Leonardo da Vinci Death: On April 15, 1452, in Anchiano, near Vinci in the Republic of Florence, Italy, the Italian painter, draughtsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer who finest exemplified Renaissance humanism was born. He died at Cloux, now Clos-Lucé, France, on He painted the Last Supper (1495–1488) and Mona Lisa (1503–19), two Renaissance classics. His notes demonstrate mechanical innovation and scientific research decades ahead. Leonardo’s intense curiosity, which shaped every thought and action, earned him unmatched fame during his lifetime and now, despite historical criticism.
Leonardo, an artist, depended on his eyes since sight was the only sense that could consistently, rapidly, and accurately express experience. All visible events became subjects of knowledge, and his studies concentrated on saper vedere, or “knowing how to see.” He created art in painting, sculpture, building, and engineering using his creativity. But he proceeded. His art and science were enhanced by his natural studies. His great observation, intelligence, and drawing talents helped him achieve this.
Life and work
Leonardo was born to single parents. His parents were Florence landowner and notary Ser Piero and young peasant Caterina, who married an artisan. As a “legitimate” son, Leonardo was educated in reading, writing, and maths on his father’s estate. Leonardo learnt Latin, the standard school language, much later. He started advanced geometry and arithmetic at 30. Leonardo was undoubtedly inventive early on. His beloved Florence father apprenticed him to artist Andrea del Verrocchio at 15. Leonardo studied painting, sculpting, and technical-mechanical arts at Verrocchio’s famous studio. He also worked at Antonio Pollaiuolo’s nearby workshop. Leonardo joined the Florence Painters’ Guild in 1472 and worked in his teacher’s studio for five years before starting his own career in 1481. Many technical drawings of pumps, military weapons, and mechanical gear from this time remain intact. These drawings reflect Leonardo’s early interest in technological issues.
Milan’s beginning (1482–99)
The 30-year-old artist worked for the duke in Milan in 1482 after getting his first important contracts from Florence. The monastery of San Donato a Scopeto’s panel work Adoration of the Magi and the Palazzo della Signoria’s St. Bernard Chapel altar piece were never finished. Both projects were abandoned, suggesting he left Florence for deeper reasons. Leonardo’s experience-driven brain may have preferred Milan’s rigorous academic culture to Florence’s refined Neoplatonism during the Medici era. He loved Duke Ludovico Sforza’s famous court and excellent works. Leonardo spent 17 years in Milan before Ludovico’s 1499 collapse. The royal household record called him pictor et ingeniarius ducalis, “painter and engineer of the duke.” Courts admired Leonardo’s humility. He designed court ceremonies and painted and sculpted, staying occupied. Hydraulic and mechanical engineer and construction, fortification, and military consultant. Leonardo had high standards throughout his life. His life and work resemble a “unfinished symphony.”
In 17 years in Milan, Leonardo painted six paintings. The Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, who commissioned The Virgin of the Rocks, sued Leonardo for 10 years over its 1483–1486 altar painting. Leonardo reworked the piece in 1486 for unclear reasons. He created the massive wall painting Last Supper (1495–98) at Santa Maria delle Grazie convent’s refectory during his first Milan visit. His ceiling painting (1498) for Milan Castello Sforzesco’s Sala delle Asse is notable. Francesco Sforza, the founder of the Sforza dynasty, may have called Leonardo to Milan to work on a massive bronze horse monument. This took Leonardo 12 years, interrupted. During Emperor Maximilian’s 1493 wedding to Bianca Maria Sforza, the clay horse model was displayed and preparations began to cast the 16-foot (5-meter) statue.
War threatened, therefore ready-to-pour metal was used to build guns, ending the endeavour. This failed 15th-century monument project terminated with Ludovico’s death in 1499. Conflict destroyed the clay model. Leonardo, a talented artist, had a huge Milan workshop with students. Leonardo taught Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Ambrogio de Predis, Bernardino de’ Conti, Francesco Napoletano, Andrea Solari, Marco d’Oggiono, and Salai. Most of these collaborators’ roles are unclear, raising issues about Leonardo’s apocryphal works, which he collaborated on. Scholars dispute these works’ attributions.
Second Florentine period (1500–08) of Leonardo
Leonardo and Lucas Pacioli departed Milan when the French took it in December 1499 or January 1500. When the Signoria asked him to avert a Turkish invasion of Friuli, he left Mantua in February 1500 and went to Venice in March. Leonardo suggested flooding the endangered area. He was acknowledged as a renowned Florence son after a lengthy absence. That year, he was an architectural consultant for a San Francesco al Monte church foundation and building damage commission. Leonardo visited the Santissima Annunziata monastery as a Servite guest and studied mathematics rather than painting. Fra Pietro Nuvolaria notified Isabella d’Este, her Florence envoy, of his fruitless Leonardo artwork search.
Leonardo left Florence in summer 1502 to work for Cesare Borgia as a “senior military architect and general engineer,” maybe owing to his passion for life. The infamous son of Pope Alexander VI, Borgia, led the papal army in a fierce campaign to seize Romagna and the Marches. Leonardo, the most interesting and dreaded man of his day, was recruited at 27. At twice his age, Leonardo must have appreciated the man’s personality. Leonardo studied and researched the condottiere’s region for 10 months. He created early modern cartography by drawing city plans and topographical maps. Leonardo and Niccolò Machiavelli met at Cesare Borgia’s court. Florence temporarily had Machiavelli as a political observer.
Leonardo visited Florence in spring 1503 to consider rerouting the Arno River behind Pisa, which the Florentines were besieging, to limit its sea access. After his failure, Leonardo considered a 13th-century idea to create a massive canal to connect Florence to the sea and circumvent the unnavigable Arno. Leonardo researched his ideas. He planned the canal’s design, including its crossing of the Serravalle mountain pass, using precise topographical measurements and his own panoramic riverbank views, which may be considered imaginative landscape paintings. The proposal was never completed after years of debate. However, decades later, the Florence-to-Sea freeway over Leonardo’s waterway.
Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio council chamber commissioned Leonardo to paint in 1503. The artwork was meant to depict a historical setting 23 by 56 feet (7 by 17 meters), twice as huge as the Last Supper. A three-year project, the Battle of Anghiari was never completed, like Michelangelo’s companion work. At this period, Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa (1503–19). See down for more about The Mona Lisa and other paintings. Scientists studied extensively throughout the second Florentine period. Leonardo studied human anatomy and function at Santa Maria Nuova hospital. He designed a book by studying bird flight.
Even his hydrological research, “on the nature and movement of water,” examined water’s physical qualities, including current laws, which he related to air laws. His data is part of the Codex Hammer (formerly the Leicester Codex, currently owned by Bill Gates in Seattle, Washington). This inspired Leonardo to propose a “science of painting.” Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti had established the mathematical underpinning of painting in their perspective and proportion research, validating his argument. Leonardo felt that the painter, with his sensitive abilities of observation and comprehensive capacity to pictorialise them, was best fitted to obtain genuine knowledge since he could attentively examine and replicate the universe. Leonardo’s lofty goal was to examine all visible objects, identify their form and structure, and depict them exactly.
In his early Milan years, Leonardo began notebooks. He produced brief sketches of his observations on loose sheets or paper pads in his belt, sorted them by topic, and put them into the notebook. His papers include a painting treatise, a model book of sacred and profane building designs, a mechanical theory treatise, and the first parts of a human body treatise. Leonardo wrote thousands of exact pages with drawings in his notebooks, the most of any painter. 21 of the more than 40 codices mentioned—often inaccurately—in contemporaneous sources have survived, including 32 bound notebooks. Add several large bundles of documents: Pompeo Leoni collected an omnibus volume in Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana, called Codex Atlanticus due to its size, at the end of the 16th century; the English crown bought its companion volume in the 17th century and placed it in Windsor Castle’s Royal Library. Finally, Leonardo’s varied fascicles are in the British Museum’s Arundel Manuscript.
Unusually, Leonardo penned his notes and paintings in mirror writing. Since Leonardo was left-handed, mirror writing came easily to him, although why is unclear. His script is rare, although his contemporaries reported it could be seen in a mirror and was not obscured. Leonardo employed mirror writing throughout his notebooks, even in his copy made out with meticulous calligraphy, demonstrating that, even if he addressed an imagined reader, he never felt the need to adopt conventional handwriting for simple communication. Leonardo never completed his published writings. In the margin of a late anatomical sketch, Jesus asks people to copy his work.
Leonardo’s notebooks’ word-picture relationship is extraordinary. Leonardo craved clear, expressive language. His vibrant and broad language, enriched by independent study, helped Italian scientific writing grow. In school, Leonardo favoured sketching over writing despite his eloquence. The wording in his journals describes the vision, not the drawing. Leonardo’s dimostrazione (“demonstrations”) of artistic representations existed before scientific illustration.
