Life of Leonardo da Vinch
The life and work of Leonardo da Vinci have proved
endlessly fascinating for later generations. What most impresses
people today, perhaps, is the immense scope of Leonardo's achievement.
In the past, however, he was admired chiefly for his art and art theory,
on which his reputation was based. Leonardo's equally impressive
contribution to science is a modern rediscovery, having been preserved
in a vast quantity of notes that became widely known only in the 20th century.
LIFE
Leonardo was born on Apr. 15, 1452, near the
town of Vinci, not far from Florence. He was the illegitimate son
of a Florentine notary, Piero da Vinci, and a young woman named Caterina.
His artistic talent must have revealed itself early, for he was soon apprenticed
(c.1469) to Andrea VERROCCHIO, a leading Renaissance master. In this
versatile Florentine workshop, where he remained until at least 1476, Leonardo
acquired a variety of skills. He entered the painters' guild in 1472,
and his earliest extant works date from this time. In 1478 he was
commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
Three years later he undertook to paint the Adoration of the Magi for the
monastery of San Donato a Scopeto. This project was interrupted when
Leonardo left Florence for Milan about 1482. Leonardo worked for
Duke Lodovico Sforza in Milan for nearly 18 years. Although active
as court artist, painting portraits, designing festivals, and projecting
a colossal equestrian monument in sculpture to the duke's father, Leonardo
also became deeply interested in nonartistic matters during this period.
He applied his growing knowledge of mechanics to his duties as a civil
and military engineer; in addition, he took up scientific fields
as diverse as anatomy, biology, mathematics, and physics. These activities,
however, did not prevent him from completing his single most important
painting, The Last Supper.
With the fall (1499) of his patron to the French,
Leonardo left Milan to seek employment elsewhere: he went first to
Mantua and Venice, but by April 1500 he was back in Florence. His
stay there was interrupted by time spent working in central Italy as a
mapmaker and military engineer for Cesare Borgia. Again in Florence in
1503, Leonardo undertook several highly significant artistic projects,
including the Battle of Anghiari mural for the council chamber of the Town
Hall, the portrait of Mona Lisa, and the lost Leda and the Swan.
At the same time his scientific interests deepened: his concern with
anatomy led him to perform dissections, and he undertook a systematic study
of the flight of birds.
Leonardo returned to Milan in June 1506, called
there to work for the new French government. Except for a brief stay
in Florence (1507-08), he remained in Milan for 7 years. The artistic
project on which he focused at this time was the equestrian monument to
Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, which, like the Sforza monument earlier, was never
completed. Meanwhile, Leonardo's scientific research began to dominate
his other activities, so much so that his artistic gifts were directed
toward scientific illustration; through drawing, he sought to convey
his understanding of the structure of things. In 1513 he accompanied
Pope Leo X's brother, Giuliano de'Medici, to Rome, where he stayed for
3 years, increasingly absorbed in theoretical research. In 1516-17,
Leonardo left Italy forever to become architectural advisor to King Francis
I of France, who greatly admired him. Leonardo died at the age of
67 on May 2, 1519, at Cloux, near Amboise, France.
ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENTS
Early Work in Florence
The famous angel contributed by Leonardo to Verrocchio's
Baptism of Christ (c.1475; Uffizi, Florence) was the young artist's
first documented painting. Other examples of Leonardo's activity
in Verrocchio's workshop are the Annunciation (c.1473; Uffizi);
the beautiful portrait Ginevra Benci (c.1474; National Gallery, Washington,
D.C.); and the Madonna with a Carnation (c.1475; Alte Pinakothek,
Munich). Although these paintings are rather traditional, they include
details, such as the curling hair of Ginevra, that could have been conceived
and painted only by Leonardo.
Other, slightly later works, such as the so-called
Benois Madonna (c.1478-80; The Hermitage, Leningrad) and the unfinished
Saint Jerome (c.1480; Vatican Gallery), already show two hallmarks
of Leonardo's mature style: contrapposto, or twisting movement;
and CHIAROSCURO, or emphatic modeling in light and shade. The unfinished
Adoration of the Magi (1481-82; Uffizi) is the most important of
all the early paintings. In it, Leonardo displays for the first time
his method of organizing figures into a pyramid shape, so that interest
is focused on the principal subject--in this case, the child held by his
mother and adored by the three kings and their retinue.
Work in Milan
In 1483, soon after he arrived in Milan, Leonardo
was asked to paint the Madonna of the Rocks. This altarpiece exists
in two nearly identical versions, one (1483-85), entirely by Leonardo,
in the Louvre, Paris, and the other (begun 1490s; finished 1506-08)
in the National Gallery, London. Both versions depict a supposed
meeting of the Christ Child and the infant Saint John. The figures,
again grouped in a pyramid, are glimpsed in a dimly lit grotto setting
of rocks and water that gives the work its name. Not long afterward,
Leonardo painted a portrait of Duke Lodovico's favorite, Cecilia Gallerani,
probably the charming Lady with the Ermine (c.1485-90; Czartoryski
Gallery, Krakow, Poland). Another portrait dating from this time
is the unidentified Musician (c.1490; Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan).
In the great The Last Supper (422 x 910 cm / 13 ft 10 in x 29 ft 71/2 in),
completed in 1495-98 for the refectory of the ducal church of Santa Maria
delle Grazie in Milan, Leonardo portrayed the apostles' reactions to Christ's
startling announcement that one of them would betray him. Unfortunately,
Leonardo experimented with a new fresco technique that was to show signs
of decay as early as 1517. After repeated attempts at restoration,
the mural survives only as an impressive ruin.
Late Work in Florence
When he returned to Florence in 1500, Leonardo
took up the theme of the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne. He had
already produced a splendid full-scale preparatory drawing (c.1498; National
Gallery, London); he now treated the subject in a painting (begun
c.1501; Louvre). We know from Leonardo's recently discovered
Madrid notebooks that he began to execute the ferocious Battle of Anghiari
for the Great Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence on June 6, 1505.
As a result of faulty technique the mural deteriorated almost at once,
and Leonardo abandoned it; knowledge of this work comes from Leonardo's
preparatory sketches and from several copies. The mysterious, evocative
portrait Mona Lisa (begun 1503; Louvre), probably the most famous
painting in the world, dates from this period, as does Saint John the Baptist
(begun c.1503-05; Louvre).
SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATIONS
Written in a peculiar right-to-left script, Leonardo's
manuscripts can be read with a mirror. The already vast corpus was
significantly increased when two previously unknown notebooks were found
in Madrid in 1965. From them we learn, among much else, how Leonardo
planned to cast the Sforza monument.
The majority of Leonardo's technical notes and
sketches make up the Codex Atlanticus in the Ambrosian Library in Milan.
At an early date they were separated from the artistic drawings, some 600
of which belong to the British Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
The manuscripts reveal that Leonardo explored
virtually every field of science. They not only contain solutions
to practical problems of the day--the grinding of lenses, for instance,
and the construction of canals and fortifications--but they also envision
such future possibilities as flying machines and automation.
Leonardo's observations and experiments into the
workings of nature include the stratification of rocks, the flow of water,
the growth of plants, and the action of light. The mechanical devices
that he sketched and described were also concerned with the transmission
of energy. Leonardo's solitary investigations took him from surface
to structure, from catching the exact appearance of things in nature to
visually analyzing how they function.
Leonardo's art and science are not separate,
then, as was once believed, but belong to the same lifelong pursuit of
knowledge. His paintings, drawings, and manuscripts show that he was the
foremost creative mind of his time.