.e. not a power player.

He never delivered the commission, it was with him when he died in France.

It's Yoda in Mona Lisa's outfit with the hairstyle of Red queen...

What a nothingburger. A man who lived centuries ago made comments about people who look different that we now interpret as unkind. He also drew some of these people.

Sometimes “nothing burgers” make for an interesting read. TAL is basically a podcast of nothing burgers, doesn’t stop it from being great

And the fact that there’s an exhibition on with these works is always good to know from a “news” perspective

>Sometimes “nothing burgers” make for an interesting read.

That's the problem. It's how a Big Mac makes for an interesting eat. Interesting but not nutricious...

Not so much a nothingburger as simply poorly written. The focus of the article seems to be on the possibly "problematic" side of da Vinci going so far as to hint at his supposed pretty privilege and wonder if he chuckled at his own caricatures which is an absurdly retrospective judgement. There are far more interesting facets to da Vinci's work and life than whether or not his attitudes towards ugly people would be acceptable in the morality du jour. The article even admits that da Vinci's notes make no mention of ugliness in a pejorative sense, highlighting that he referred to one of them as a viso fantastico. They make a U turn and attempt to climb up out of the hole they've dug for themselves talking about his interest in anatomy and ageing and tries to make a worn out point about the Mona Lisa's possible androgyny but it's about as striking as a wet noodle. Anyone who thinks the Mona Lisa is overly masculine is probably just a man who hasn't seen many women without makeup on.

It's all rather transparent click bait that's aimed at riling people up. Incredibly dull when compared to even the most factual and plainly written biography of da Vinci.

That is not the focus of the article at all. The very first paragraph starts with a sympathetic quote of Da Vinci's. The third paragraph approvingly suggests his drawings were foreshadowing Munch and Bacon's art. Almost every other paragraph is also a sympathetic reading of Da Vinci's drawings that are being featured an upcoming art exhibition.

You've invented a strawman and then sneered at the author for not following through with it, and then, it seems, you became overly sensitive about the comment on androgyny with Mona Lisa, as if that comment is offensive and denigrating (it's not, and the author didn't intend it as such, but it does reveal that you think it is offensive).

Oh, yeah. He liked his ugly.

His ugly old men made his ugly old women look like models, but I usually hear about his women.

The only thing more grotesque is how boring the rest of this writer's articles are https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jonathanjones

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