Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519)



Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer,botanist, and writer. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci states that while there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro, textbooks, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number because of his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, and the double hull, and he outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on later science.

Life & Character - Born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Italy, Leonardo da Vinci was the love child of a landowner and a peasant girl. Raised by his father, he began apprenticing at the age of 14 under the artist Verrocchio. Within six years, he was a master artist and began taking commissions from wealthy clients. His best-known works are two of the most famous paintings of all time, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. His scientific inquiries fill 13,000 pages, ranging from anatomy to war machines.

Humble Beginnings
Born out of wedlock, the love child of a respected notary and a young peasant woman, Leonardo da Vinci (b. April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Italy) was raised by his father, Ser Piero, and his stepmothers. At the age of 14, Leonardo began apprenticing with the artist Verrocchio. For six years, he learned a wide breadth of technical skills, including metalworking, leather arts, carpentry, drawing and sculpting. By the age of 20, he qualified as a master artist in the Guild of St. Luke and established his own workshop.
Florentine court records show that he was charged with and acquitted of sodomy at the age of 22, and for two years, his whereabouts went entirely undocumented.

Meteoric Rise
In 1482, Lorenzo de’ Medici, a man from a prominent Italian family, commissioned Leonardo to create a silver lyre and bring it to Ludovico il Moro, the Duke of Milan, as a gesture of peace. Leonardo did so and then wrote Ludovico a letter describing how his engineering and artistic talents would be of great service to Ludovico’s court. His letter successfully endeared him to Ludovico, and from 1482 until 1499, Leonardo was commissioned to work on a great many projects. It was during this time that he painted The Last Supper. Leonardo’s most well-known painting, arguably the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, was a privately commissioned work and was completed sometime between 1505 and 1507.

Renaissance Man
Leonardo has been called a genius and the archetypal Renaissance man; his talents extended far beyond his artistic works. Like many leaders of Renaissance humanism, he did not see a divide between science and art. His observations and inventions were recorded in 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, including designs for flying machines (some 400 years before the Wright brothers’ first success), plant studies, war machinery, anatomy and architecture. His ideas were mainly theoretical explanations, laid out in exacting detail, but they were rarely experimental. His drawings of a fetus in utero, the heart and vascular system, sex organs, and other bone and muscular structures, are some of the first on human record. One of his last commissioned works was a mechanical lion that could walk and open its chest to reveal a bouquet of lilies. On May 2, 1519, Leonardo’s first assistant and perhaps his lover, Francesco Melzi, became the principal heir and executor of his estate.