He was a vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons. He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings.
Navigate this website to learn more about Leonardo's brilliant and imaginative mind, and the art, inventions, and discoveries that he made. Leonardo sought a universal language in painting. Using perspective and his experiences with scientific observation, Leonardo tried to create faithful renditions of life.
Gifted with a curious mind and a brilliant intellect, da Vinci studied the laws of science and nature, which greatly informed his work. His drawings, paintings and other works have influenced countless artists and engineers over the centuries.
Da Vinci was born in a farmhouse outside the village of Anchiano in Tuscany, Italy about 18 miles west of Florence on April 15, Born out of wedlock to respected Florentine notary Ser Piero and a young peasant woman named Caterina, da Vinci was raised by his father and his stepmother. Young da Vinci 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 However, he continued to collaborate with del Verrocchio for an additional five years. According to Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects , written around by artist Giorgio Vasari, del Verrocchio was so humbled by the superior talent of his pupil that he never picked up a paintbrush again.
Many historians believe that da Vinci was a homosexual: Florentine court records from show that da Vinci and four other young men were charged with sodomy, a crime punishable by exile or death. After no witnesses showed up to testify against year-old da Vinci, the charges were dropped, but his whereabouts went entirely undocumented for the following two years.
Several other famous Florentine artists were also known to have been homosexual, including Michelangelo , Donatello and Sandro Botticelli. Although da Vinci is known for his artistic abilities, fewer than two dozen paintings attributed to him exist. The now-famous sketch represents da Vinci's study of proportion and symmetry, as well as his desire to relate man to the natural world.
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. 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.
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. In , 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 "Battle of Anghiari" project after two years when the mural began to deteriorate before he had a chance to finish it. In , 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. Leonardo da Vinci is renowned as much for his inventions as his works of art, studies of architecture and anatomical drawings.
The documents that survive show us his ideas for a wide range of devices. They include some of the first concepts for gliders, helicopters, parachutes, diving suits, cranes, gearboxes and many types of weapons of war. Many of these may be seen in use today, having taken the best part of years to become practical realities. He combined an imagination ahead of his time, an understanding of the emerging principles of science and engineering, and his superlative draftsmanship to devise new uses for levers, gears, pulleys, bearings and springs.
His creations were designed to be useful but also to be appealing to his patrons: the warring dukes and kings of late 15th- and early 16th-century France and Italy. Although he apparently despised war, he was employed for much of the time as a military engineer, devising new defences and concepts for terrifying weapons.
Ornithopters, human powered flying machines which mimicked bird flight, were a fascination for him — and he drew many beautiful and innovative designs. However, bird flight was not fully understood at this time and he was unaware that a human being could never generate the required power to operate such devices. His imagination was so far ahead of its time that it would take four centuries before ideas such as the tank became practical through the development of light and strong materials, such as steel and aluminium, and new sources of power in the form of engines powered by fossil fuels.
He would no doubt recognise — and be fascinated by — much of the machinery of modern life that we take for granted. Although da Vinci is best known for his artistic works, he considered himself more of a scientist than an artist. Mathematics — in particular, perspective, symmetry, proportions and geometry — had a significant influence over his drawings and paintings, and he was most certainly ahead of his time in making use of it.
Da Vinci used the mathematical principles of linear perspective — parallel lines, the horizon line, and a vanishing point — to create the illusion of depth on a flat surface.
0コメント