 Leonardo da Vinci and Pop Culture Leonardo was brought back into mainstream pop culture a few years ago with the publication of the infamous: “The da Vinci Code.” Interesting enough, we can realize just how pop the book was by the simple fact that the adequate way to shorten Leonardo da Vinci’s name is to call him only Leonardo, as “da Vinci” means: “from Vinci”, and is by no name Leonardo’s last name, as any art or history student will tell you. He was also revived for the romantic movie “Everafter” where he was depicted a sweet excentric old master who helped Cinderella to get her Prince.
And another pop fact here for you: if you go to a random library and search the term “Leonardo” you will see that out of the, let us say, ten books they have with that word as topic, eight are about Leonardo DiCaprio. This particular situation makes me worry. But I won’t even try to start a real discussion on Leonardo da Vinci as the man surpasses any possible blog and probably any intellectual definition from any age. My intention is to awake your curiosity to research for him. Take for instance this painting: (Mary, Christ, St. Anne and the Infant St. John)
The background shows a floating and ever shifting rock mass. They represent the constant flux of nature and the integration of elements in a big ecosystem. Now take the heads of Mary and her mother Anne. Their forms are repeated in the background as to make them part of the everlasting circle of life. See how Anne is holding Mary in her lap and the special relationship of Jesus and the lamb. The lamb represents John the Baptist, as a resource to make the painting more harmonious and at the same time symbolic and sweet with innocence of childhood Now see this: This is a representation of a woman’s urogenital, digestive, respiratory and vascular systems. Leonardo was a great student of anatomy and the first to dissect a woman. His discoveries in medicine were many centuries in advance and unfortunately most of them are lost to us as the Catholic Church ordered them to be burn and accused Leonardo of necromancy and witchcraft. One notebook that survived, is the Codex of Leicester, where can find a serious study on the management of water, from a Physics point of view and also drawing so surprising as this baby in the form of an opening seed: This book is the most expensive of history as Bill Gates bought it for 30 million dollar in 2004.
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