Leonardo da Vinci

I INTRODUCTION
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Florentine artist, one of the
great masters of the High Renaissance, celebrated as a
painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His
profound love of knowledge and research was the keynote of
both his artistic and scientific endeavours. His innovations in
the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for
more than a century after his death, and his scientific
studies—particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and
hydraulics—anticipated many of the developments of
modern science.
Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Four Caricatures
Leonardo da Vinci was fascinated by faces, and produced countless drawings
of them, using a range of models from haggard elderly people to angelic
children. These four caricatures, drawn in brown ink, reveal the effortless
quality of his draughtsmanship.

II EARLY LIFE IN FLORENCE

Culver Pictures

Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci was known not only as a masterful painter but as an
architect, sculptor, engineer, and scientist. His pursuit of knowledge was
relentless and his discoveries left lasting changes in the fields of art and
science. With his sophisticated skills and love for learning, Leonardo was the
quintessential Renaissance man.

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the small town of

Vinci, near Florence, in Tuscany. He was the son of a wealthy
Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid-1460s
the family settled in Florence, where Leonardo was given the
best education that Florence, a major intellectual and artistic
centre of Italy, could offer. He rapidly advanced socially and
intellectually. He was handsome, persuasive in conversation,
and a fine musician and improviser. In about 1466 he was
apprenticed as a garzone (studio boy) to Andrea del
Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his
day. In Verrocchio’s workshop Leonardo was introduced to
many activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel
pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble
and bronze. In 1472 he was admitted to the painters’ guild of
Florence, and in 1476 he was still considered Verrocchio’s
assistant. In Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1470, Uffizi,
Florence), the kneeling angel in the left of the painting is by
Leonardo.

In 1478 Leonardo became an independent master. His first

commission, to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the
Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine town hall, was never
executed. His first large painting, The Adoration of the Magi
(Uffizi), begun in 1481 and left unfinished, was ordered for
the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto, Florence. Other
works ascribed to his youth are the so-called Benois
Madonna (c. 1478, Hermitage, St Petersburg), the portrait
Ginevra de’ Benci (c. 1474, National Gallery, Washington,
D.C.), and the unfinished St Jerome (c. 1481, Pinacoteca,
Vatican).
III YEARS IN MILAN

Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The Virgin of the Rocks

The Virgin of the Rocks is one of the greatest paintings Leonardo da Vinci
produced during his 17 years in Milan. It is known in two versions. The first,
dating from 1485, hangs in the Louvre, Paris. The second, shown here, and
now in the National Gallery, London, was completed in 1506, probably with
the help of an assistant.
In about 1482 Leonardo entered the service of Ludovico
Sforza, Duke of Milan, having written the duke an
astonishing letter in which he stated that he could build
portable bridges; that he knew the techniques of
constructing bombardments and of making cannons; that he
could build ships as well as armoured vehicles, catapults,
and other war machines; and that he could execute
sculpture in marble, bronze, and clay. He served as principal
engineer in the duke’s numerous military enterprises and
was also active as an architect. In addition, he assisted the
Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli in the celebrated work
Divina Proportione (1509), a treatise on aesthetics centring
on the concept of the Golden Section.

Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The Last Supper by da Vinci

The Last Supper (c. 1495-1497), in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, is one of
Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous religious paintings. The fresco depicts the moment
immediately following Christ’s announcement to his disciples that “One of you shall
betray me”. Because Leonardo painted this scene in an oil-tempera mixture that did
not adhere well to the wall, the fresco has deteriorated.
Evidence indicates that Leonardo had apprentices and pupils
in Milan, for whom he probably wrote the various texts later
compiled as Treatise on Painting (1651; trans. 1956). The
most important of his own paintings during the early Milan
period was The Virgin of the Rocks, two versions of which
exist (1483-1485, Louvre, Paris; 1490s to 1506-1508,
National Gallery, London); he worked on the compositions for
a long time, as was his custom, seemingly unwilling to finish
what he had begun. From 1495 to 1497 Leonardo laboured
on his masterpiece, The Last Supper, a mural in the refectory
of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.
Unfortunately, his experimental use of oil on dry plaster (on
what was the thin outer wall of a space designed for serving
food) led to technical problems, and by 1500 the mural had
begun to deteriorate. Since 1726 attempts have been made,
unsuccessfully, to restore it; a concerted conservation and
restoration programme, making use of the latest technology,
was begun in 1977 (completed in 1999) and has reversed
some of the damage. Although much of the original surface
is gone, the majesty of the composition and the penetrating
characterization of the figures give a fleeting vision of its
vanished splendour.

During his long stay in Milan, Leonardo also produced other

paintings and drawings (most of which are now lost), theatre
designs, architectural drawings, and models for the dome of
Milan Cathedral. His largest commission was for a colossal
bronze equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, father of
Ludovico, for the courtyard of Castello Sforzesco. In
December 1499, however, the Sforza family was driven from
Milan by French forces. Leonardo had made the clay model
but contingency dictated that the metal intended for the
statue be used for cannon instead. The model was destroyed
by French archers, who used it as a target. Leonardo
returned to Florence in 1500.
IV RETURN TO FLORENCE

Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa (1503-1506, Louvre, Paris) was Leonardo da Vinci’s favourite painting.
Many theories have been advanced regarding the meaning of the enigmatic smile on
the woman’s face and the identity of the sitter.

In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, Duke

of Romagna and son and chief general of Pope Alexander VI.
In his capacity as the duke’s chief architect and engineer,
Leonardo supervised work on the fortresses of the papal
territories in central Italy. In 1503 he was a member of a
commission of artists who were to decide on the proper
location for Michelangelo‘s statue of David (1501-1504,
Accademia, Florence), and he also served as an engineer in
the war against Pisa. Towards the end of the year Leonardo
began to design a decoration for the great hall of the Palazzo
Vecchio. The subject was the Battle of Anghiari, a Florentine
victory in the war with Pisa. He made many drawings for it
and completed a full-size cartoon, in 1505, but he never
finished the wall painting. The cartoon itself was destroyed
in the 17th century, and the composition survives only in
copies, of which the most famous (c. 1615, Louvre) is the
one by Peter Paul Rubens.

During this second Florentine period, Leonardo painted

several portraits, but the only one that survives is the
famous Mona Lisa (1503-1506, Louvre), one of the most
celebrated portraits ever painted. It is also known as La
Gioconda, after the presumed name of the woman’s
husband. Leonardo seems to have had a special affection for
the picture, for he took it with him on all his subsequent
travels.

V LATER TRAVELS AND DEATH

In 1506 Leonardo went again to Milan, at the summons of its
French governor, Charles d’Amboise. The following year he
was named court painter to Louis XII of France, who was
then residing in Milan. For the next six years Leonardo
divided his time between Milan and Florence, where he often
visited his half-brothers and half-sisters and looked after his
inheritance. In Milan he continued his engineering projects
and worked on an equestrian figure for a monument to Gian
Giacomo Trivulzio, commander of the French forces in the
city; although the project was not completed, drawings and
studies have been preserved. From 1514 to 1516 Leonardo
lived in Rome under the patronage of Pope Leo X: he was
housed in the Palazzo Belvedere in the Vatican and seems to
have been occupied principally with scientific
experimentation. In 1516 he travelled to France to enter the
service of Francis I. He spent his last years at the Château de
Cloux, near Amboise, where he died on May 2, 1519.

VI PAINTINGS
Although Leonardo produced a relatively small number of
paintings, many of which remained unfinished, he was
nevertheless an extraordinarily innovative and influential
artist. During his early years, his style closely paralleled that
of Verrocchio, but he gradually moved away from his
teacher’s stiff, tight, and somewhat rigid treatment of figures
to develop a more evocative and atmospheric handling of
composition. The early Adoration of the Magi introduced a
new approach to composition, in which the main figures are
grouped in the foreground, while the background consists of
distant views of imaginary ruins and battle scenes.

Leonardo’s stylistic innovations are even more apparent in

The Last Supper, in which he re-created a traditional theme
in an entirely new way. Instead of showing the 12 apostles
as individual figures, he grouped them in dynamic
compositional units of three, framing the figure of Christ,
who is isolated in the centre of the picture. Seated before a
pale, distant landscape seen through a rectangular opening
in the wall, Christ—who is about to announce that one of
those present will betray him—represents a calm nucleus
while the others respond with animated gestures. In the
monumentality of the scene and the weightiness of the
figures, Leonardo reintroduced a style pioneered more than
a generation earlier by Masaccio.

The Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s most famous work, is as well

known for its mastery of technical innovations as for the
mysteriousness of its legendary smiling subject. This work is
a consummate example of two techniques—sfumato and
chiaroscuro—of which Leonardo was one of the first great
masters. Sfumato (smoked) is a delicately atmospheric haze
or smoky effect produced by subtle, almost infinitesimal
transitions between areas of colour; it is especially evident in
the delicate gauzy robes worn by the sitter and in her
enigmatic smile. Chiaroscuro (light and dark) is the
technique of modelling and defining forms by means of
contrasts between light and shadow; the sensitive hands of
the sitter are portrayed with a luminous modulation of light
and shade, while colour contrast is used only sparingly.

Leonardo was among the first to introduce atmospheric

perspective (the effect that the atmosphere appears to have
on the colour and definition of distant scenery); landscape
backgrounds painted in this way are an especially notable
characteristic of his paintings. The chief masters of the High
Renaissance in Florence, including Raphael, Andrea del
Sarto, and Fra Bartolommeo, all learnt from Leonardo; he
completely transformed the school of Milan; and at Parma,
the artistic development of Correggio was given direction by
Leonardo’s work.

Leonardo’s many extant drawings, which reveal his brilliant

draughtsmanship and his mastery of the anatomy of
humans, animals, and plant life, may be found in the
principal European collections; the largest group is at
Windsor Castle, in England. Probably his most famous
drawing is the magnificent self-portrait in old age (c. 1510-
1513, Biblioteca Reale, Turin).

SCULPTURAL AND ARCHITECTURAL

VII DRAWINGS

Scala/Art Resource, NY

Leonardo da Vinci's “Vitruvian Man”

This drawing from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, known as “Vitruvian
Man” after the architect Vitruvius, demonstrates the proportions of the
Golden Section: the sections of the body from head to waist and from waist to
feet are to each other what the section from waist to feet is to the length of
the whole body. The fact that the “divine proportion” was to be found in the
human body was seen as highly significant in the Renaissance, the age of
humanism.
Because none of Leonardo’s sculptural projects was brought
to completion, his approach to three-dimensional art can
only be judged from his drawings. The same strictures apply
to his architecture; none of his building projects was actually
carried out as he devised them. In his architectural drawings,
however, he demonstrates mastery in the use of massive
forms, a clarity of expression, and especially a deep
understanding of ancient Roman sources.

SCIENTIFIC AND THEORETICAL

VIII PROJECTS

NASA/Photo Researchers, Inc.

Ornithopter Design
The ornithopter was one of many intriguing scientific ideas explored by
Leonardo da Vinci. Although his inventions were never carried through to
completion, the drawings for them are skilful. The ornithopter was the result
of the artist’s interest in the flight of birds; Leonardo could be called the first
scientific illustrator.
As a scientist Leonardo towered above all his
contemporaries. His scientific theories, like his artistic
innovations, were based on careful observation and precise
documentation. He understood, better than anyone of his
century or the next, the importance of precise scientific
observation. Unfortunately, just as he frequently failed to
bring to conclusion artistic projects, he never completed his
planned treatises on a variety of scientific subjects. His
theories are contained in numerous notebooks, most of
which were written in mirror script. Because they were not
easily decipherable, Leonardo’s findings were not
disseminated in his own lifetime; had they been published,
they would have revolutionized the science of the 16th
century. Leonardo actually anticipated many discoveries of
modern times. In anatomy he studied the circulation of the
blood and the action of the eye. He made discoveries in
meteorology and geology, understood the effect of the Moon
on the tides, foreshadowed modern conceptions of continent
formation, and surmised the origin of fossilized shells. He
was among the originators of the science of hydraulics and
probably devised the hydrometer; his scheme for the
canalization of rivers still has practical value. He invented a
large number of ingenious machines, many potentially
useful, among them an underwater diving suit. His flying
devices, although not practicable, embodied sound
principles of aerodynamics.