Leonardo's life 3 E-Book

Dmitrij Sergeevič Merežkovskij

• Herausgeber: Sem Edizioni
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Last chapter of the trilogy "Leonardo’s life". Werecked the star of Cesare Borgia, Leonardo returns to Florence. His fellow citizens do not love him. They are divided among those who suspect him of sorcery and those who accuse him of sodomy. He is consoled by his disciples, only. Not everybody. Meanwhile Michelangelo appears on the horizon, who contests him. Their rivalry is likely to degenerate into a sort of faid to be solved with the blood. Luckily he knows Monna Lisa Gioconda, wife of a merchant of cloths and skins. It is the anchor to which it clings to not wreck, the island on which to land in order not to drown. Too bad you can not talk about his feelings. He devotes her however to the "painting" absolute, the painting in which he reaches the highest expression of the artist, the work that, together with the Cenacolo, will make him immortal. Monna Lisa dies on return journey from Calabria, then Leonardo leaves Italy and retreats to France. There he lives among regrets and new works, in which many of people see the representation of the Antichrist.

Leseprobe

Dmitrij Sergeevič Merežkovskij

Leonardo's life 3° - The secret of Mona Lisa

Editorial director: Cosimo de Leo

Editor: Claudia Barulli

Translator: Lavinia Galvagno

Cover: Michelangelo Allegri

© 2017 SEM - Editorial & Multimedia Services

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All rights reserved. No part of these pages may be reproduced in any form, included any electronic and mechanical means, without prior written permission by the Editor, except for brief quotations used for purposes of review. VAT is pre-paid by the publisher in accordance with section 74, paragraph 1, letter C of Presidential Decree 633/72 and further modifications.

ISBN: 9788897093879

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Table of contents

The bloody beast (1503)

Mona Lisa Gioconda (1506-1506

The Holy Inquisition (1506-1513)

Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raffaello (1516-1515)

The Winged Precursor (1516-1519)

The bloody beast (1503)

The beast comes out of the sea

St. John, The Apocalypse, XI,7.

I.

At the end of March 1503, Leonardo, who was in Romagna, called Giovanni Boltraffio who was in Rome. He wanted to charge him with a certain argument risen by a peasant, because of a vineyard that Leonardo possessed in the hills of Fiesole near Florence.

During the trip, Giovanni stopped in Orvieto to see the famous frescoes that Luca Signorelli had recently completed in the New Chapel of the Cathedral. One of these was the coming of the Antichrist on earth: Giovanni was especially struck by the face that, at first, seemed to shine with a sinister and malignant light, but as he looked closer, it was not an expression of malignancy but of an infinite sadness. In the eyes there was the supreme despair of the wisdom that has denied his God. He had hairy ears as a satyr, fingers hooked like the claws of a wild beast, but neither the one nor the other were enough to remove from his body the charm of an irresistible beauty. And as once before in the visions of his delusions, Giovanni could see through those appearances others similar but divine, a face that he did not want to recognize and did not dare to recognize.

On the left, on the same wall, the artist painted the death of the Antichrist. Soared toward the clear skies with the help of invisible wings, the proud enemy of God, the one who wanted to prove to people that he was the Son of Man, who one day will come to judge the living and the dead, was hit by the angel of the Lord and, stripped of the diabolical virtue, fell into the abyss. The terrible fall of the one who had presumed to rise by means of the wings, awoke in the heart of the young the ancient and painful doubts on behalf of Leonardo.

Next to Boltraffio, there was a fifty-years-old fat monk, completely absorbed in the contemplation of the frescoes. He was accompanied by a man who did not show his age: he was tall, lanky, with a cheerful face full of hungry, dressed in the guise of the ancient university student or wandering scholars of the Middle Ages. They greeted and exchanged a few words with Giovanni, since they were going to the same place, all three resumed the journey together.

The monk was a very erudite German from Nuremberg named Tomaso Schweinitz, a theologian at the monastery of St. Augustine, and he was going to Rome for certain intricate disputes of sinecures and favours. The other, German too, native of Salzburg and named Hans Platter, followed him as a secretary, as a servant, and as a jester.

During the journey, the conversation turned on the sad condition of the Church. With the calm and serene objectivity of the philosopher who argues from the chair, Schweinitz demonstrated the absurdity of the dogma of the papal infallibility, and asserted that in twenty years, the whole of Germany would have revolted against the unbearable yoke of the Roman Church.