hey everybody before i start the video i just want to tell you about something that i've been working on for the past year and a half those of you who've watched my show since the beginning know that it's been my dream forever to write and publish a book i cannot believe i'm actually saying this right now but i wrote a book and it'll be coming out this spring in real physical copies that you can hold in your hand and buy at bookstores if you can't tell i'm extremely excited about this and i'm also excited to show you something we just finished working on the book cover introducing escape into meaning a book of essays not unlike the nerdwriter but in which i go more in depth about really the biggest obsessions in my life the pre-order links are live now and you can find them in the description below you'll judge for yourself when you read it but i think this is the best thing i've ever done and i'm so thrilled to finally tell you about it after all this time there's a lot more to say and i will soon but for now i just want to say thank you for watching and thank you for reading all right the video for all his influence and prestige leonardo da vinci didn't really make that many paintings of his total output which is impossible to know exactly only about NUMBER_TOKEN paintings survived to the modern day and many of these are unfinished of course of these NUMBER_TOKEN or so two the mona lisa and the last supper are arguably the most famous and second most famous paintings in the world but there's a less well-known canvas one that was painted around the same time as the mona lisa that i think may be an even better example of leonardo's genius it's called the virgin and child with saint anne and it depicts the infant jesus and a small lamb huddled with his mother the virgin mary and his grandmother saint anne in front of a craggy mountainous landscape okay so what's the first thing you notice in this painting the first thing i see is the composition of the bodies in a triangle or a pyramid a shape that was popular for group compositions in the renaissance but which was executed most spectacularly by leonardo himself NUMBER_TOKEN years earlier in the virgin of the rocks which had a major influence on other painters like raphael for example as you can see in these paintings the pyramid is a shape of stability and strength and it unifies the figures in a greater whole triangular shapes are also effective tools for getting the eye to move around the canvas the viewer can't help but glance from corner to corner and leonardo accentuates this movement with eye lines our attention naturally gets drawn to the apex of the pyramid where saint anne looks with a mona lisa-like smile at her daughter who looks down at her son who meets her gaze and sends you back up in the opposite direction the lamb which is also on that line and which the infant jesus grapples with aggressively is the one point of tension in this otherwise peaceful grouping this sacrificial lamb symbolizes the eventual sacrifice of jesus on the cross in this way moving from the apex of the pyramid to its bottom right corner is actually a trip through time from the past to the
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN hey everybody before i start the video i just want to tell you about something that i've been working on for the past year and a half those of you who've watched my show since the beginning know that it's been my dream forever to write and publish a book i cannot believe i'm actually saying this right now but i wrote a book and it'll be coming out this spring in real physical copies that you can hold in your hand and buy at bookstores if you can't tell i'm extremely excited about this and i'm also excited to show you something we just finished working on the book cover introducing escape into meaning a book of essays not unlike the nerdwriter but in which i go more in depth about really the biggest obsessions in my life the pre-order links are live now and you can find them in the description below you'll judge for yourself when you read it but i think this is the best thing i've ever done and i'm so thrilled to finally tell you about it after all this time there's a lot more to say and i will soon but for now i just want to say thank you for watching and thank you for reading all right the video END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN