Leonardo Da Vinci's Artistic Influence On Renaissance Art

There is a general consensus that the Renaissance arose in Florence in the 15th century, when Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), as a pioneering artist, invented groundbreaking painting techniques. Scholars have concluded that the development of handling colours and perspective in Tuscan paintings accelerated most between the earliest works of Leonardo and the death of Andrea del Sarto, making Leonardo Da Vinci the apex of the development of Renaissance art in Italy.1 This paper will be primarily concerned with Leonardo’s artistic impact on portraiture, and, more importantly, with the way in which his paintings compare to Flemish paintings formally, technically, and intellectually.

The shift in art from the Early Renaissance to the High Renaissance in Northern Europe and Italy did not proceed in a linear, geographical manner but rather radiated in a network across Europe. During this time, various local painters were achieving new heights in their art simultaneously. Thus, to find out which of them

This means that a painter achieves relief either through saturation-modelling (colour change) or luminance-modelling (change in shadow).3 In fig.1, Masaccio’s Madonna and Child and St Anne, the most apparent example of colour change lies in the upper left-hand angel, who has a vestment that turns from the full value of yellow to a full cinnabar-red shadow. The audience can get a sense that Massacio is trying to exploit the difference in the tone of pigments to indicate the light-and-shadow effect and the plasticity of the figure. In fig. 2, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, on the other hand, the passage from apple-green to black in the heavily creased garment of the bride dominates the modelling of form and gives viewer a sense of three-dimensionality through the shift from light to