Essay Example on Mona Lisa: Leonardo da Vinci's Artistic Strategies

Introduction

Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated with optics and perspectives. He introduced the artistic strategy of atmospheric perspective, a technique in which objects from a distance looked blurrier and the popularized it in high renaissance paintings such as the Mona Lisa (Hidalgo Garcia, 2015). He introduced artistic strategies like the sfumato blending of oil paints to blur different colors of painting and chiaroscuro, the alteration of light and shadow.

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Stylistic Influences

The Mona Lisa has a significant impact on the Renaissance and in the later period since it revolutionized modern portrait painting. The reason being is that the three-quarter Mona Lisa among other da Vinci preliminary drawings motivated other artists to express themselves in their drawings and revitalized connoisseurs to collect those paints.

Reflection on My Learning

The research of the Mona Lisa artwork enhanced my admiration of Leonardo da Vinci. I was intrigued by the way he used contraction of colors between light and shadow, in which the face, the point of concentration, could be visibly seen. At the same time, less focused areas were uniquely blur due to the use of oil paints to alter the lines of different colors. The understanding of the use of sfumato and chiaroscuro makes it easy to interpret why the Mona Lisa portrait has different color elements but still looks great due to the unique strategy used in combining them. Similarly, it helps interpret the period the portrait was drawn due to the inclusion of tone contrast in one unifying style, a style attributed to the Italian Renaissance.

References

Hidalgo Garcia, D. (2015). Parallel urban developments: Leonardo Da Vinci - Etienne Cabet. Estoa, 4(7), 7-13. https://doi.org/10.18537/est.v004.n007.02

Oznuluer, H. (2018). The journey of the figure in the space from the cave-wall period to high renaissance. Journal of Art and Language, 7(52). https://doi.org/10.7816/idil-07-52-11

Wallace, A. (2019). Mona Lisa. SSRN Electronic Journal, 1(1), 1-34. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3575795