According to another student, Cozens sometimes splashed plates with blots of ‘all the colours of the rainbow’ and pressed into them crumpled sheets of paper, which he worked up with swift strokes (Botticelli, Leonardo noted, used to throw sponges drenched in colour at the wall to create his landscapes, but was a ‘sorry’ painter of them). The previously hesitant boy’s power of composition was freed, and an easy method for generating new landscapes was born. ‘The stains,’ he wrote, ‘though extremely faint, appeared upon revisal to have influenced me, insensibly, in expressing the general appearance of landscape.’ Using a wet brush dipped in stronger ink, he deliberately made some marks on another piece of paper, and instructed his student to turn the blots into a landscape. Alexander Cozens, an English landscape painter famous for his study of neoclassical beauty, was illustrating something to a pupil with a quick sketch when he noticed that what he’d drawn had been unconsciously affected by the pre-existing marks on the soiled page. However, it was only in the eighteenth century that a systematic unpacking of Leonardo’s idea of cultivated chance began. ![]() Nature is shown to be a repository of readymades, if only you are patient enough to look for them. Mantegna secreted zephyrs in the billowing clouds of his paintings, Bellini’s rocks hid human faces and the folds in Dürer’s drapery contained a camouflaged catalogue of physiognomic types. Renaissance artists employed all kinds of tricks that played with these ancient, shape-changing ideas. ![]() In De Statua, Leon Battista Alberti supposed that artistic imitation emerged when our ancestors came across a gnarled tree trunk or a piece of clay, whose contours ‘needed only a slight change’ to look strikingly like something else. ![]() Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with an abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.’ Leonardo’s technique, which encouraged the viewer to search for meaning in chaos, referred back to myths about the origin of art in accidental shapes. Leonardo da Vinci advised the budding artist with creative block to leave behind his blank canvas and stare at the stains on walls: ‘If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, etc.
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