The Da Vinci Women: The Untold Feminist Power of Leonardo's Art

by Kia Vahland

This new biographical look at Leonardo da Vinci explores the Renaissance master's groundbreaking portrayal of women which forever changed the way the female form is depicted.Leonardo da Vinci was a revolutionary thinker, artist, and inventor who has been written about and celebrated for centuries. Lesser known, however, is his revolutionary and empowering portrayal of the modern female centuries before the first women's liberation movements. Before da Vinci, portraits of women in Italy were still, impersonal, and mostly shown in profile. Leonardo pushed the boundaries of female depiction having several of his female subjects, including his Mona Lisa, gaze at the viewer, giving them an authority which was withheld from women at the time.Art historian and journalist Kia Vahland recounts Leonardo's entire life from April 15, 1452, as a child born out of wedlock in Vinci up through his death on May 2, 1519, in the French castle of von Cloux. Included throughout are 80 sketches and paintings showcasing Leonardo's approach to the female form (including anatomical sketches of birth) and other artwork as well as examples from other artists from the 15th and 16th centuries. Vahland explains how artists like Raphael, Giorgione, and the young Titan were influenced by da Vinci's women while Michelangelo, da Vinci's main rival, created masculine images of woman that counters Leonardo's depictions.

Genres: Art History, Nonfiction

234 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 25, 2020

Reviews

[Toni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched. Read the book and listen to the audiobook at the same time.

From the book:

Leonardo da Vinci did more for the visibility of women than any other painter. The main figures in Leonardo’s paintings are women. Only two men are featured as protagonists in the surviving panel paintings that are definitely by Leonardo. We would have to include all the disciples in the fresco of the Last Supper (Plate 19) and all the figures of the baby Jesus in the images of the Madonna in order to reach anywhere near a balance between the sexes. Even Joseph did not manage to appear in Leonardo’s paintings of the Holy Family; instead, the artist usually assigns his place to Saint Anne, the mother of Mary

Leonardo’s machines make up only a small part of his vast body of drawings. He worked extensively on human anatomy, geological history, and the growth of plants, and constantly returned to his great passion, the movement of winds and water. He drew in order to understand the world, and he sought to understand the world in order to paint it. For him, painting was the greatest of all the sciences and the defining medium of his age.

Leonardo da Vinci was not a feminist; this concept simply did not exist around 1500. He did not fight for equal legal and social rights for women, because there were no such struggles in Renaissance times.

The image Leonardo created of the young Ginevra de’ Benci was the first ever psychological portrait in Italy. The artist who painted her gave his first secular portrait so much heart and soul that art was never the same again. The emancipation of women would not come for another five hundred years, but the emancipation of art happened at that moment.

However, this story is not about feminine invisibility and masculine claims to ownership. It is about a woman who wanted to express herself and was able to do so, and an artist who had apparently been waiting for a challenge of this kind. No bride in her best dress or successful man in a high position would have been suitable for what Leonardo clearly had in mind—to create a work in which the interior and exterior of a person would be balanced in a new way.

For Leonardo, the world was feminine, and women were the world in smaller form.