Beauty and ugliness. Two contrasting obsessions of legendary artist Leonardo da Vinci

In his notes, Leonardo da Vinci shares that while not many people are trained to judge portraits, he feels that everyone has the right to judge real people if they have a hump on their back, over or under a shoulder, or an overly large mouth or nose. That phrase makes sense, of course, but at first glance it may seem like it shares these prejudices about “other” people, writes The Guardian.

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We know of her famous works, where she depicts real beauties and attractive men. However, alongside the admiration for youth and beauty, another aspect of Leonardo emerges – an obsession with the wrong, sick, and old faces that he paints with incredible accuracy.

Called Leonardo’s caricatures in the 18th century, his caricatures are one of the most shocking and shocking modern drawings today. Often Renaissance art is perceived as something orderly and calming, but these faces cause Munch’s anxiety and Francis Bacon’s horror.

Quentin Masseys’ painting “The Old Lady” was nicknamed “The Ugly Duchess” because it also inspired John Tenniel’s illustration for Alice in Wonderland. Working in Antwerp in 1513, Masseys depicted a face filled with chaos of subcutaneous skeletal deformities, great structural curvature, a stretch of a woman’s upper lip, sunken cheeks, and a swollen forehead.

However, he aims to impress the outfit with his onion-like headpiece that highlights his unusual features. She seems to be selling herself with her looks because she has a flower in her hand, often an advertisement for sexual favors in Renaissance art.

But Masseys himself is not the actual author of this image, because it is an elaborate copy of the lost caricature of Leonardo da Vinci. This is a sketch made in red chalk by Francesco Melzi, a student of Leonardo, who made an incomplete drawing of the same master.

Melzi was a devoted student and her copy is undoubtedly correct. So Leonardo designed this unique look, from the bottom of the dress to the wrinkled chest. Masseys just completed it.

“The Ugly Duchess” is a kind of window into da Vinci’s surprising series of ugly, “abnormal” faces. Another cartoon shows old men and women in their clothes flirtatiously saluting. However, it is not all that simple.

The man’s face resembles a mummy’s face, and the woman’s nose is barely visible. Could this be due to syphilis?

In another restless drawing by Leonardo, a man stands with his back to us. He has a mouth like a donkey, a thick turkey neck like a sewn nose. But that’s not all. In all these crooked facial features, a spiral in the dull hair like a well, like a whirlpool that started in his brain.

However, it is not known exactly what these drawings mean. According to historians, Leonardo, like Melzi, had a handsome appearance.

And it can be assumed that these two talented artists laughed at the unfortunate, but this does not quite fit the mood of these drawings.

First of all, they’re not very funny. They have a power that is helpless, even terrifying, some of them tragic and compassionate.

Also, some of his cartoons seem to be portrayed insidiously. Perhaps the artist made his sketch on the street, as he advised his students to always carry a notebook with them in order to draw people “fighting, laughing or fighting” in the city.

He certainly paid attention to the strange faces in the square, because on another note, da Vinci, who advised drawing strangers, said, “I won’t say anything about scary faces, because they naturally stay in the memory.”

He even dreamed of such faces. He suggests that if you stare at the stains and cracks in the wall for a long time, you’ll start to see things, especially “weird faces of all kinds”. He also had a habit of visiting hospitals. He came there to meet the sick and tore them to pieces when they died.

Some of the changes that the artist reproduces are not unusual or painful. These are the usual effects of aging. He considered this particular body to be one of his interests in anatomy. According to him, the flesh of the old is like wood. Their faces fade and their chins stick out. This is exactly what his cartoons emphasize. The main theme of these drawings is human regression.

Therefore, da Vinci had a certain biological view of humanity itself. We are born, we get sick and we die. He does not laugh at others, in these drawings he depicts the universal human condition in the darkest possible way. We are all in the same boat because we are biological machines running out of energy.

Previously Focus He told what new details were found about the life that was covered by the secrets of the mother of a distinguished artist by Italian historians.

We also talked about one of Leonardo da Vinci’s most outstanding diaries. There he wrote down his theories, observations and even experiments.