Frescoes By Bogdanoff

Leonardo da Vinci

“Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!”
–Leonardo da Vinci

“If money was beauty, I’d be The Chase Manhattan Bank!”
–Laverne Lashinski

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian painter, inventor, draftsman, sculptor, architect, anatomist, botanist, musician, writer, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal; a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, “at the third hour of the night” in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary named Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman named Caterina, who may have been a slave from the Middle East. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, “da Vinci” simply meaning “of Vinci”: his full birth name was “Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci”, meaning “Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci.”

Laverne Lashinski was born out of a 1970s CBS variety hour called The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour (1971-1974). Portrayed by American Grammy Award-winning pop singer-songwriter, Academy Award-winning / Golden Globe Award-winning / Emmy Award-winning / actress, director and record producer Cher (born Cherilyn Sarkisian on May 20, 1946), Laverne gave the world its first glimpse of what today’s “cougar” looked like. Brash, confident, colorful in personality as well as decor, and man-hungry, Laverne was a mix of Bette Midler and Molly Shannon’s Sally “I’m 50″ O’Malley, with an ounce of Ernestine Tomlin thrown in for good measure. After the cancellation of The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour in 1974, Laverne lived on with the Cher show, which debuted on February 16, 1975, and the couple’s professional reuniting in 1976 with The Sonny & Cher Show (1976-1977).

Leo’s Early Years
Little is known about Leonardo’s early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.

In 1466, at the age of 14, Leonardo was apprenticed to one of the most successful artists of his day, Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio. Verrocchio’s workshop was at the centre of the intellectual currents of Florence, assuring the young Leonardo of an education in the humanities. Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to a vast range of technical skills and had the opportunity to learn drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling.

By 1472, at the age of 20, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St. Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo’s earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473.

Da Vinci’s Fame
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.

The Last Supper (1495-1498)

Mona Lisa

Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps 15 of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination.

Vitruvian Man

Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

fetus views (left) ♦ principal organs (middle) ♦ brain study (right)

Lashinski’s Fame
Well…besides catching her on tv reruns and some obscure videos on YouTube (see end of this post), she has sadly been forgotten by most.

Her Bubble Burst

Gay Speculation
Speculation over Leonardo da Vinci’s sexuality began when he was 24 years old after his arrest on charges of sodomy, a serious crime in 15th century Florence. No witnesses appeared to support allegations da Vinci had sexual relations with a 16-year-old male model, thus the charges were dropped.

Although allegations of Leonardo da Vinci’s homosexuality were never substantiated, rumors continued to circulate among those who analyzed his depiction of young boys in his paintings, his portrayal of an effeminate John in The Last Supper, and the fact that he had several young male proteges and no wife and kids.

St. John in the Wilderness

After the hearings, Leonardo kept his personal life extremely private. At the time, unfavorable rumors or negative public attention was detrimental to the career of an artist, such as da Vinci, who was dependant upon the support of patrons and the Church.

More Speculation
It is believed that Laverne, like the megastar that portrayed her, was adored by gay fans everywhere.

Showgirls

Da Vinci’s life between 1476 and 1508
Leonardo had his own workshop in Florence between 1476 and 1481. He was commissioned to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard and The Adoration of the Magi in 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. This important commission was interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.

Adoration of the Magi

In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head. Lorenzo de’ Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.

"Ginevra," my fresco interpretation from da Vinci's painting "Ginevra de' Benci"

Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. He worked on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico’s predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello’s statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio’s Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the “Gran Cavallo”.

Virgin of the Rocks

Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.

At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the “Gran Cavallo” for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.

Crossbow Machine

On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that “men and women, young and old” flocked to see it “as if they were attending a great festival”. In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. He returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St. Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist’s will, Michelangelo’s statue of David.

The Battle of Anghiari

In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo’s most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D’Oggione. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father’s estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila.

Last Years
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. In 1516, he entered François’ service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé near the king’s residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.

Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67. In accordance to his will, 60 beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo’s paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo’s vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak of good stuff with a fur edge.

Cher as Laverne live in Monte Carlo

Vivien Leigh in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

Glamorous Actress Stone

Not to be confused with The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, the film starring Vivien Leigh (and later played by that Damn Helen Mirren in a PBS TV production) as Karen Stone, an isolated woman considered beyond her prime − as she approaches 50(!), here I dare to compare March holidays on the ancient Roman calendar with select films featuring that zany Hollywood actress, Sharon Stone.

Martius
Martius (March), the Roman month devoted to and named after the god of war, Mars, was filled with numerous celebrations

The Ides of March
The most known festival was the Ides of March (Latin: Idus Martiae), which is the name of March 15 in the Roman calendar. The term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October, and the 13th day of the other months. This festival was a joyous day dedicated to the god Mars and a military parade was usually held. In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Caesar was stabbed to death in the Roman Senate led by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and 60 other co-conspirators.

Julius Caesar

According to the Greek historian Plutarch, Caesar was warned by a seer to be on his guard against a great peril on the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre of Pompey (where he would be assassinated), Caesar saw the seer and joked “Well, the Ides of March have come,” to which the seer replied “Ay, they have come, but they are not gone.” This meeting is famously dramatized in William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned to “beware the Ides of March”.

Sophistication and Elegance

Basic Plumbing
Fast-forward 2,036 years and five days to March 20, 1992. It was on this date that Basic Instinct had its theatrical release in the United States. Like the dreaded day for Caesar,  Basic Instinct has lots of blood and gore, thanks to an ice pick and Catherine Tramell, the character played by Stone. Tramell is a successfull and very wealthy crime writer, and the main suspect in the brutal murder of Johnny Boz, a former rock star. Down-and-out detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) is on the case, and on Tramell’s tail. Like the citizens of ancient Rome, Tramell didn’t wear panties, as evidenced in the infamous interrogation scene where Stone’s character appears to be suffering from restless leg syndrome and can’t stop crossing and uncrossing her legs, resulting in the kootchipop seen around the world.

The similarities are uncanny! Catherine Tramell is the equivalent of the assassin of Caesar, who’s modern equivalent could be Johnny Boz. Freaky!

Feriae Martis
Mars’ birthday fell on the Kalends. The salii, his priests, were divided into two groups (sodales) of 12 men each who, following the etymology of their name from the Latin salire, would leap or dance in procession at festivals to Mars. The salii were of ancient, pre-Republican origin, patrician, and chosen for life from families with living parents (like the Vestal Virgins). Headquartered in the Curia Saliorum on the Palatine Hill, they were charged with caring for the shields (ancilia) of Mars, and singing and dancing through Rome beating swords on the shields, at the beginning and end of the war season, in March and October. The salii’s celebration in honor of Mars (Feriae Martis) lasted 24 days.

Pretty Perm

A Slice of Life
Like the 24 days it took to honor Mars, so is the amount of days it takes to wrap your mind around the plot of Sliver. Stone plays Carly Norris, a New York City book editor who manages to move into the spacious Sliver Heights building in Manhattan — on a book editor’s salary. How does she do this?

Ann Marie

Well, if That Girl’s Ann Marie, a struggling actress who lives in a spacious Manhattan apartment can do it, then why not? Maybe Ann’s boyfriend, magazine reporter Donald Hollinger (Ted Bessell) was really her pimp. In the original unaired pilot episode, Bessell’s character was named Donald Blue Sky, and he played Ann’s ‘agent’ instead of a reporter. Hmm. Anyway, so after Carly moves into this expensive high-rise, a bunch of people start to die, and there is a serial killer on the loose. What follows are a couple of the usual suspects, along with voyeurism and bad dialog.

Anna Perenna
The Festival of Anna Perenna occurs on the Ides of March. Much like the identity of who was killing off tenants in a highrise Manhattan apartment building, the identity of Anna Perenna (or Porenna) is a mystery, but she may be a personification of the year. The prolific Roman poet Ovid tells two stories about her, but they may be his inventions. In one, Anna was an old woman who gave cakes to the plebeians when they seceded (494 B.C.). In the other, she is Dido’s (Queen of Carthage) sister who was driven from Carthage to Latium after Dido’s suicide. In Latium, she incurred the wrath of Aeneas’ wife, fled, and was carried off by Numicus, god of a stream. When Aeneas’ servants went out searching for her, they followed her tracks to the river bank where they discovered she had been turned into a water nymph.

Swallows With Lilies No. 5 Fresco (by yours truly) inspired by a wall mural in an ancient harvest room, signifying spring.

In her article on Ovid’s treatment of the Ides of March in his Fasti, Professor Carole Newlands says Anna Perenna’s festival included the drunkenness and sexual and verbal freedoms typical of carnivalesque holidays like Lupercalia and Saturnalia. At Anna Perenna’s festival, reversal of typical Roman dignitas includes inversion of gender roles as when a drunken old woman drags along a drunken old man.

If she were a card, she'd be the Joker

Only in Vegas
Drunkenness? Sexual and verbal freedoms? Sounds like modern day Las Vegas. Which leads me to Ms. Stone’s role as Ginger McKenna in Casino. Like the ancient prostitutes of Rome, Ginger is a hooker who roams. She goes from casino to casino looking for unsuspecting rich dudes to roll. She hooks up with Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro) and ends up marrying him. She’s still hooked on her old sleazy pimp boyfriend Lester Diamond (James Woods). Ginger is a truly tormented dame. She ends up having a baby with Sam, can’t give up Lester, has an affair with sleaze ball small-time mobster Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and falls into a downward spiral of booze and drugs. Ginger flees Las Vegas with money and jewels and hooks up with some lowlifes in a fleabag motel in Hollywood. She quickly becomes destitute and dies of a cocaine overdose. It’s your typical girl gets boy, girl still wants old pimp boy, girl finds new mob boy, girl leaves first boy, and girl ends up dead from a drug overdose in a fleabag Hollywood motel. It’s been done hundreds of times in cinematic history. What seems to be most confusing about Stone’s role is that her character’s name is Ginger, but she’s a blonde. Go figure.

Fast and the Day of Blood
March 16th marked the end of the carnival celebration which had started with the Terminalia celebration on the 23d of February. Like Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), it was the end of a feast period and beginning of a fast, only with the Romans, the celebration was in honor of Dionysus, Jupiter, and Mars.

A nine-day fast preceded the Dies sanguinis ‘Day of the Blood’. On the 22 of March, a procession of palms or a pine tree was brought to the shrine of Cybele so that the pine could be worshiped as a god. Two days later, at the Day of the Blood, the priests of Cybele slashed themselves and spun around to sprinkle her statue with blood. Afterwards, the priests washed the statue in the Almo River, a Tiber tributary.

Stone as Edith Ann

Basic Nonsence
What could be more natural to follow up this holiday, which features lots of blood and slashing, than Basic Instinct 2? Here, 14 years after the release of the film with the same name minus the 2, Stone reprises her role as Catherine Tramell. This time Tramell is living across the pond. The opening scene has Tramell driving a car at high speeds with her soccer playing boyfriend as her passenger, looking totally out of it. Tramell is using his hand to see if she still foregoes panties, while she is wild behind the wheel. Her scene is reminiscent of the car scene in Mahogany, where a rail-thin fashion model named Tracy (played by character Diana Ross) is a passenger in a car driven by out-of-control Sean, a high-fashion photographer (played by character Anthony Perkins), who is obsessed with Tracy and determined to have her all to himself — or else. Getting back to Cate Tramell, Stone plays her like Ross in that Mahogany scene, with some Courtney Love thrown in for good measure.

Tramell’s car ends up plunging into the Thames and her boyfriend drowns…or was he already dead? Tramell becomes the subject of yet another police investigation, and what follows is what could only be an advertisement for Stone’s plastic surgeon and nothing else. Stone is wacky in this part, and like ancient Rome, her career appeared to be in ruins after the film’s release.

Epilogue
Where Stone may have had mishaps at the box office, her life as an advocate shines.

AIDS Research Support
In April 2004, she was awarded the National Center for Lesbian Rights Spirit Award in San Francisco for her support and involvement with organizations that serve the lesbian, gay and HIV/AIDS community and performed Can’t Get You Out of My Head with Kylie Minogue in Cannes for AIDS research. She was presented the award by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Chinese Earthquake Controversy
Stone sparked criticism for her comments made in an exchange on the red carpet with Hong Kong’s Cable Entertainment News during the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 25, 2008. When asked about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake she remarked:

“Well you know it was very interesting because at first, you know, I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And so I have been very concerned about how to think and what to do about that because I don’t like that. And I had been this, you know, concerned about, oh how should we deal with the Olympics because they are not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine. And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that Karma? When you’re not nice then the bad things happen to you?”