In today’s class we focused primarily on the High Renaissance in Italy. We first wrapped up our discussion of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, before shifting gears to look at the works of Leonardo da Vinci. We covered Leonardo’s interest in a vast number of topics, focusing on the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Leonardo seemed to follow a funny trend of getting bored of a lot of the work he started, and moving on to projects he found more interesting.
We looked at a few of Leonardo’s paintings, such as Madonna on the Rocks and we took a while to study The Last Supper, where Leonardo unsurprisingly experimented, leading the painting to be in a lot of disrepair. We touched briefly on the Mona Lisa, and why it is so famous, then closed with a look at some of the architecture of the time. This class provided a fascinating insight into some of the most popular works of art ever, and it was incredibly interesting to learn more about the process behind Leonardo’s creations.