Leonardo da Vinci (his life and artworks) part 2

Anatomy. Leonardo has become renowned as a dissecting artist, probing, as legend tells us, the forbidden inner secrets of decaying corpses in the face of what he himself acknowledged as the repellent aspects of under taking 'an anatomy'. Supposedly, this was an illicit and sacrilegious activity, which placed him outside the realms of the church. Late in Leonardo's career in papal Rome, one of the troublesome German technicians denounced his dissections of the Pope, but …

…an expressive and a visualizing medium. Moreover, moment by moment, he checks his pictorial technique against his concept of the world: "The image, before reaching the painter's hands, must undergo a long gestation in his spirit" (Marinoni). We can rightly say, in conclusion, that in the execution of La Gioconda, Leonardo succeeds in expressing fully this higher demand of his intellect and of his art. This harmony endows the work with its greatness and value.