Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Op Art, Geometry Online Education

 

Leonardo da Vinci: 'Mona Lisa', c. 1503-1519 and Golden Rectangles, Droste Effect, News

Leonardo da Vinci: 'Mona Lisa', c. 1503-1519 and Golden Rectangles

Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (logarithmic spiral known as the golden spiral)


Mona Lisa by Leonardo
Year: c. 1503–1519
Type: Oil on poplar
Dimensions: 77 cm × 53 cm (30 in × 21 in)
Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris

The Mona Lisa (La Gioconda or La Joconde, or Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo) is a half-length portrait of a woman by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, which has been acclaimed as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world." Source: Wikipedia: Mona Lisa

Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo (1452 - 1519, Old Style) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". Source: Wikipedia, Leonardo da Vinci.

Golden rectangle
A golden rectangle is a rectangle whose side lengths are in the golden ratio, one-to-phi, that is, approximately 1:1.618. A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden or Fibonacci spiral.

Droste Effect
The Droste effect is a specific kind of recursive picture, one that in heraldry is termed mise en abyme. An image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This smaller version then depicts an even smaller version of itself in the same place, and so on. Only in theory could this go on forever; practically, it continues only as long as the resolution of the picture allows, which is relatively short, since each iteration geometrically reduces the picture's size. It is a visual example of a strange loop, a self-referential system of instancing which is the cornerstone of fractal geometry. Source: Wikipedia, Droste Effect.
 

Leonardo da Vinci: 'Mona Lisa''

 

Home | Sitemap | Geometry | Geometric Art | Golden Rectangles | Great Paintings | Leonardo | Email | Post a comment | By Antonio Gutierrez