The Shadow Drawing Quotes

“This integrated approach to painting, philosophy, and science lay at the heart of Leonardo’s project. And yet we find it easier to simply marvel at the work of “his hand” than to understand this work as the lost way of comprehending the world that it in fact is.”
― Francesca Fiorani, The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint

“He came to value his own critical thinking over the completion of a finished product. Whether it was a painting, a book, or an experiment, it was the process rather than the outcome that mattered to him.”
― Francesca Fiorani, The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint

“The good painter should paint two main things, and these are man and the intention of his mind [concetti della mente sua]; while the first is easy, the second is difficult, because it has to be captured through the gestures and the movements of the limbs, and these should be learned from mutes, who better actualize them than any other sort of man.”
― Francesca Fiorani, The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint

“With the Adoration, he had learned that when it comes to portraying revelation, typology—the deep similarity of apparently unrelated figures and events—is more important than chronology, the temporal succession of events. This is because what is being presented is not a storia, a narrative, but a prefiguration that collapses time and space.”
― Francesca Fiorani, The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint

“Put more simply, they did not see art the way we do. They read art in a way we no longer can.”
― Francesca Fiorani, The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint

“It was not just a matter of learning how to draw from nature the lights and shadows on each muscle, which is what Verrocchio and his fellow artists did. Rather, it was a matter of learning how to capture the effect of particle-filled air on the luminous forms of people’s faces and their bodies.”
― Francesca Fiorani, The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint