Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
1452~1519. An Italian artist in the Renaissance period. He engaged in various artistic genres including painting, sculpture, and architecture. The major works of his are Mona Lisa or La Gioconda and The Last Supper (1498).
It was Walter Pater who revalued Mona Lisa first and the description of Mona Lisa in his Renaissance is typical of the fin de siècle femme fatale. Mona Lisa described by Pater gave a great impact on artists in the fin de siècle such as Oscar Wilde. Mona Lisa's mysterious smile implicating various experiences has charmed a lot of people, and Pater's Mona Lisa who has revived from the past and invited men into death or destroys marriage is somewhat similar to female ghosts in Vernon Lee's stories.
In 'The Storage of Emotion' in The Beautiful, discussing imitation in art, she referred to Leonardo and asserted: "But Leonardo is a name to conjure with, and in this case to destroy the conjurer himself: the word Leonardo implies an emotion, distilled from a number of highly prized and purposely repeated experiences, kept to gather strength in respectful isolation, and further heightened by a thrill of initiate veneration whenever it is mentioned. " In this essay, she used the term "Leonardo-emotion." Also she wrote: "And Leonardo's systems of whirling interlaced circles will merely baffle (the "enigmatic" quality we hear so much of) the perfunctory beholder."
In Laurus Nobilis, she referred to Leonardo's Annunciation.（P.226.）And she wrote: "After the painters born between 1450 and 1460, there are no more genuine Tuscans. Leonardo, once independent of Verrocchio and settled in Lombardy, is barely one of them." (P.231.)
In "Faustus and Helena" in Belcaro, Lee mentioned Mona Lisa of Leonardo.
