Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the greatest artists who has ever lived. He is also among the greatest scientists. He experimented with unusual ways to mix paint and use colours. He created new painting techniques and original ways to compose pictures. He studied everything he saw—from living things to machines, using his incredible drawing skills to record them in detail. Then he used his observations to think up plans for inventions that were not built until hundreds of years later, such as a telescope, a tank and a helicopter!

LEONARDO’S CHILDHOOD

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the small town of Vinci, near Florence, in Italy. (His name means in Italian, “Leonardo of Vinci”.) His father was a wealthy Florentine official who did not marry his mother, a simple peasant woman.
Leonardo was brought up by his mother’s family in the beautiful Tuscan countryside. As a small boy, he spent hours exploring the woods, fields and streams. He loved to watch insects, animals and birds, and to examine different plants and flowers, then make sketches of them. His restless curiosity, interest in nature and keen eye for observation shaped the whole course of his life.

LEONARDO BECOMES A CRAFTSMAN

At the age of about 12, Leonardo went to live with his father in Florence. The great city was then a bustling centre for training master artists and for brilliant students of literature and science. Leonardo was sent to school to learn reading, writing and maths, and he became a fine musician. However, he showed such a talent for drawing that he was taken on as an apprentice by one of the leading artists in the city, Andrea del Verrocchio.

In Verrocchio’s workshop, Leonardo began to learn how to mix different types of paint, make brushes and prepare canvases for painting. He studied the art of fresco (painting using watercolours on wet plaster) and learnt how to sculpt. Artists in those days knew many other skills. Wealthy people paid Verrocchio to create bronze church bells, musical instruments and furniture, to make compasses for ships and to cast objects in gold and silver.

Leonardo studied all the crafts in the workshop, and became fascinated by the variety of tools and machines used there. He examined how each of the pieces of technical equipment worked and made careful drawings of them. Leonardo carried a sketchpad with him at all times, so he could make accurate drawings of anything around Florence that interested him. He began to think about how everyday machines worked, such as the waterwheels that turned millstones to grind corn. And he studied the specialist machines being used on an enormous construction site where the city cathedral was being built.

AN ARTIST IN FLORENCE

By 1472, Leonardo had finished his apprenticeship with Verrocchio. However, he stayed working in the great craftsman’s workshop as his assistant. Verrocchio thought the 21-year-old was so skilled that he allowed Leonardo to help with a masterpiece he was working on called The Baptism of Christ. Leonardo painted an angel kneeling in the left of the picture, and some of the background. He used delicate colours to show feelings on the angel’s face, and tried a new idea for painting haziness in the landscape to try to show distance. In those days, artists could only paint flat pictures; they did not know how to show perspective.
By 1478, Leonardo had set up a workshop of his own. Two of his first paintings were gentle, touching portraits of Mary with baby Jesus, called Madonnas. Between 1480 and 1481 he also created a lovely, small painting called the Annunciation, showing the Bible story of how Mary was once visited by an angel. Leonardo brilliantly captured the meeting of the human and the spiritual worlds by setting the figures in a deep, misty, magical landscape, with exquisitely detailed, lifelike wildflowers and plants around the angel’s feet.

Many wealthy people in Florence began to ask Leonardo to create works of art for them—in particular the ruler of the city himself, the great Lorenzo de’ Medici. Strangely, Leonardo never carried out work on one big order, which was for a painting in the chapel of a palace, the Palazzo Vecchio. He also left several other works unfinished. One of these was a portrait of St Jerome. Another was an order from a monastery for his first large-scale painting, The Adoration of the Magi, showing the visit of the Three Wise Men to baby Jesus. Perhaps Leonardo did not finish the paintings because he was engrossed with other work he was doing in private. Leonardo was not only still studying and sketching machines, such as pumps and army equipment. He was also planning new machines of his own.

WORK AT THE COURT OF MILAN

In 1482, Lorenzo de’ Medici sent Leonardo on an important mission. He asked him to take a silver musical instrument called a lute as a peace offering to the warlike ruler of Milan, Duke Lodovico Sforza. Leonardo wrote a daring personal letter to deliver to the duke at the same time. In it, he described the amazing ideas he had for incredible new machines, which would be perfect for the Duke’s army. These included armoured vehicles, moveable bridges and original designs for catapults, cannons and other weapons. At the end of the letter, Leonardo added that he also happened to be a skilled painter, sculptor and musician. He offered to create a bronze horse statue to honour the Duke’s father.

The Duke was highly impressed and invited Leonardo to work for him as an engineer and painter. Leonardo set up a studio with pupils and assistants helping him on many different projects. From 1483 to 1485 he worked on two versions of a wonderful picture called The Virgin of the Rocks. Then he was asked to paint a massive fresco on the wall of a dining room in a monastery. For the next two years, Leonardo created a masterpiece called The Last Supper, which showed the final meal Jesus Christ shared with his close followers.

However, much of Leonardo’s time was taken up with scientific studies. He was employed on the duke’s many war campaigns, advising on new ideas for weapons and building defences. He also produced models for the building of a magnificent dome for Milan cathedral, drew up plans for other great buildings, and designed theatre sets and costumes. He studied how humans and animals moved, explored possibilities for inventing flying machines, and thought deeply about the moon, stars and planets. He also became firm friends with a mathematician called Luca Pacioli, who was working on the relationship between distances. Leonardo made a series of drawings to illustrate Pacioli’s ideas, and studied how he could use mathematical rules to create paintings that looked solid, deep and lifelike.

FOUR YEARS IN FLORENCE

Leonardo stayed in Milan for 18 years. Then at the end of 1499, French soldiers attacked the city and conquered it. The 48-year-old artist returned to Florence once more. Not long afterwards Florence was caught up in its own war against the city of Pisa. In 1502, Duke Cesare Borgia asked Leonardo to become his chief architect and engineer. He worked hard, designing and building forts. He also drew up plans to cut off Pisa’s water supply and force the city to surrender. His brilliant ideas involved changing the direction of a river and also building canals, but these were not carried out.

Leonardo saw horrors during the war, which inspired him to plan an enormous painting called the Battle of Anghiari for the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. However, he only got as far as making detailed sketches and a full-size drawing. Instead, Leonardo turned to studying the flight of birds and experimenting further with his designs for flying machines. He also painted several famous portraits. The only one that still survives is a captivating picture of a woman with a mysterious smile, called the Mona Lisa. It is probably the most famous painting in all the world today.

LEONARDO’S LATER YEARS

In 1506, Leonardo returned to Milan, at the request of the French governor there. The King of France himself, Louis XII, was living in Milan at the time, and just a year later he appointed Leonardo to be his court painter. However, Leonardo continued to devote lots of time to engineering projects and scientific investigations, such as examining fossils to work out what they were.

After the governor of Milan died, Leonardo went to Rome in 1514 to work for the brother of the pope. Although he completed one magnificent painting, a portrait of St John the Baptist, he spent most of his time studying and experimenting. By examining animal parts from a butcher’s shop, he produced brilliant models of how the heart works. He tried making giant, rounded mirrors because he wanted to see the moon and stars close-up. And by studying he plants he discovered that the same patterns exist in many natural things.

Shortly after the pope’s brother died, in 1516, Leonardo went to live and work in France. He was 64 years old. King Francis I gave Leonardo the title of “First painter, architect and mechanic of the king”, and set him up in a house near his own palace in Amboise. He paid Leonardo well and left him to do as he pleased, visiting him now and again to enjoy fascinating conversations. Leonardo began the huge job of sorting out all the scientific papers he had produced during his lifetime. He died before he was able to finish, on May 2, 1519.

Did you know ?

• Leonardo never finished the horse statue he offered to make for the Duke of Milan. He got as far as creating an enormous clay model, but when the French armies invaded the city, they destroyed it by using it for archery practice!
• When Leonardo wrote in his notebooks, he wrote backwards (from right to left) using 'mirror writing'. No one is sure why. Some people think that he wanted to make it hard for others to read his studies and steal his ideas. Other people think that it was just easier for him, because he was left-handed. Whatever the reason, when Leonardo wrote documents for other people to read, he wrote in the usual way.
• In Leonardo's day, very few people grew up left-handed like him. Everyone was very supersitious and many believed that the left side of the body was evil and unlucky. Children who showed signs of being left-handed were usually forced to using their right hand instead. Leonardo was also a vegetarian, which was equally unusual in those times.
• Leonardo was buried in the palace church at Amboise in France. However, the building was destroyed three hundred years later, during the French Revolution, so his grave can no longer be found.