The Da Vinci Women Quotes

“In the extensive Milan exhibition of 1939, the Italian fascists turned Leonardo into an ideal model of a virile, war-mongering man who would conquer the world through rationalism and technology. At the end of the twentieth century engineers were more in demand than fighters, and consequently Leonardo, the solitary visionary, was now said to have foreseen the inventions of the modern age and became the hero of both aircraft and computer technology. 2”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“In the mid-1510s the symbiosis of thoughtfulness and sensuality was not yet considered as sacrilege. It was only with the arrival of the Counter-Reformation later on in the century that artists were forced to clothe their images of saints decently and separate the private sphere from the sacred.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“Where Michelangelo’s colorful palette shone out brightly, Leonardo became the master of darkness and warm light. Both artists eroticized religion, but Michelangelo mostly kept to nudes in the antique style, whereas, now more than ever, Leonardo understood sexuality as a primeval force of nature.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“If such talk reached the ears of the man-loving Leonardo, who always took great care with his appearance, he did not show his feelings about it in his late years in Rome—quite the opposite. He had nothing more to lose, and, together with his pupils, he now celebrated not only the beauty of women but the beauty of all sexes.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“Leonardo did not consider women to be an unfortunate mistake, but rather an ingenious invention on the part of Mother Nature. In Castiglione’s book, Giuliano finds what he wants, the encouragement of the ladies present. One of them jokes that it was not by chance that the Italian word for virtue is feminine, whereas the word for mistake is masculine. 15”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“Giuliano de’ Medici makes a long, ardent speech at the court of Urbino in defense of women. He is incensed by his opponent in the discussion, who considers women to be inferior and a mistake of nature, although, since humankind would then die out, nature must have had something in mind when creating women. Giuliano considers women to be at least as virtuous, sensible, and decisive as men, and he would prefer to hand over the affairs of state, the conduct of wars, and everything else to them.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“In contrast to the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, in High Renaissance Rome there was no question of maintaining the appearance of sexual abstinence.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“Mona Lisa, the big sister of the pensive Ginevra de’ Benci and the energetic Cecilia Gallerani, bears witness to Leonardo’s alliance with women, his belief in the power of their minds and their independence.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“The story of how Leonardo painted Lisa del Giocondo in Florence was still being told in the city long after Leonardo’s death.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“The result was the most influential wood panel painting in Western art, honored and revered, celebrated profusely and interpreted in a greater variety of ways than almost any other picture, and constantly copied and parodied over the centuries—La Gioconda, often known as the Mona Lisa”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“Lisa’s children were cared for by nurses, and the household also included a number of women whom Francesco had bought as slaves after they had been kidnapped in distant countries. He had so many of them baptized in Florence that he might have been suspected of trading in people as well as fabrics. 8”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“For Leonardo, the world was feminine, and women were the world in smaller form.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“He wanted painting to be perceived as the most seductive of the arts, more intelligent, sensual, charming, and true to life than poetry, music, or sculpture. 6 In order to achieve this, he wanted to make his figures animated and give them a soul. It must look as though they could twist and turn their bodies as naturally and nimbly as a weasel, and bite back at the world outside the frame surrounding them.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“the artist who painted her gave his first secular portrait so much heart and soul that art was never the same again. The emancipation of women would not come for another five hundred years, but the emancipation of art happened at that moment.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“He must have thought to himself that it would be possible to abandon the usual profile view of women in Florence, without immediately giving rise to moral doubts. The side view said too little about a person; it was inhibiting, because it prevented dialogue. In order to be on an equal footing with the viewer, if not actually superior to him, the painted figure must be able to return his gaze. God had given people eyes so that they could understand the world, so they should be used, not hidden. “Oh eye, you stand supreme above all the other creations of God!” exclaimed Leonardo. “It is the window of the human body, through which it sees its way and enjoys the beauty of the world; it is thanks to the eye that the soul is content with its human prison.” 17”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“However, this story is not about feminine invisibility and masculine claims to ownership. It is about a woman who wanted to express herself and was able to do so, and an artist who had apparently been waiting for a challenge of this kind. No bride in her best dress or successful man in a high position would have been suitable for what Leonardo clearly had in mind—to create a work in which the interior and exterior of a person would be balanced in a new way.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“The end result would be an artificial creation, a woman whose dress appeared more individual than her face. Newly married Florentine women looked out of their frames in severe profile without smiling; that was the convention. After all, the wooden panels would be shown to others and would say something about the fortune of the husband and his family and the chastity of the lady of the house. No unauthorized person was allowed to look into the lady’s eyes or into her heart; the modest side view of the face was intended to prevent this.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“The image Leonardo created of the young Ginevra de’ Benci was the first ever psychological portrait in Italy,”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“the advice of Lorenzo’s personal philosopher, the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, was that women should be treated like chamber pots and locked away after use. 33”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“We would have to include all the disciples in the fresco of the Last Supper (Plate 19) and all the figures of the baby Jesus in the images of the Madonna in order to reach anywhere near a balance between the sexes. Even Joseph did not manage to appear in Leonardo’s paintings of the Holy Family; instead, the artist usually assigns his place to Saint Anne, the mother of Mary (Plates”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“the main figures in Leonardo’s paintings are women. Only two men are featured as protagonists in the surviving panel paintings that are definitely by Leonardo.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“FLORENCE DURING THE Renaissance was not green and airy; it was crowded and noisy. Oxcarts, mules, and passersby pushed their way through narrow, foul-smelling streets, which were as dark as tunnels, because many of the householders had added oriel windows to the upper floors. Buildings were going up everywhere. Workmen pulled down old, cramped dwellings and carted in building materials for palaces until these became a scarce commodity. Many of these new houses were as big as castles. One could lose one’s way for hours in their suites of brightly painted rooms. During the fifteenth century rich Florentines grew even richer, while the poor became even poorer. 1 Wealthy families also cut themselves off from the city. Where their palazzi would once have opened on to the city with a loggia, they now looked inward over magnificent interior courtyards where social events took place.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“In Florence it was customary for the daughters of middle-class and noble families to marry young, whereas men did not marry until ten or twenty years later. That gave them a long time in which to sire many illegitimate children with lower-class women.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“An illegitimate birth was a stigma in Renaissance Italy. 22 Families were the smallest and most important units of society; they—and, within them, the fathers—made the decisions about education and the choice of career and partner. Anyone who was born illegitimate never really belonged. Anything that such a child received was a favor. There were fathers who treated their illegitimate children as servants, especially when the mothers were slaves or maidservants. Others, like Ser Piero, took care of their natural sons (though not usually daughters), because they saw them as a reserve, in case they had no surviving legitimate sons. This “insurance” was worth the cost of an education, though as a rule it was less than for legitimate sons.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“In practice, the wet nurses did not have to be free women or of Christian upbringing; it was enough if they were fair-skinned, like the slaves from the east. 15 The idea that it could be otherwise, that breastfeeding was close to a mother’s heart and important for the child’s development, was professed by Renaissance philosophers such as Leon Battista Alberti, and later Erasmus of Rotterdam and Michel de Montaigne, who were looking back to Plutarch and other writers from classical antiquity.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“It was easier for the nobility, who had their children nursed at home. Many of them could afford to buy female slaves as domestic servants. These were Tartar, Bulgarian, Russian, Mongolian, or Greek women who were kidnapped and sold in seafaring cities. Many of the men of the house subjected these women to brutal sexual exploitation, sent the children they had together to the orphanage, and then demanded that the slaves should breastfeed the legitimate offspring in the home.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“The economic pressure on the families of the wet nurses was so great that many of them entrusted their own newborns to an even poorer wet nurse or gave them away to the Foundling Hospital in Florence that was opened in 1445. A merchant’s wife from Prato who arranged wet nurses for the newborns of wealthy families cruelly boasted that she had forced a woman to promise to become wet nurse to a strange child on the very night that her own baby had died. 14”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“The majority of prosperous Florentine women did not breastfeed at all. Instead, their husbands made agreements with the spouses of the wet nurses who took over this task. Fathers were concerned that their wives’ milk might be polluted by having sex and, above all, by a new pregnancy. They wished however to become fathers again soon, as having several children increased their chances of having future heirs. It was important for men’s social status to have many legitimate offspring, whereas an intimate mother–child relationship in early years seemed to many of them to be of secondary importance. The rich fathers expected the parents of poorer families to abstain from sexual intercourse and inform them immediately if the wet nurse got pregnant again, which would result in the termination of the agreement.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“Leonardo kept the paintings that really meant something to him in his home until the end of his life. These included the Mona Lisa and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

“Leonardo da Vinci was not a feminist; this concept simply did not exist around 1500. He did not fight for equal legal and social rights for women, because there were no such struggles in Renaissance times.”
― Kia Vahland, The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art