RESEARCHING ROMANTICISM: DA VINCI
Beginning by looking at some of Romanticism’s origins. In the Romantic era, landscape became a subject in itself really for the first time. Surprisingly (in Michael Bird’s ‘100 Ideas That Changed Art’) Leonardo Da Vinci is described as a very early artist whose work it could be said used landscape in this way, exploring its sublime power.
Leonardo Da Vinci
“Arno Landscape, 5th August” 1473, Pen and ink on paper.
This sweeping landscape seems linked with so many of Romanticism’s corner-stone ideas. An epic view drawn in a single day and presumably first hand at the scene (not from other studies), evoking Romantic traditions of sketching outside directly from sublime nature. A sense here of this ungovernable nature - dramatic cliffs and only small elements of human presence.
“St.Anne Virgin and Child: detail: landscape” c. 1508-10. Oil on wood.
Expressive brush strokes, building up layers to evoke the roughness and inhospitable landscape, a dramatic vision of nature paralleled in later Romantic work. It seems surprising that as a Renaissance artist, the predominant ideas in Da Vinci’s time were of mathematical harmony, nature as an expression of God’s divine logic. Although new scientific discoveries were influencing artists, nature’s power and mystery was still felt, as seen here. Shakespeare in “The Merchant of Venice” (also Renaissance though some time after c.1596-8) seems also expressing this contradiction, (a scene between husband and wife Lorenzo and Jessica):
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony
Sit Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patinas of bright gold…
….Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
Comparing Shakespeare with Da Vinci, there are comparisons between the “sweet harmony” described here and elements of harmony in Da Vinci’s paintings - Renaissance ideas of underlying compositional harmony in geometry i.e. order, reason ad abstract thought. And yet there is still the presence of nature’s darkness and mystery. The “muddy vesture of decay” - corporeal, ruining forces - hides this 'music of eternity’ that Shakespeare suggests. Although we aspire to immortality in harmony and mathematical perfection, nature still holds us to the earth by its mortal decay and chaos.
“Deluge with Neptune and the Gods of the Winds” 1514. Pen, black chalk, ink on grey paper.
Da Vinci explored nature’s ruination also in 'patina’, surface patterns caused by decay. A kind of patina can be seen in the complex patterns of these waves. As Christopher Turner (in “The Deliberate Accident in Art” explains, looking at chaotic patina like this was a process of discovering “…meaning in chaos…” This exploration and acceptance of mysterious forces beyond our control seems a sentiment shared by the Romantics.
“The Adoration of the Magi” 1481-2. Oil on panel.
looking at how Da Vinci has depicted human constructions (the arches and steps in the background) in view of informing my thoughts on ruins. This architecture is drawn in strict perspective, looking very mathematical and geometric looking compared the rest of the image’s action and chaos. This seems related to Georg Simmel’s ideas of a building as a scene of conflict between man’s will and nature’s decay - the precision in drawing the building here is expressive of man’s aspiration to construct the perfection his reason can imagine. Yet nature’s chaos challenges this. Da Vinci’s buildings look abstract yet fragile compared to other more chaotic, earthly elements in the image.
Last year I looked at the perspective system in drawing, and ideas of it as a way to order our physical world in a mathematical 2D vision. I think these ideas about perspective as a way to draw buildings, and the breaking down of this also symbolising a breaking down of order, with nature’s chaotic decay taking hold, could really inform future work about ruins.