Leonardo da Vinci biography
Leonardo da Vinci was
a leading artist and intellectual of the Italian Renaissance who's
known for his enduring works "The Last Supper" and the "Mona Lisa."
Leonardo
da Vinci (April 15, 1452 to May 2, 1519) was a painter, sculptor,
architect, inventor, military engineer and draftsman — the epitome of a
“Renaissance man.”
With a curious mind and keen intellect, da
Vinci studied the laws of science and nature, which greatly informed his
work. His ideas and body of work have influenced countless artists and
made da Vinci a leading light of the Italian Renaissance.
Although
da Vinci is known for his artistic abilities, fewer than two-dozen
paintings attributed to him exist. One reason is that his interests were
so varied that he wasn’t a prolific painter. Leonardo da Vinci’s most
famous works include the “Vitruvian Man,” “The Last Supper” and
Art
and science intersected perfectly in da Vinci’s sketch of “Vitruvian
Man,” drawn in 1490, which depicted a male figure in two superimposed
positions with his arms and legs apart inside both a square and a
circle. The sketch represents Leonardo’s study of proportion as well as
his desire to relate man to nature.
The Last Supper'
Around 1495,
Ludovico Sforza, then the Duke of Milan, commissioned da Vinci to paint
“The Last Supper” on the back wall of the dining hall inside the
monastery of Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie.
The masterpiece,
which took approximately three years to complete, captures the drama of
the moment when Jesus informs the Twelve Apostles gathered for Passover
dinner that one of them would soon betray him. The range of facial
expressions and the body language of the figures around the table bring
the masterful composition to life.
The decision by da Vinci to
paint with tempera and oil on dried plaster instead of painting a fresco
on fresh plaster led to the quick deterioration and flaking of “The
Last Supper.” Although an improper restoration caused further damage to
the mural, it has now been stabilized using modern conservation
techniques.
‘Mona Lisa’
In 1503, da Vinci started
working on what would become his most well known painting — and arguably
the most famous painting in the world —the “Mona Lisa.” The privately
commissioned work is characterized by the enigmatic smile of the woman
in the half-portrait, which derives from da Vinci’s sfumato technique.
Adding
to the allure of the “Mona Lisa” is the mystery surrounding the
identity of the subject. Princess Isabella of Naples, an unnamed
courtesan and da Vinci’s own mother have all been put forth as potential
sitters for the masterpiece. It has even been speculated that the
subject wasn’t a female at all but da Vinci’s longtime apprentice Salai
dressed in women’s clothing.
Based on accounts from an early
biographer,
however, the "Mona Lisa" is a picture of Lisa del Giocondo,
the wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant. The painting’s original
Italian name — “La Gioconda” — supports the theory, but it’s far from
certain. Some art historians believe the merchant commissioned the
portrait to celebrate the pending birth of the couple’s next child,
which means the subject could have been pregnant at the time of the
painting.
If the Giocondo family did indeed commission the
painting, they never received it. For da Vinci, the "Mona Lisa" was
forever a work in progress, as it was his attempt at perfection, and he
never parted with the painting. Today, the "Mona Lisa" hangs in the
Louvre Museum in Paris, France, secured behind bulletproof glass and
regarded as a priceless national treasure seen by millions of visitors
each year.
‘Battle of Anghiari’
In 1503, da Vinci also
started work on the “Battle of Anghiari,” a mural commissioned for the
council hall in the Palazzo Vecchio that was to be twice as large as
“The Last Supper.” He abandoned the project after two years when the
mural began to deteriorate before he had a chance to finish it.
Sculptures
Ludovico
Sforza also tasked da Vinci with sculpting a 16-foot-tall bronze
equestrian statue of his father and founder of the family dynasty,
Francesco Sforza. With the help of apprentices and students in his
workshop, da Vinci worked on the project on and off for more than a
dozen years.
Leonardo sculpted a life-size clay model of the
statue, but the project was put on hold when war with France required
bronze to be used for casting cannons, not sculptures. After French
forces overran Milan in 1499 — and shot the clay model to pieces — da
Vinci fled the city along with the duke and the Sforza family.
Ironically,
Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, who led the French forces that conquered
Ludovico in 1499, followed in his foe’s footsteps and commissioned da
Vinci to sculpt a grand equestrian statue, one that could be mounted on
his tomb. After years of work and numerous sketches by da Vinci,
Trivulzio decided to scale back the size of the statue, which was
ultimately never finished.
Painting Techniques
Leonardo da Vinci is well known for his pioneering use of two painting techniques:
Chiaroscuro: a stark contrast between darkness and light that gave a three-dimensionality to da Vinci’s figures.
Sfumato: a technique in which subtle gradations, rather than strict borders, infuse paintings with a softer, smoky aura.
His painting “Virgin of the Rocks,” begun in 1483, is a classic example of both of these techniques.
Flying Machine
A
man ahead of his time, da Vinci appeared to prophesy the future with
his sketches of machines resembling a bicycle and a helicopter. Perhaps
his most well-known “invention” is a “flying machine,” which is based on
the physiology of a bat.
Where Was da Vinci Born?
Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in a farmhouse outside the village of Anchiano, in present-day Italy.
Family, Education and Early Life
Born
out of wedlock to respected Florentine notary Ser Piero and a young
peasant woman named Caterina, Leonardo da Vinci was raised by his father
and his stepmother. At the age of five, he moved to his father’s family
estate in nearby Vinci, the Tuscan town from which the surname
associated with Leonardo derives, and lived with his uncle and
grandparents.
Young Leonardo received little formal education
beyond basic reading, writing and mathematics instruction, but his
artistic talents were evident from an early age.
Around the age
of 14, da Vinci began a lengthy apprenticeship with the noted artist
Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. He learned a wide breadth of
technical skills including metalworking, leather arts, carpentry,
drawing, painting and sculpting. His earliest known dated work — a
pen-and-ink drawing of a landscape in the Arno valley — was sketched in
1473.
At the age of 20, da Vinci qualified for membership as a
master artist in Florence’s Guild of Saint Luke and established his own
workshop. However, he continued to collaborate with his teacher for an
additional five years.
It is thought that del Verrocchio
completed his “Baptism of Christ” around 1475 with the help of his
student, who painted part of the background and the young angel holding
the robe of Jesus. According to
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects,
written around 1550 by artist Giorgio Vasari, Verrocchio was so humbled
by the superior talent of his pupil that he never picked up a
paintbrush again. Most scholars, however, dismiss Vasari’s account as
apocryphal.
In 1478, after leaving Verrocchio’s studio, da Vinci
received his first independent commission for an altarpiece to reside in
a chapel inside Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. Three years later the
Augustinian monks of Florence’s San Donato a Scopeto tasked him to paint
“Adoration of the Magi.” The young artist, however, would leave the
city and abandon both commissions without ever completing them.
Leonardo da Vinci Inventions
In
1482, Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici commissioned da Vinci to
create a silver lyre and bring it as a peace gesture to Ludovico Sforza.
After doing so, da Vinci lobbied Ludovico for a job and sent the future
Duke of Milan a letter that barely mentioned his considerable talents
as an artist and instead touted his more marketable skills as a military
engineer.
Using his inventive mind, da Vinci sketched war
machines such as a war chariot with scythe blades mounted on the sides,
an armored tank propelled by two men cranking a shaft and even an
enormous crossbow that required a small army of men to operate.
The
letter worked, and Ludovico brought da Vinci to Milan for a tenure that
would last 17 years. During his time in Milan, Leonardo was
commissioned to work on numerous artistic projects as well, including
“The Last Supper.”
Leonardo’s ability to be employed by the Sforza
clan as an architecture and military engineering advisor as well as a
painter and sculptor spoke to da Vinci’s keen intellect and curiosity
about a wide variety of subjects.
Like many leaders of
Renaissance humanism, da Vinci did not see a divide between science and
art. He viewed the two as intertwined disciplines rather than separate
ones. He believed studying science made him a better artist.
In
1502 and 1503, da Vinci also briefly worked in Florence as a military
engineer for Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI
and commander of the papal army. He traveled outside of Florence to
survey military construction projects and sketch city plans and
topographical maps.
He designed plans, possibly with noted diplomat
Niccolò Machiavelli, to divert the Arno River away from rival Pisa in order to deny its wartime enemy access to the sea.
Da Vinci’s Study of Anatomy and Science
Leonardo
da Vinci thought sight was humankind’s most important sense and eyes
the most important organ, and he stressed the importance of saper
vedere, or “knowing how to see.” He believed in the accumulation of
direct knowledge and facts through observation.
“A good painter
has two chief objects to paint — man and the intention of his soul,” da
Vinci wrote. “The former is easy, the latter hard, for it must be
expressed by gestures and the movement of the limbs.”
To more
accurately depict those gestures and movements, da Vinci began to study
anatomy seriously and dissect human and animal bodies during the 1480s.
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.
In addition to his anatomical investigations, da
Vinci studied botany, geology, zoology, hydraulics, aeronautics and
physics. He sketched his observations on loose sheets of papers and pads
that he tucked inside his belt.
Da Vinci placed the papers in
notebooks and arranged them around four broad themes—painting,
architecture, mechanics and human anatomy. He filled dozens of notebooks
with finely drawn illustrations and scientific observations. His ideas
were mainly theoretical explanations, laid out in exacting detail, but
they were rarely experimental.
Book and Movie
Although
much has been written about da Vinci over the years, Walter Isaacson
explored new territory with an acclaimed 2017 biography,
Leonardo da Vinci, which offers up details on what drove the artist's creations and inventions.
The
buzz surrounding the book carried into 2018, with the announcement that
it had been optioned for a big-screen adaptation starring
Leonardo DiCaprio.
Was Leonardo da Vinci Gay?
Florentine
court records show that in 1476 da Vinci and four other young men were
charged with sodomy, a crime punishable by exile or even death. After da
Vinci was acquitted, his whereabouts went entirely undocumented for the
following two years.
Final Years
Leonardo returned to
Milan in 1506 to work for the very French rulers who had overtaken the
city seven years earlier and forced him to flee.
Among the
students who joined his studio was young Milanese aristocrat Francesco
Melzi, who would become da Vinci’s closest companion for the rest of his
life. He did little painting during his second stint in Milan, however,
and most of his time was instead dedicated to scientific studies.
Amid
political strife and the temporary expulsion of the French from Milan,
da Vinci left the city and moved to Rome in 1513 along with Salai, Melzi
and two studio assistants. Giuliano de’ Medici, brother of newly
installed Pope Leo X and son of his former patron, gave da Vinci a
monthly stipend along with a suite of rooms at his residence inside the
Vatican.
His new patron, however, also gave da Vinci little work.
Lacking large commissions, he devoted most of his time in Rome to
mathematical studies and scientific exploration.
After being
present at a 1515 meeting between France’s King Francis I and Pope Leo X
in Bologna, the new French monarch offered da Vinci the title “Premier
Painter and Engineer and Architect to the King.”
Along with
Melzi, da Vinci departed for France, never to return. He lived in the
Chateau de Cloux (now Clos Luce) near the king’s summer palace along the
Loire River in Amboise. As in Rome, da Vinci did little painting during
his time in France. One of his last commissioned works was a mechanical
lion that could walk and open its chest to reveal a bouquet of lilies.
How Did Leonardo da Vinci Die?
Leonardo
da Vinci died of a probable stroke on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67. He
continued work on his scientific studies until his death; his
assistant, Melzi, became the principal heir and executor of his estate.
The “Mona Lisa” was bequeathed to Salai.
For centuries after his
death, thousands of pages from his private journals with notes,
drawings, observations and scientific theories have surfaced and
provided a fuller measure of a true "Renaissance man."
Auction Sale of 'Salvator Mundi'
In
November 2017, the art world was sent buzzing with the news that the da
Vinci painting "Salvator Mundi" had been sold at a Christie's auction
to an undisclosed buyer for a whopping $450.3 million. That amount
dwarfed the previous record for an art work sold at an auction,
the $179.4 million paid for Picasso's “Women of Algiers" in 2015.
The
sales figure was stunning in part because of the damaged condition of
the oil-on-panel, which features Christ with his right hand raised in
blessing and his left holding a crystal orb, and because not all experts
believe it was rendered by da Vinci. However, Christie's had launched
what one dealer called a "brilliant marketing campaign," which promoted
the work as "the holy grail of our business" and "the last da Vinci."
Prior to the sale, it was the only known painting by the old master
still in a private collection.
In early December, the mystery
buyer was said to be Prince Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan
al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, a friend of the country's crown
prince, Mohammed bin Salman. However, the Saudi Embassy in Washington
soon clarified matters, saying Prince Bader had acted as an agent for
the ministry of culture of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates.
Around that time, the newly opened Louvre Abu Dhabi announced that the
record-breaking art work would be exhibited in its collection.