Question

I need a explanation Document on the Mosa lisa and the Antikythera Mechanism

Answer 1

Mona Lisa is the famous oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting is done on the wooden panel. Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer. Indeed, the Mona Lisa is a very realistic portrait. The portrait dangle behind bulletproof glass within the Louvre Museum and draws attention of thousands of people each day. It is the most well known painting in the world, and yet, when viewers manage to see the artwork, they are likely to get puzzled by the gloomy portrait of a woman. This portrait was started in Florence around 1503. It is thought to be of Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine cloth merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. The portrait might be painted to speck one of the two events - either when Francesco del Giocondo and his wife bought their own house in 1503, or when their second son, Andrea, was born in December 1502. The portrait is in half-length, from head to waist, sitting on a chair. She is resting her left arm on the chair, which is placed in front of a loggia. Behind her is a hazy and seemingly isolated landscape imagined by the artist and painted using sfumato. Its a technique which is formed “without lines or borders, in a smoky manner. The Mona Lisa's famous smile represents the sitter in the same way that the juniper branches represent Ginevra Benci. It is a visual portrayal of the idea of cheerfulness suggested by the word "gioconda" in Italian. Leonardo made this conviction of happiness the central motif of the portrait: it is this notion which makes the work such an ideal. The painting was among the first portraits to illustrate the sitter before a fictitious landscape and Leonardo was one of the first painters to use aerial perspective.

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical analog computer, designed to calculate astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes decades in advance. It is also called as clockwork computer. The mechanism can make accurate calculations based on astronomical and mathematical principles developed by the ancient Greeks. The cruel location at sea would have given a danger to the instrument’s elegant gears, and characteristics such as eclipse predictions are irrelevant for navigation. The mechanism’s small size, suggest that it was designed with portability in mind. The device seemed to have a range of interconnecting gears made of bronze and a hand crank to give a turning movement to the geared mechanism, plus a display that present information about the moon, sun and planets against a background of stars. According to some researchers, a more possible story is that the mechanism was used to teach astronomy to those with little knowledge of the subject. Antikythera mechanism is the only known original, its detailed engineering and the fact that similar gadgets were described in synchronic writing lend strong support to the notion that it was not unique. It is thought that the famous inventor Archimedes of Syracuse constructed comparable devices. Some believe that the instrument came from the school of the astronomer Hipparchus. Whoever the builder was, they were likely Greek, as witnessed by the written instructions that are attached to the instrument’s face.