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 now know what people mean when they say that travel can improve your life considerably.
When I was a teen, my sister told me about an Italian artist and unique polymath who lived during the Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci. Intrigued, I began reading about this staggeringly versatile man and visionary inventor, whose copious notebooks reveal that he studied everything from architecture to geology to aeronautics. I recognized his world-famous masterpieces, the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, from pop-art parodies, and I vowed to one day visit his homeland.
Read MoreRecently I read Monument Man: The Life & Art of Daniel Chester French, the long-awaited first authoritative biography of my favorite sculptor, who a New York Times writer hailed, at his death in 1931, as a “distinctively American ‘apostle of beauty.’” While a review was published that closely reflects what I wanted to write about the book, I’m still eager to share some thoughts on why that writer’s description is so apt.
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