Leonardo da Vinci's Best Painting (Is Not The Mona Lisa)

hey everybody before i start the video i just want to tell you about something that i've been working on for the past year and a half those of you who've watched my show since the beginning know that it's been my dream forever to write and publish a book i cannot believe i'm actually saying this right now but i wrote a book and it'll be coming out this spring in real physical copies that you can hold in your hand and buy at bookstores if you can't tell i'm extremely excited about this and i'm also excited to show you something we just finished working on the book cover introducing escape into meaning a book of essays not unlike the nerdwriter but in which i go more in depth about really the biggest obsessions in my life the pre-order links are live now and you can find them in the description below you'll judge for yourself when you read it but i think this is the best thing i've ever done and i'm so thrilled to finally tell you about it after all this time there's a lot more to say and i will soon but for now i just want to say thank you for watching and thank you for reading all right the video for all his influence and prestige leonardo da vinci didn't really make that many paintings of his total output which is impossible to know exactly only about 20 paintings survived to the modern day and many of these are unfinished of course of these 20 or so two the mona lisa and the last supper are arguably the most famous and second most famous paintings in the world but there's a less well-known canvas one that was painted around the same time as the mona lisa that i think may be an even better example of leonardo's genius it's called the virgin and child with saint anne and it depicts the infant jesus and a small lamb huddled with his mother the virgin mary and his grandmother saint anne in front of a craggy mountainous landscape okay so what's the first thing you notice in this painting the first thing i see is the composition of the bodies in a triangle or a pyramid a shape that was popular for group compositions in the renaissance but which was executed most spectacularly by leonardo himself 20 years earlier in the virgin of the rocks which had a major influence on other painters like raphael for example as you can see in these paintings the pyramid is a shape of stability and strength and it unifies the figures in a greater whole triangular shapes are also effective tools for getting the eye to move around the canvas the viewer can't help but glance from corner to corner and leonardo accentuates this movement with eye lines our attention naturally gets drawn to the apex of the pyramid where saint anne looks with a mona lisa-like smile at her daughter who looks down at her son who meets her gaze and sends you back up in the opposite direction the lamb which is also on that line and which the infant jesus grapples with aggressively is the one point of tension in this otherwise peaceful grouping this sacrificial lamb symbolizes the eventual sacrifice of jesus on the cross in this way moving from the apex of the pyramid to its bottom right corner is actually a trip through time from the past to the present to the future and that timeline also extends along a three-dimensional axis the lamb is in front of jesus who's in front of mary who's in front of an but on this axis it goes even further behind and we're launched into the geological past these mountains these bones of the earth suggest a deep time so deep that it conflicts with the christian sense of the age of the world that reflects a larger conflict in the renaissance between religion and a growing appreciation for natural science which is embodied in no person more than leonardo da vinci the insatiably curious polymath oh and the z-axis goes in the other direction too in front of the lamb deep into the future is you looking at the painting leonardo made 500 years ago but so far i've only talked about composition and design one of the great joys of a leonardo painting is seeing his extraordinary powers of representation at this later point in his career he had a deep first-hand knowledge of form and texture and light he had personally dissected human cadavers so he knew precisely how muscle laid on bone and flesh laid on muscle you can see that knowledge in mary's foot and jesus arm he knew exactly how different fabrics draped and folded he rendered the lamb's wool so real it's as if you can feel it he knew that in the far distance colors become less vivid and objects become hazy i mean just look at the detail in this pebble and now look at how small it is in relation to the whole canvas i mean it's insane leonardo's obsessiveness is one reason he produced so few works and why he failed to finish many of the ones he started like this one he embarked on this painting sometime around 1500 we think as a commission from the king of france but he never delivered it and was still tinkering at the time of his death in 1519 but his perfectionism also gives us something like his signature technique of svu mato which removes harsh outlines by blending light and dark areas across several gradations of tone and color to better reflect how our eyes actually see he achieved this by laying down lots of extremely thin layers of translucent glazes each with the faintest hint of color research using x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy on a glaze layer in jesus's cheek found that less than eight percent of it was an earth-colored pigment and the glaze thickness ranged from 30 to 55 micrometers in the dark areas to just a few micrometers in the light areas never exceeding 80 micrometers altogether to give you a sense of that a human hair is on average 70 micrometers thick that means leonardo applied up to 30 layers within the thickness of a hair with each layer of glaze taking from several days to several months to dry well maybe you can see why these paintings went unfinished leonardo used similar techniques to create atmospheric effects like you can see in the distant misty mountains when i look at st anne's face beside this rock formation i see a painter trying to unify the natural and the spiritual with his art i see the same when i notice these folds in the virgin mary's dress repeated in the earth just behind her then i look at the grouping again and the symbolism falls away i don't see religious figures i see a family i see a child goofing around and a mother concerned and a grandmother smiling with the wisdom of having gone through the same thing with her daughter not so long ago it's that smile brought to life by the delicacy of leonardo's technique placed at the peak of the pyramid the top of the mountain that suffuses the canvas the family and the real mountains behind it with love of course that love doesn't solve the mysteries that consumed leonardo it would be a few hundred years until we answered the questions he wrestled with questions about optics anatomy engineering and so much more but we are infinitely fortunate that leonardo da vinci was born before his time because it was those mysteries the incoherences of life that drove him with such fanatical energy to attain a perfect harmony in his art hey everybody thank you so much for watching this episode was brought to you by squarespace if you don't know you can use squarespace to make beautiful websites for anything you might need a personal site a wedding website a site for your business or portfolio and in just a few clicks you can have that website up and running their design team has crafted beautiful templates that work on computer browsers and on mobile switching perfectly between the two you can integrate your own photos and videos with just a few clicks and you can even link your social accounts so you can auto post to twitter and facebook all from within squarespace head over to squarespace.com for free trial and when you're ready to launch that site go to squarespace.com nerdwriter for 10 off your first purchase thanks guys i'll see you next time

Channel: Nerdwriter1

Views: 461,907

Keywords: the nerdwriter, nerdwriter, nerdwriter youtube, youtube nerdwriter, nerd writer, nerdwriter1, nerdwriter channel, video essays, essays, education, education channel, nerd writer essays

Id: tREOeneo7gY

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/robeewankenobee]

not sure that was ever the debate. Clearly it's the most Renowned painting of Leonardo da Vinci

[u/SquidCap0]

What i hate about people who analyses art is how arrogant they are. If you listen to the narrator, they are 100% certain they KNOW what Leonardo was thinking. Take for ex the pyramid... start drawing your own lines to things and you will NOT get a pyramid. You will get that if you decide that it has to be a 3D pyramid, at an angle, projected to a 2D surface. If you say "it is roughly triangular" you would be right. But this is not how these people talk, they say it like they KNOW everything. They don't. The lamb symbolizes something to THEM, this does not mean any other interpretation isn't equally valid.

Art analysis has a place but the way they do it is insufferably arrogant. No one knows what Leonardo meant by all of this, and maybe he didn't mean anything. You can write gibberish and have someone say for a fact that it is the works of a genius. We should never claim we know for certain but it is really, really fascinating to hear the guesses and the different interpretations... as long as they are not said to be facts.