HISTORY78 - Introduction to Leonardo da Vinci

I’ve had Leonardo da Vinci on my list of potential blog topics for a long time.  But I couldn’t figure out how to approach writing about this fascinating person.  So, with this blog, I decided just to “jump in,” and see what develops.

 

This is an overall introduction to Leonardo the person, his life, and his accomplishments.  I may come back later to do more on his multidiscipline accomplishments.  In this blog, first I’ll provide some historical perspective, then I’ll cover Da Vinci’s birth and childhood, next I’ll summarize his accomplishments in historically-ordered periods of his life, and end with a discussion of his legacy.

My principal sources include: “Renaissance,” history.com; “Leonardo da Vinci” and “List of Works by Leonardo da Vinci,” Wikipedia.com; “Leonardo da Vinci - Paintings, Drawings, Quotes, Biography,” leonardodavinci.net; “Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519),” metmuseum.org; “Leonardo da Vinci - Italian artist, engineer, and scientist,” britannica.com; “Leonardo da Vinci Biography in Details,” leonardoda-vinci.org; plus, many other online sources.

Historical Perspective

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) was a supremely gifted Italian who was active during the Renaissance as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect.  Da Vinci lived in a golden age of creativity among such contemporaries as Michelangelo (1475 - 1564) and Raphael (1483 - 1520).  While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, Leonardo da Vinci also became known for his science and engineering ideas.  Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomized the Renaissance.

The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political, and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages.  Generally described as taking place from the 14^th century to the 17^th century, the Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, literature, and art.  Some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists, and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce.  The Renaissance is credited with bridging the gap between the Middle Ages and modern-day civilization.

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the greatest painters in the history of art.  Despite having many lost works and fewer than 25 attributed major works - including numerous unfinished works - he created some of the most influential paintings in Western art.  His magnum opus, the Mona Lisa, is his best-known work and often regarded as the world's most famous painting.  The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time, and his Vitruvian Man drawing is regarded as a cultural icon of Western civilization. 

Three of Leonardo da Vinci’s most influential artworks:  painting of The Last Supper (top), painting of Mona Lisa (lower left), and drawing the Vitruvian Man (lower right).

 

Also revered for his technological ingenuity, Da Vinci conceptualized flying machines (including airplanes, helicopters, and parachutes); machines of war (including battle tanks, machine guns, and cannons); concentrated solar power; a ratio machine that could be used in an adding machine; and the double hull.  Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance.

 

Collage of some of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and notes of his conceptual inventions.

Some of his smaller inventions, however, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire.  

Born out of wedlock in 1452 to a successful notary and a lower-class woman in the small town of Vinci, he was educated in Florence by the Italian painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio.  He began his career in Florence, but then spent much time in Milan in the service of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan.  Later, he worked in Florence and Milan again, as well as briefly in Rome, all while attracting a large following of imitators and students.  Upon the invitation of French King Francis I, he spent his last three years in France, where he died in 1519 at the age of 67.

Principal locations of Leonardo da Vinci’s life events and artistic efforts in Italy.

 

In addition to his painting and inventions, Leonardo Da Vinci made substantial contributions to many science and engineering disciplines, including anatomy, botany, cartography, chemistry, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, mathematics, mechanical engineering, optics, physics, and physiology.

Da Vinci’s curiosity and insatiable hunger for knowledge never left him.  He was constantly observing, experimenting, and inventing, and drawing was, for him, a tool for recording his investigation of nature.  Although completed works by Leonardo are few, he left a large body of drawings (almost 2,500) with notes that record his ideas, most still gathered into notebooks.

One special feature that makes Leonardo’s notes and sketches unusual is his use of cursive mirror image writing, without punctuation.  It is uncertain why he chose to do so.  

Leonardo da Vinci’s genius as an artist, inventor, and man of science continues to inspire artists and scientists alike, centuries after his death.

Birth and Childhood:  1452 - 1466

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence.  He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero, a prominent Florentine notary and landlord, and Caterina di Meo Lippi, a young peasant girl. 

Little is known about Leonardo's childhood.  His early years were spent living on his father’s family estate in Vinci; raised by his father and several stepmothers.  Leonardo only received a basic elementary education in writing, reading, and mathematics, possibly because his artistic talents were recognized early, so his family decided to focus on art.

Apprenticeship with Verrocchio in Florence:  1466 - 1476

In the mid-1460s, Leonardo's family moved to Florence.  Around the age of 14, Leonardo became a studio boy in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who was the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his time.  Verrocchio was the officially recognized sculptor for the Medici family, the rulers of Italy during this era. 

Leonardo became an apprentice by the age of 17.  In 1472, at the age of 20, Leonard had progressed sufficiently to become a member of the Florence Painters' Guild, although he continued his studies with Verrocchio as an assistant until 1476.

Under Verrocchio's tutelage, da Vinci probably progressed from doing various menial tasks around the studio to mixing paints and preparing surfaces.  He would have then have graduated to the study and copying of his master's works.  Finally, he would have assisted Verrocchio, along with other apprentices, in producing the master's artworks.  (Much of his other creative output during his time with Verrocchio was credited to the master of the studio although the paintings were collaborative efforts.)

In 1473, when he was more than halfway through his studies with Verrocchio, Leonardo completed Landscape Drawing for Santa Maria della Neve, a pen and ink depiction of the Arno River Valley.  It is the earliest work that is clearly attributable to Leonardo da Vinci.

This landscape drawing is the earliest work that is clearly attributable to Leonardo da Vinci (1473).

 

The influences of Verrocchio are evident in the remarkable vitality and anatomical correctness of the later paintings and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo was also influenced by other famous painters apprenticed in the workshop, or associated with it, like Sandro Botticelli, who would later contribute to the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, and paint the immortal The Birth of Venus.  Leonardo was also profoundly influenced by the works of great artists ornamenting the city of Florence.

Leonardo da Vinci not only developed his skill in drawing, painting, and sculpting during his apprenticeship, but through others working in and around the studio, he picked up knowledge in such diverse fields as mechanics, carpentry, metallurgy, architectural drafting and chemistry.

First Florentine Period (1477 - 1482)

After leaving the Verrocchio studio to set up his own studio in Florence, Leonardo da Vinci began laying the groundwork for his artistic legacy.  Like his contemporaries, he focused on religious subjects, but he also took portrait commissions as they came up.  Over the next five years or so, he produced several notable paintings, including Madonna of the Carnation, Ginevra de Benci, Benois Madonna, Adoration of the Magi, and St. Jerome in the Wilderness. 

In 1478, Leonardo received a commission to paint the Adoration of the Magi from Florence church elders who planned to use it as an altarpiece in the Chapel of Saint Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio.  This artwork is historically significant by virtue of the innovations da Vinci made that were unique among the art conventions of the 1480s.  He centered the Virgin and Christ child in the scene whereas previous artists had placed them to one side.  Da Vinci improved on standard practices of perspective by making changes in clarity and color as objects became increasingly distant.

The Adoration of the Magi - one of da Vinci’s unfinished paintings.

 

Unfortunately, he did not complete the commission, abandoning his work, when the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, hired da Vinci as the resident artist at his court.   (Leonardo had written Sforza a letter which described the diverse things that he could achieve in the fields of engineering and weapon design, and mentioned that he could paint.) 

There are a great many superb surviving pen and pencil drawings from this period, including many technical sketches - for example, pumps, military weapons, mechanical apparatus - that offer evidence of Leonardo’s interest in, and knowledge of, technical matters even at the outset of his career.

First Milanese Period (1482 - 1499)

Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499.  He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Virgin of the Rocks is a six-foot-tall altarpiece, also called the "Madonna of the Rocks." In this painting, which dates to 1483, Leonardo experimented with blending the edges of objects in indistinct light to create a sort of smoky effect known as sfumato, a technique da Vinci would continue to develop in his future works.

Virgin of the Rocks dates to 1483.

 

It was perhaps because of his desire to fine-tune this technique that his other surviving painting from his years in Milan, The Last Supper, a 15 x 29-foot wall painting in the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, completed in 1498, deteriorated so quickly.  Da Vinci used oil-based paint on plaster for this scene of Jesus and his apostles at the table because his customary water-based fresco paints were difficult to blend for the sfumato effect he sought.  Within only a few decades, much of the painting had flaked away from the wall.  The canvas of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper that now hangs in the Louvre is, in large part, a reproduction of the failed fresco. 

Leonardo’s gracious but reserved personality and elegant bearing were well-received in Milan’s court circles.  Highly esteemed, he was constantly kept busy as a painter and sculptor and as a designer of court festivals.  He was also frequently consulted as a technical adviser in the fields of architecture, fortifications, and military matters, and he served as a hydraulic and mechanical engineer.  As a master artist, Leonardo maintained an extensive workshop in Milan, employing apprentices and students.

On his own, Leonardo completed his drawing of the Vitruvian Man in 1490.  Inspired by the writings of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, the drawing depicts a nude man in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and inscribed in both a circle and square.  The drawing represents Leonardo's conception of ideal body proportions.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (1490).

 

Second Florentine Period (1500 - 1508)

When Milan and Ludovico Sforza were overthrown by France in 1500, Leonardo fled Milan for Venice, where the governing council sought his advice on how to ward off a threatened Turkish incursion in northeast Italy.   Leonardo recommended that they prepare to flood the menaced region.

On his return to Florence in 1500, he was a guest of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata, and was provided with a workshop.  His reputation preceded him; after a long absence, he was received with acclaim and honored as a renowned native son.

Starting in 1501, Leonardo made preliminary progress on his painting, Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which he would set aside unfinished, not to be completed for another 18 years.

Leonardo started Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in 1501, but didn’t complete it until 1519.

 

In 1502, Leonardo briefly entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, in Cesena, east of Florence, near the Adriatic Sea, acting as a military architect and engineer and traveling for 10 months throughout Italy with his patron.  Leonardo surveyed the territory and in the course of his activity, he sketched some of the city plans and topographical maps, creating early examples of aspects of modern cartography.

Leonardo left Borgia's service and returned to Florence by early 1503.  He began working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the model for the Mona Lisa, which he would continue working on until his twilight years, and never finish.

In approximately the same period, Leonardo created his second version of the painting, Virgin of the Rocks.  Chief differences between the two versions include color choices, lighting and details of composition.

The second Florentine period was also a time of intensive scientific study.  Leonardo did dissections in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova and broadened his anatomical work into a comprehensive study of the structure and function of the human organism.  He made systematic observations of the flight of birds, about which he planned a treatise.  Even his hydrological studies, “on the nature and movement of water,” broadened into research on the physical properties of water, especially the laws of currents, which he compared with those pertaining to air.  

Leonardo da Vinci returned to Milan in 1506 to accept an official commission for an equestrian statue.   However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507, he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate.  In 1508, Leonard returned to Milan.

Second Milanese Period (1508 - 1513)

Honored and admired by his generous patrons in Milan, Charles d’Amboise and French King Louis XII, Leonardo enjoyed his duties, which were limited largely to advice in architectural matters.

During this second period in Milan, Leonardo created very little as a painter.

But over the course of this seven-year residency in the city, Leonardo would produce a body of drawings on topics that ranged from human anatomy to botany, plus sketches of weaponry inventions and studies of birds in flight.  The latter would lead to his exploratory drawings of a human flight machine.  All of his drawings during this time reflected da Vinci's interest in how things are put together and how they work.

Leonardo’s scientific activity flourished during this period.  His studies in anatomy achieved a new dimension in his collaboration with Marcantonio della Torre, a famous anatomist from Pavia (20 miles south of Milan).   Leonardo outlined a plan for an overall work that would include not only exact, detailed reproductions of the human body and its organs, but would also include comparative anatomy and the whole field of physiology.  Beyond that, his manuscripts are replete with mathematical, optical, mechanical, geological, and botanical studies. 

Rome and France (1513 - 1519)

In 1513, political events - the temporary expulsion of the French from Milan - caused the now 60-year-old Leonardo to move again.  At the end of the year, he went to Rome, hoping to find employment there through his patron  Giuliano de Medici, brother of the new pope, Leo X.  Giuliano gave Leonardo a suite of rooms in his residence, the Belvedere, in the Vatican.  He also gave Leonardo a considerable monthly stipend, but no large commissions followed.  

For three years Leonardo remained in Rome at a time of great artistic activity: Donato Bramante was building St. Peter's, Raphael was painting the last rooms of the pope’s new apartments, and Michelangelo was struggling to complete the tomb of Pope Julius II.  Drafts of embittered letters betray the disappointment of the aging master, who kept a low profile while he worked in his studio on mathematical studies and technical experiments, or surveyed ancient monuments as he strolled through the city.

At age 65, Leonardo accepted the invitation of the young King Francis I to enter his service in France.   At the end of 1516, he left Italy forever.  Leonardo spent the last three years of his life in a small residence in Cloux, near the king’s summer palace in central France.  He proudly bore the title “First painter, architect, and engineer to the King.”

Leonardo still made sketches for court festivals, but the King treated him in every respect as an honored guest and allowed him freedom of action. 

Leonardo did little painting while in France, spending most of his time arranging and editing his scientific studies.  But many historians believe Leonardo completed his final painting, St. John the Baptist, an oil painting on walnut wood, at his rural home in Cloux, France.  This masterwork exhibits his perfection of the sfumato technique.

Leonardo da Vinci’s last painting - John the Baptist (1516).

 

Leonardo became ill, in what may have been the first of multiple strokes.  He continued to work at some capacity until eventually becoming bedridden for several months.  His ill health may indicate why he left works such as the Mona Lisa unfinished.

Leonardo da Vinci died at Cloux on May 2, 1519 at the age of 67, and was buried in the palace church of Saint-Florentin.  The church was devastated during the French Revolution and completely torn down at the beginning of the 19^th century; his grave can no longer be located.

Legacy

Within the artworks created by his own circle of peers, the influence of Leonardo da Vinci's painting is readily evident.   Raphael, and even sometimes rival Michelangelo, adopted some of da Vinci's signature techniques (such as the use of light, perspective, sfumato, his unique placement of key figures, his innovative techniques for laying on the paint, and his scientific investigations of the human body) to produce similarly active, anatomically realistic figures.

Leonardo’s innovative breaks from the artistic standards of his day would guide generations of artists that followed.  In The Last Supper, the way in which he isolated Christ at the epicenter of the scene and made each apostle a separate entity, yet at the same time united them all in the moment, is a stroke of genius that subsequent artists throughout history would strive to replicate.

Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1498).

 

To the present day, art enthusiasts worldwide consider the iconic Mona Lisa to be among the greatest paintings of all time.   An aura of mystery surrounds this painting, which is veiled in a soft light, creating an atmosphere of enchantment. There are no hard lines or contours here, only seamless transitions between light and dark. Perhaps the most striking feature of the painting is the sitter’s ambiguous half smile. She looks directly at the viewer, but her arms, torso, and head each twist subtly in a different direction, conveying an arrested sense of movement. 

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (unfinished).

Her image continues to appear on items ranging from T-shirts to refrigerator magnets, and rather than trivializing the import of the masterpiece, this popularity serves to immortalize Leonardo da Vinci's paintings and drawings.  They still remain at the forefront of people's hearts and minds centuries after his death.

Although he had no formal academic training, many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man,” an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination."  He is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived.  According to art historian Helen Gardner, “the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote.” 

Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks contain diagrams, drawings, personal notes and observations, providing a unique insight into how he saw the world. 

But Leonardo found it difficult to bring his work to a conclusion, so he never published the scientific work in his notebooks.  These notebooks - originally loose papers of different types and sizes - were largely entrusted to Leonardo's pupil and heir Francesco Melzi after the master's death. They were supposed to be published, but it was a task of overwhelming difficulty because of its scope and Leonardo's idiosyncratic writing.  For years, the notebook largely languished in Melzi family possessions.

It wasn’t until the late 1500s, after Meizi’s death, that the notebooks were rather haphazardly dispersed and began to be published in pieces.  The tragedy is that much of Da Vinci’s scientific work was only re-discovered many years after his death at a time when science had already embraced many of his ideas.  (For decades after his death, Leonardo was known only as a painter.)  There is little doubt that had his work been publicized in the Renaissance era it would have advanced the knowledge of the time.  His left-handed mirror-writing also caused problems. It created a code that needed breaking before his unpunctuated manuscripts could be understood.  Also, many of his scientific papers have been lost or damaged and are dispersed throughout the world.

Some works eventually found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and the British Library in London.  Works have also been at Holkham Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in private hands.

Today, there are eleven surviving bound manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci’s notes and drawings, amounting to thousands of pages. 

The notebooks were influential both for their theories on painting and Leonardo’s diagrams on perspective, but also on the pursuit of knowledge in general.  Simply the way that Leonardo illustrated certain subjects (from an embryo to a cathedral), with his use of cross-section, perspective, scaled precision, and repeating the subject, but from different viewpoints, would all influence draughtsmanship in architecture and the creation of diagrams in science ever after.  Above all, Leonardo showed that practice and theory could not and should not be separated.  The great master demonstrated in his own person that a full knowledge of any subject required a combination of the skills of the artisan, the flair and imagination of the artist, and the meticulous research and reasoning of a scholar. Consequently, the approaches to a great many subjects, but especially art, architecture, engineering, and science, were fundamentally changed forever.

Leonardo commands continued admiration from painters, critics, and historians. The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyze his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions, search for works which have been recorded but never found, and marvel at his inventions and notebooks.  

On the 500^th anniversary of Leonardo's death, the Louvre in Paris arranged for the largest ever single exhibit of his work, called Leonardo, between November 2019 and February 2020.  The exhibit included over 100 paintings, drawings and notebooks. 

This portrait of Leonardo da Vinci is thought to have been painted in 1512, using red chalk, when Leonardo was 60 and living in France. It is widely, though not universally, accepted as a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci.