Evaluating artists significance - Assignment Example

As a painter, da Vinci developed a number of iconic artifacts key among which is the Mona Lisa. In this portrait, da Vinci couples a number of possibilities within a single face to come up with the most beautiful painting of its time. The painting portrays a fairer face of a woman with a protruding breast as though of a woman. In all aspects, the painting is a woman. However, several art professionals disagree with the actual portrayal in the painting some asserting that it is a combination of both male and female thereby depicting the beauty of creation (O'Connor 44).

Such ambiguities in his works portray da Vinci’s creativity. Art is relative and therefore earns relative interpretations from different people. Leonardo da Vinci’s works on the contrary were difficult to interpret since the artist used simple artistic features to portray complex information mostly targeting the elite in the early society. This ability thus quantifies him as the father of the mannerist period, a period in arts in which artists used complex artifacts to communicate and to criticize the society and the elite ruling class.

Besides the Mona Lisa, da Vinci produced several other controversial paintings including the last supper, which is one of the most reproduced religious paintings. In the painting, Leonardo portrays Jesus sitting at a table with his twelve disciples. In a very controversial twist, Leonardo inserts a male disciple in the painting with fairer features next to Jesus. While most people view the image as that of Mathews one of the closest disciples of Jesus, other have rightly argued that she could be Marry Magdalene thereby raising questions about Marry Magdalene’s relationship with Jesus.

This portrays the level of controversies that da Vinci left in most of his works. His other iconic painting is the Virgin and child with St Anne, in this, Leonardo includes a controversy as he superimposes two figures in the picture thereby complicating the identity of either Marry or St Anne. Despite the controversies that made his works more exciting, Leonardo da Vinci captured nature’s beauty in his works. He used some of the best models of the time and depicted nature as the most beautiful of all that existed. II. Late Renaissance and Baroque: Gian Lorenzo Bernini Lorenzo Bernini was yet another iconic Italian artist, architect, and sculptor.

Bernini was a renowned playwright with the ability to develop dramatic narratives and a great sculptor who depicted magnificence in most of his works. As an artist of his time, Bernini portrayed arts as a reflector of the society; most of his narratives were therefore satirical criticisms of the elite in the early Roman society and the ruling class. He therefore portrayed the issues affecting the society in a sardonic manner thereby attracting the attention of the masses to the actions of the ruling elite through entertainment.

His sculptors on the other hand were both realist and humanist. In such, he developed big sculptors of the great figures of the time in the streets and churches in Rome and developed others as decorations to similar places. The streets of Rome and some great international museums still stash some of his surviving artifacts. Among his great works that portrayed both beauty and opulence included the Apollo and Daphne, in the sculpture, Bernini portrays both a complex understanding to nature and the