Photos: Joseph Kellard
Cultivating greater enjoyment of the visual arts can profoundly change your life.
Art in general–from painting, sculpture and drawing to literature, music and movies–packs that degree of life-enhancing power. But while some people at museums can experience speechless awe when encountering a beautiful painting or sculpture, others can muster only enough enthusiasm to say: “There were some pretty pictures and nice statues.”
During a summer trip down South, I visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to view for the first time Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait Ginevra de’ Benci. (Photo: Brian Jones)
“Walk straight down the hall, turn right at the third room, and her eyes will meet yours,” an employee at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. told me when I asked her where I would find “the Leonardo da Vinci painting.”
Read MoreI reached a milestone in my research for an essay I plan to write about Leonardo da Vinci. I finished reading his treatise on painting
Read MoreWelcome to the wall at my (unusually clean) desk at home. Drab and boring, right? Bookshelves once hung there until the brackets gave and my books tumbled down. I left the wall bare for a year until last summer.
Read MoreThe Marvellous Works of Nature and Man.
Photo: Joseph Kellard
The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man is the most informative book I’ve read so far on the depth of Leonardo da Vinci’s thinking as an artist, scientist and engineer.
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