Leonardo da Vinci’s Painting, the Mona Lisa

Beauty
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Beauty
Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa, is widely hailed as one of the greatest works of visual art for its realism and mastery of lighting and shadows. I love the painting and consider it beautiful because it is unique and mysterious. The painting was the first to break the traditional genre of portraiture and even apply the sfumato technique. The Mona Lisa is amazing in that it breaks away from the traditional profile standard by positioning the sitter in a three-quarter pose before an imaginary landscape. The painting was also the first to use aerial perspective, over and above, the sfumato technique to create blur edges that produce vivid and realistic images of the natural world. This technique softens Mona Lisa's facial outlines and contours, thereby making a subtle transition around her mouth and lips. This quality has generated mystery as to the meaning of the painting or the identity of the portraiture.
John Ruskin was a Victorian art critic who believed that all beauty is derived from nature. Ruskin thought that all art must take nature as its pattern since beauty manifests Divine characteristics in the matter. According to Ruskin, beautiful works of art have their roots in the natural world, and anything that does not take this form should be considered ugly and monstrous. This notion of beauty is in line with modern art critics' contemporary understanding of beauty. The perception of order in nature is widely attributed as pleasing and central to the modern beauty phenomenon. Nature is regular in all its parts, and therefore modern art tries to apply exact regularity to capture this critical facet of aesthetics (Ruskin et al., 2010). Ruskin's idea that beautiful works of art should imitate nature is also relevant in contemporary aesthetics since beauty also consists of a proper mixture of unity and variety.
This quality is found in nature: the natural world is filled with various objects that create beauty through their unity. For instance, the rainbow is beautiful because it is the union of simple and multiple colors. If there was no unity in the various colors, then the beauty of the rainbow is diminished: the beauty lies in the uniting of the scattered and weaker beauties of the different colors. The exact ratio of uniformity and variety in similar natural objec...