Читать книгу The Lost Diary of Leonardo’s Paint Mixer - Alex Parsons - Страница 8

Florence, 1472

The young Leonardo is not just a painter of pretty faces. He wants to know how everything works and then make it work better. Take the dome of Florence Cathedral, for example. The workshop has a commission to sculpt a golden sphere to fit right on top of the cathedral dome.

Instead of spending time sculpting in the workshop, Leonardo is poring over the plans of the cathedral with the architect Brunelleschi. He’s made hundreds of drawings of the cranes being used to hoist up the stones. His sketchbooks are full of gears, axles, rollers and pivots. I think he’d rather be an engineer than an artist.

Leonardo also spends a lot of time gazing at a fresco* in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. All the painters in our Workshop have an opinion about this painting of The Trinity. The artist, Masaccio, drew the vaulted ceiling in the background using mathematics, not guesswork like the rest of us. It’s spooky because it makes everything look so real.

This may well be the way art is going. Artists today are talking about being real and using real models and all that kind of stuff. It’s the fashion to sniff at the artists of the past and put them down as primitive decorators. I can sniff with the best of them.