Leonardo Da Vinci

When Leonardo was scrolling around the market place in Florence with his pupils he liked to visit the bird dealers. He would buy a few birds, then take them out of their cages and set them free. It was one of Leonardo's    most heartfelt desires to lift himself into the air some day. He drew a parachute, a glider and a helicopter in his sketchbook.

Leonardo wrote down his observations on birds in mirror writing, so that he would not smudge the ink as he wrote left-handed, and scribbled pictures alongside them, intended to show how birds move their wings. Leonardo regarded the observation of nature and painting as one and the same thing: art was intended to provide  a better understanding of the world.


Da Vinci's Paintings

Giotto Di Bondone

When Giotto was ten years old his father sent him out to look after the sheep in the fields. He began to draw one of the animals on it. The famous painter Cimabue of Florence happened to pass by and asked the talented boy if he might like to work in his studio. So, Giotto became a painter.


Giotto's new fresco technique. For frescos, the paint is applied to damp plaster made of lime, sand and marble dust. Cimabue always made his assistants plaster the whole ares that could be reached from painter's scaffold.If he didn't finish painting the plastered area in a day, he continued the next day on dry plaster, but the paint did not take as well on this. Giotto plastered only as much as he could paint in a day. This is why Giotto's frescos continue to survive in such good condition.


Picture stories on the church wall. Giotto's exciting new frescos soon became as well known beyond the boundaries of Florence that he needed assistants himself to meet the demand for his pictures. It was not just rich merchants and bankers who ordered his work, but the Pope, and the King of Naples, too. Giotto painted the ceiling and walls of the Franciscan monks' church in Assisi.

Giotto's Paintings

Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giotto_di_Bondone
http://www.giottodibondone.org/
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/giotto/