Life as a fullness of picturesque art
Life is an interesting thing – you never know what kind of surprise it will afford. This becomes clear when we realize how many things of nonmaterial character we already have by the pains of creative people. As I see, the art of direct observation is Painting, of course. Great painters get the popularity, as a rule, after being dead. A very few numbers of them became popular while alive.
Now I want to pay your special attention to the two outstanding artists of different periods: Leonardo da Vinci and Andy Warhol.
Leonardo da Vinci’s glimpse on art and Mona Lisa
First, da Vinci was in medieval times the genius, numerous inventions of whom helped us to progress only now. His creativeness of mind helped him to supervise the ideal structure of the Universe. It seems as if he observed things internally looking at the reality which was not comprehensible for a common eye. This feature made him genius afterward and was a motive power for him to create the masterpiece of pictorial art “Mona Lisa”.
Yet the Mona Lisa is one of those works of art which each generation must reinterpret. It is also to misunderstand Leonardo, for the Mona Lisa’s smile is the supreme example of that complex inner life, caught and fixed in durable material, which Leonardo in all his notes on the subject claims as one of the chief aims of art. A quarry so shy must be approached with every artifice. (Kenneth Clark 119)
Warhol’s interpretation of the masterpiece
Leonardo himself always thought that among arts the hardest is Painting and opposed to it the art of Sculpture. Following the traditions of ancient times, he tried to collect as many disciples, as he could nurture. Da Vinci never appraised his talent highly. Mona Lisa is a whole mystery. In every part of the picture, the author illustrates something concealed and encoded: whether it is a smile or eyes, or background. Rocky spires and pinnacles behind Mona Lisa perhaps express her laden life and the mood of her smile.
In its essence, Mona Lisa’s smile is gothic, the smile of the Queens and Saints at Rheims or Strasbourg, but since Leonardo’s ideal of beauty was touched by pagan antiquity, she is smoother and more fleshly than the Gothic saints. (Kenneth Clark 120)
Earlier we concluded that every generation must re-interpret da Vinci following their thinking and apprehension of the time it lives in. One of the twentieth century’s most creative, prolific, and influential artists Andy Warhol could not, but touch upon a problem of understanding da Vinci himself. His doubled Mona Lisa reflects the familiar Latin proverb: Repetitio est Mater studiorum. It is for us to keep this masterpiece in mind forever. Despite his busy Manhattan commercial life, he tries to make some gestures to accurately reveal the beauty within a mass culture using image repetition.
The topic of repetition is also obviously important and interesting here. In paintings like Thirty Are Better Than One (repetitions of the Mona Lisa), the Marilyn diptych, or 100 Coke Bottles, the repetition of the same image in the same painting makes repetition itself the subject of the painting. (Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, Jose Esteban Munoz 132)
Warhol did not add something to the picture of da Vinci, Leonardo enclosed too many special remarks, that may stay ulterior till the last.
Conclusion
Both artists felt their need to express a beau-ideal of a woman, one through their vision and technique, another through the interpretation in the context of contemporaneity.
References
Clark, K. (1939). Leonardo Da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist. New York: Macmillan.
(1996). Pop-out: Queer Warhol (J. Doyle, J. Flatley, & J. E. MuÑoz, Ed.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.