The Life of Leonardo da Vinci

I want to talk about the book by the russian author Valentin Dityakin "Leonardo da Vinci". This is a book of my childhood that was published in 1959 and this book on the history of art is one of the first that fell into my hands. In a small and very accessible written book, it tells about the biography of Leonardo da Vinci as it should be told in order to interest the child with a historical epoch, revival, art in general.

I read quite a lot on the history of fine art, studied the world's art culture a little, there were many books, many works. But when you return to your very first experiences of this kind, then of course, it is very important which book fell into hands for the first time.

And Valentin Dityakin made a miracle. He introduced Leonardo da Vinci, maybe not so scientifically, not so conforming exactly to every historical fact, but so alive and so heartfelt that I still remember every fact, every page of biography precisely in the way that this book gives.

I watched tremendously with the childhood of the little boy. I will never forget the episode that introduces the reader to Leonardo's childhood, where he is shown a figurine of a wax lizard filled with mercury. This figure moves, moves like a living and from this focus begins the story of the childhood of Leonardo. About the fact that through his whole life he carried interest in various, amazing creatures of nature and human hands. He studied plants, herbs, minerals, architecture, the human body, animals. He studied, and astronomical phenomena, and geology, and the life of the seas, and even sea creatures for him delivered. He sketched all this countless times, his sketches are the treasures of the history of artistic thought.

But in this book, I first of all followed the biography of a person, the biography of someone who, with each step, discovered something new and, of course, overcame enormous resistance. Before he came to the service of Louis Moreau, before everything that happened to him happened, there were a lot of tragic events in his life that shocked me.

The child, of course, will be very interested in reading about the great artist in this book. Then everything will come, Cellini, and Pavel Muratov, they sat down talking about Italy, but at first it would be good to be worried about the great man, how he searched, how he suffered in this search.

I remember how worried I was when I read how the Last Supper was written, as a result of a desperately bold experiment with soil and paints, the destruction of the fresco began even before it was completed, the first cracks appeared. This worried him terribly, but for me it became an important discovery, as a masterpiece already being born carries a grain of its own defeat.

And this drama, which is naturally contained in the book "Leonardo da Vinci", he left a very strong emotional trace in me. Probably, it was one of the first experiences of familiarizing with the destiny of a creative person, a brilliant creator who overcomes, and the stagnation of society, and the boundaries of the unknown and makes some creative discoveries.

In addition, I have learned countless different things for the first time from this book. I long afterwards, like delirium, drew some unintelligible drawings, because the happiest thing in my life was precisely the meeting with Leonardo. His versatile development seemed to me an unattainable ideal. To my great regret, by that time I was already far behind in mathematics and, accordingly, in all exact sciences, and therefore this ideal did not come to life in such a way.

But I can not imagine anything more useful, from the pedagogical point of view, because it is this versatility of the great genius that can give the child the incentive to get involved and engage in many sciences, many disciplines and develop a variety of abilities.

In the pages of this book, I first met with the characters of the Renaissance and Italian history. I learned that there are cities that are managed differently, that there are dukes who are fighting each other for the land. I learned a lot and the book, in essence of a biographical nature, which should tell and disclose art history questions, is accessible to the child, it has also become a history textbook.

To a child interested in history, art, he should fall into the hands of the right books about great people. And to such a number of correct books, one can refer the book of Valentin Dityakin "Leonardo da Vinci" published in 1959.

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