Leo & I

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Lillian Feldman Schwartz

1989

Medium/Materials: fujichrome
Paper Size: 10 7⁄8" x 8 1⁄2"
Image Size: 8 1⁄8" x 6 7⁄8"

Description

Lillian Schwartz’s longstanding fascination with Leonardo da Vinci is the conceptual starting point for this work. Throughout the 1980s she investigated the Renaissance artist’s methods, and even proposed through digital collages that da Vinci may have used his own features as a model for the Mona Lisa.

In this digital collage, likely produced with the early Unix-based photo-editing program Pico, Schwartz stages an imagined encounter between herself and her historical predecessor. Their faces are composited onto figures borrowed from a devotional composition, while the watchful eyes of the Mona Lisa preside over the exchange. Between them pass geometric solids paneled with Schwartz’s 1988 collage Mona Leo, transforming that earlier analytical project into a symbolic dialogue. Rather than simply demonstrating technical manipulation, Leo & I positions artistic inheritance as an active, transhistorical conversation, asking what da Vinci—an artist, engineer, and experimenter—might have made of the new digital tools that Schwartz herself was using.