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| Jacques-Laurent Agasse La Fontaine Personnifiée 1837 oil on canvas Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Emile Burdet Pyramids of Cheops and Khafre reflected in Flood Water ca. 1885 albumen print Cabinet d'Arts Graphiques des Musées d'Art et d'Histoire, Genève |
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| Jeroen Krabbe Suriname River at Danpaati II 2006 oil on canvas Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands |
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| Agricol-Louis Montagné Fountain at Nîmes ca. 1910 oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes |
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| Gaetano Gandolfi Design for Fountain ca. 1785-95 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Jørgen Roed Fountain in Gardens of Villa Borghese, Rome ca. 1839 oil on canvas Nivaagaard Museum, Denmark |
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| Hubert Robert Wall Fountain 1767 drawing Musée du Louvre |
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| Susanne Maria von Sandrart after Jean Le Pautre Fountain Design with Salmacis and Hermaphroditus 1678 etching Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig |
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| Franz Sigrist the Elder Fountain with Nymphs ca. 1760 etching Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna |
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| Abraham van Diepenbeeck The Deluge ca. 1636-39 drawing (print study for illustration to Ovid) Städel Museum, Frankfurt |
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| Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld The Deluge 1826 drawing (print study for Bible illustration) Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden |
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| Friedrich Reclam Staircase with Cascade in a Park ca. 1760 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Thomas Ender Ladder Falls near Heiligenblut 1845 watercolor on paper Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Franz Kobell Landscape with Waterfall and Temple Ruins before 1822 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden |
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| Adrian Zingg River Keppbach near Dresden ca. 1780-90 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen,Dresden |
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| Lucas van Valckenborch Mountain Landscape with Waterfall 1595 oil on panel Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
And yet Leonardo, if anyone, knew that the artist's desire to create, to bring forth a second reality, finds its inexorable limits in the restrictions of his medium. I feel we catch an echo of the disillusionment with having created only a picture that we found in Lucien [sic] Freud when we read in Leonardo's notes: "Painters often fall into despair . . . when they see that their paintings lack the roundness and the liveliness which we find in objects seen in the mirror . . . but it is impossible for a painting to look as rounded as a mirror image . . . except if you look at both with only one eye."
Perhaps the passage betrays the ultimate reason for Leonardo's deep dissatisfaction with his art, his reluctance to reach the fatal moment of completion: all the artist's knowledge and imagination are of no avail, it is only a picture that he has been painting, and it will look flat. Small wonder that contemporaries describe him in his later years as most impatient of the brush and engrossed in mathematics. Mathematics was to help him to be the true maker. Today we read of Leonardo's project to build a "flying machine," but if we look into Leonardo's notes we will not find such an expression. What he wants to make is a bird that will fly, and once more there is an exultant tone in the master's famous prophecy that the bird would fly. It did not. And shortly afterward we find Leonardo lodging in the Vatican – at the same time when Michelangelo and Raphael were there creating their most renowned works – quarreling with a German mirror maker and fixing wings and a beard to a tame lizard in order to fighten his visitors. He made a dragon, but it was only a whimsical footnote to a Promethean life. The claim to be a creator, a maker of things, passed from the painter to the engineer – leaving to the artist only the small consolation of being a maker of dreams.
– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).
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