A Quote by Leonardo da Vinci

How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains. — © Leonardo da Vinci
How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.
That sculpture is more admirable than painting for the reason that it contains relief and painting does not is completely false. ... Rather, how much more admirable the painting must be considered, if having no relief at all, it appears to have as much as sculpture!
As usual, nature's imagination far surpasses our own, as we have seen from the other theories which are subtle and deep.
The edge of a painting is its frontier... where the artist negotiates his boundaries with the real world... where art begins and ends and where the eye enters and leaves the image. It determines, in an infinitely subtle number of ways, how you read a painting - which, unlike a book or a piece of music, has no pre-determined beginning or end.
If a painting contains no abstraction nor impressionistic elements, it is a kite that will never fly. But if the painting completely breaks the connection between human feeling and the object portrayed, the kite string has been broken. I try to keep the line unbroken.
Although man is not armed by nature nor is naturally swiftest in flight, yet he has something better by far—reason. For by the possession of this function he exceeds the beasts to such a degree that he subdues. … You see, therefore, how much the gift of reason surpasses mere physical equipment.
When we think how narrow and devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and a confident man who will put a limit to the strange by-oaths into which the human spirit may wander.
Painting contains a divine force which... makes the dead seem almost alive.
This all-pervading power is the power of divine love. It thinks. It organizes. It plans. It loves. It is the one which is the subtle of the ether, you can call it. It is the subtle of the matter. It is the subtle of your emotions. It is the subtle of your mental power. It is the subtle of your evolutionary power, but all integrated and coordinated in complete synchronization.
Painting embraces and contains within itself all the things which nature produces or which results from the fortuitous actions of men... he is but a poor master who makes only a single figure well.
Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.
Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.
The process of painting offers an infinite array of possibilities. The closer in unification to just one of those, the better the painting becomes.
The human MIND seems to work best in the presence of reality. The brain that contains the problem probably also contains the solution. IF the conditions are right, the huge intelligence of the human being surfaces. IDEAS seem to come from nowhere & sometimes STUN US.
There are subjects where reason cannot take us far and we have to accept things on faith. Faith then does not contradict reason but transcends it. Faith is a kind of sixth sense which works in cases which are without the purview of reason.
Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.
I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
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