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This tile is from Mainquilters 22: Medievalness


Comment: "da Vinci flies again!"
Checked out at: May 02, 2003
Checked in at: May 03, 2003
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dimeboy
geekness
You know I was thinking about it and Leonardo was in the renaissance not medievil times. The thing is I unknowingly drew renaissance style angels in the tile to the right of this so at least they match.......like I said geekness. Oh yeah, pretty nice tile here.
SirMildredPierce
Renaissance men of the Middle Ages
Well, true, technically, yes, Da Vinci was a figure of the Renaissance, not the Middle Ages. But really he was living on the cusp of the renaissance, and it was individuals like Da Vinci who made it possible to make such a transition from the the decidely Dark Ages of intellectual stagnation in to the flowering age of the Renaissance. And of course in times of chaotic change, the dichotomies that we use to define such things as "Middle Ages" and "Renaissance", the old and the new, will be seen as the main oppossing forces shaping that society.

But history is a poor judge of those chaotic changes, and historians prefer instead to stick a definite date of when one age ends and another begins, ie the middle ages ended in 1453 (the year after Da Vinci was born). But such a strict view of history ignores the great conflict that those two ages represented.

Even a century after Da Vinci's time, Galileo found himself prosecuted by medieval minded people and died locked away from a supposedly Renaissance society. You see, Galileo and Da Vinvi were simply Renaissance Men living in the increasingly irrelevant Middle Ages. It was no coincidence that the Inquisition, *the* agents of medieval conformity, didn't get in to full swing until *after* the Renaissance supposedly began. It would not be an offense to the facts to say that the Inquisition were *of* the Middle Ages. They certainly have '

Of course this quilt is about 'medievalness'. And of course Da Vinci is quite distinctly anti-midevalness. But just like "war photography' can express either a pro-war message or anti-war message, art commenting on the middle ages can include examples of those who bucked the idea of 'medivalness' and the ideas that helped end that horrible period of history. For the end of a great era is as relevant to that era as anything else that happened in that period of history.