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Leonardo's Use Of Shadows Essay

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"No artist was more obsessed with shadows that Leonardo da Vinci" (Fiorani, 271). Leonardo was fascinated by the earlier painters Pietro Cavallini and Giotto, which relied heavily on shadows and heavily studied their work alongside the writer Cennino Cennini. Finally, when he started painting, he observed how shadows acquired colors because of the objects surrounding it and asked how and why the shadows take on the colors from the other objects. He focused on various painting techniques to incorporate the blended and minute shades into his art. However, he did not just look at his own observations, but he took into account Aristotle’s observations of colors and the atmosphere as well as Alhazen's techniques of utilizing light and optics to

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