Page 35 - All About History 58 - 2017 UK

The ideal city
When Milan’s population was decimated
by plague, da Vinci made plans to reinvent
Draft sketches the city. His ‘ideal city’ had a new sanitation
Da Vinci was known to system and widened roads, as Milan’s
produce a number of draft cramped streets had exacerbated the plague.
sketches before actually Unfortunately, da Vinci’s plans required the Da Vinci’s codices
starting an art project. In whole city to be demolished and so were There are thousands of papers
some cases where the project considered too grand to attempt. that make up da Vinci’s
never materialised or no
codices. The polymath always
longer exists, it can still be
wrote down his thoughts and
envisioned from the sketches observations but interestingly
that survive today.
enough, he was not too
concerned about maintaining
an order — mundane items
such as shopping lists can be
found alongside his unique
theories and ideas.

The mysterious Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa is the culmination of da
Vinci applying his scientific knowledge to
his artwork, most specifically in regards
to her proportions, which he worked out
mathematically. Her ambiguous smile, Mirror writing
whether it is happy or sad, has continued to One of the techniques that has become
provoke interest for centuries. synonymous with da Vinci is mirror
writing. He wrote from right to left and so
a mirror is required to properly read and
decipher his notes. Various reasons have
been cited for this — for example, that da
Vinci may have wanted to prevent the
wrong people from decoding his work.
However, it could simply be because he
was left-handed and writing backwards
Sfumato skills meant that he couldn’t smudge the ink.
One of the reasons as to why da Vinci’s
art has become so iconic is because of the
sfumato technique that he used to create
his paintings. Literally translated from
Italian as ‘shaded off’, sfumato produced
the soft graduation between tones and
colours that da Vinci is famous for and
was revolutionary to his contemporaries.

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