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Rating: [Below is a brief excerpt from the essay by Siffredi Rocco "The History of Art Told in 25 Centimeters", published by the publisher Di Fianco and Di Sfuggita.]
Deepening
Brief essay by Siffredi Rocco
pag. 123, verses 12-370
"And if you are alone, you will be all yours" Leonardo
There has been much discussion regarding the sexuality of Leonardo Da Vinci, up to today: there are those who confidently claim that he was homosexual, citing the following reasons: his mother Caterina gave an illegitimate, bastard son to Ser Piero, and therefore she had to end her relationship with the newborn Leonardo's father - the trauma that all this caused the child was decisive in the development of his sexual orientation. Some, such as Freud, argued that Leonardo hated the idea of a sexual relationship, although from the numerous sketches of coitus and erect members that have come down to us, one might think that what moved him was a scientific interest mixed with a certain dark desire that the artist himself would never have admitted. Few confessions on the subject, and even where Leonardo fills the page with his meticulous and almost illegible backward writing and where he leaves room for personal notes (unfortunately few), he stops suddenly, perhaps for fear of revealing too much, and awakens from the stream of consciousness, abandoning incomplete sentences upon sentences.
This brief introduction to try to explain the ambiguity of the portrait in question, housed at the Louvre. Probably the last painting Leonardo completed, it portrays Saint John the Baptist with his finger pointing towards the sky, meaning God. I say ambiguity because the figure, emerging from darkness and smiling blissfully (but it simultaneously seems a sinister, dark smile, as dark as the background from which the figure itself emerges), has, though representing a male, vaguely feminine features that accentuate Leonardo's idea of perfection, the fusion of the two sexes into a single, clear image, the utopia he pursued and finally achieved in the much more famous Mona Lisa.
Painted between 1507 and 1513, as can be read in Vasari's Lives, it is one of the painting's most mysterious elements of the genius, with those Robert Plant-like hair of elusive meaning. Probably the smile painted by Leonardo did not inspire Dan Brown, who instead opted for a banal choice for his book, the Mona Lisa, as if it hadn't already been overused.
To the misfortune of this joker, the painting does not present any apostle with a knife, no alleged Mary Magdalene, just a cross added later by a student of Leonardo, probably without knowing that by doing so, he was ruining the aura of mystery surrounding Leonardo's idea of Christianity. Just observe The Last Supper.
It's all there. Dan Brown aside.
Since Leonardo loved to randomly throw ideas and sketches from the four corners of the earth onto a sheet that perhaps had nothing to do with the ideas and sketches themselves, a bit like it's done with Zappa Frank Vincent, then I decided to do the exact same thing:
Rocco's favorite verbs - to sink, to immerse, to hit, to saw (reflexive), to dare, to loop, to break through, to procrastinate, to bare, to finish, to escape.
Rocco's favorite movies - Apocalypse Now, Someone Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Silence of the Lambs, Take the Money and Run, TITANIC (though its real title is The Clash Between Titans(c) and Iceberg)
Rocco’s favorite objects - Broom, front wheel of the Pinarello (it's thin and narrow), chain of his brother's old bike (well-oiled but hard), pen, hidden camera.
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