``The first object of the painter is to make a flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane.''

-- Leonardo da Vinci

Since Renaissance means ``new birth'', it is obvious that it cannot stand still. Once something is born, it begins to grow. But never has there been growth as lovely as that of painting as it matured into the High Renaissance. The High Renaissance dealt with the realism of art. The Italian Renaissance was one of the most colorful, vital, and exciting times in history. Renaissance essentially comes from the French word "Renaistre," meaning "to be born again." The Renaissance was a revival or rebirth of cultural awareness and learning among art, law, language, literature, philosophy, science, and mathematics. This period took place between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance in Italy flourished in the 15th century and spread throughout most of Europe in the 16th century.

What was the Renaissance and why did it happen? Italian life in the 14th and 15th centuries was lived among the vast ruins of the ancient Roman Empire. The cruelty and barbarism of Rome had long been forgotten, and the splendor of that lost civilization's ruins suggested a glorious, golden past. By contrast, the period following the fall of Rome in the fifth century seemed to some Italian intellectuals and artists to be a period of decline and decay.

An Italian poet by the name of Francesco Petrarch, who lived from 1304 to 1374, was the first to use the term "dark ages" to describe that period. He convinced his influential friends that the way to bring the dark ages to an end was to revive the ideals preserved in the poetry, philosophy, and art of the ancient world.

Petrarch and his followers called themselves humanists because they defended and glorified the value of man's life on earth. The Church, at the time, taught that life was important mainly because the way it was lived had an effect on the soul's fate after death. The humanists believed that mankind had unlimited potential which each individual should strive to achieve. The Renaissance came into being through the humanists and their ideas. My focus is one the famous Italian painter Leonardo Da Vinci.

Leonardo Da Vinci (born 1452, Vinci, Republic of Florence [now in Italy]: died May 2, 1519, Cloux, Fr.), Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineering genious of the High Renaissance period. Leonardo had many creative masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, but my interest was redirected to the not as popular painting Ginevra de Benci.

It has that haunting, almost unearthly beauty peculiar to Leonardo. The subject of Ginevra de' Benci has nothing of the Mona Lisa's inward amusement, and also nothing of Cecilia's (another of Da Vinci s woman pieces) gentle submissiveness. The young woman looks past us with a wonderful luminous sulkiness. Her mouth is set in an unforgiving line of sensitive disgruntlement, her proud and perfect head is erect above the unyielding column of her neck, and her eyes seem to narrow as if she is looking at the painter and his art. Her ringlets, infinitely subtle, cascade down from the breadth of her gleaming forehead (the forehead, incidentally, of one of the most gifted intellectuals of her time). These delicate ripples are repeated in the spikes of the juniper bush.

The desolate waters, the mists, the dark trees, the reflected gleams of still waves, all these surround and illuminate the sitter. She is totally fleshly and totally impermeable to the artist. He observes, rapt by her perfection of form, and shows us the thin veil of her upper body and the delicate flushing of her throat. What she is truly like she conceals; what Leonardo reveals to us is precisely this concealment, a self-absorption that spares no outward glance. The piece has a sense of depth that is very interesting.