User talk:Tennisman1122

Hi Tennisman1122
I notice that you've just signed up. There's an official welcome template somewhere, but I'm not sure how to do!

About your edits to Leonardo da Vinci- while everyyone is inviited to make constructive edits, there are a lot of rules. Even if you are the world's expert on a subject, you must to be able to back up what you say.

Your addition was a comment, not a piece of verifiable information, or a quotation (which should be in quotation marks and backed up by name of the author and the publication).

The right thing to do with comments like that is to go to the article's discussion page. Every article has a discussion page. There are often very interesting discussion and sometimes new theories or comments about conflicting ideas. Check it out.

I also have to advise you against making additions to articles that you are really not very knowledgable about. In this case you have added to an article that has a wiki rating of Top importance. And what you added, was, unfortunately quite wrong, because you seem to have muddled up two artists. The artist whose female figures are, to put it bluntly, blokes with boobs is Michelangelo, not Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo did dozens of drawings of men who look like rugged men. And fewer, but also lots of very feminine looking women. But one of his pupils (who was perhaps also his lover) was a young man with delicate androgynous features and magnificent long curly hair. Leonardo painted and drew him several times, sometimes with erotic conotations, and sometimes simply as a portrait, or as a model displaying costume designs for a pageant.

There are a couple of confusing theories about Leonardo and women.
 * One is Dan Brown's ridiculous insistance that the young John in the Last Supper is actually Mary Magdalene. This is nonsense. John is always shown as a long-haired young man dressed in red. That is how hundreds of paintings including ancient iconns, medieval paintings, Renaisance paintings and Baroque paintings have always shown him,, except in a few paintinggs that show him in his extreme old age, imprisoned on an island and writing "John's Gospel".
 * There is a website in which someone has put up their personal theory that the Mona Lisa is not a women, but is actually Leonardo's young male assistant, in disguise. There is really no good case. If you compare the painting of Salai as John the Baptist, done in Leonardo's old age, then there are indeed some similarities. The main similarity is that Leonardo has put shadow in the corners of the eyes and mouth of both figures, so you can't actually see the exact shape of the features. But even so, if you compare the smiles, you find Salai's mouth curves up much more than Mona Lisa's.

My suggested explanation is this- When Leonardo painted the John the Baptist pic, he was in France and Salai probably wasn't there at all. Leonardo had already done a drawing of Salai in a similar position. I think he used the drawing, or his memory of the drawing, and his memory of Salai's face to create this pic which is probably his last painting. And in doing this, he also carried in his mind the memory of his already famous Mona Lisa. So that the Mona Lisa influenced the Salai/John the Baptist painting, not the other way round.

Artists have a tendency, particularly when they are painting from memory or imagination, to paint faces in their own particular style, and sometimes even in the image of themselves or someone close to them. A very good example is the forgeries of van Meergeren, in which every single figure has the distinctive deep-set, heavy lidded eyes of the forger's sister.

Amandajm (talk) 04:33, 16 January 2008 (UTC)