Leonardo da Vinci
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[TD="class: section_prefix"]I[/TD]
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[TD="class: section_title"]INTRODUCTION[/TD]
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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 studiesparticularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulicsanticipated many of the developments of modern science.
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[TD="class: section_prefix"]II[/TD]
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[TD="class: section_title"]EARLY LIFE IN FLORENCE[/TD]
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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 Verrocchios 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 Verrocchios assistant. In Verrocchios 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).
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[TD="class: section_prefix"]III[/TD]
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[TD="class: section_title"]YEARS IN MILAN[/TD]
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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 dukes 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.
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.
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[TD="class: section_title"]RETURN TO FLORENCE[/TD]
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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 dukes 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 Michelangelos 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 womans husband. Leonardo seems to have had a special affection for the picture, for he took it with him on all his subsequent travels.
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[TD="class: section_prefix"]V[/TD]
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[TD="class: section_title"]LATER TRAVELS AND DEATH[/TD]
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In 1506 Leonardo went again to Milan, at the summons of its French governor, Charles dAmboise. 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.
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[TD="class: section_prefix"]VI[/TD]
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[TD="class: section_title"]PAINTINGS[/TD]
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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 teachers 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.
Leonardos 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, Christwho is about to announce that one of those present will betray himrepresents 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, Leonardos 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 techniquessfumato and chiaroscuroof 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 Leonardos work.
Leonardos 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).
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[TD="class: section_title"]SCULPTURAL AND ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS[/TD]
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Because none of Leonardos 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.
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[TD="class: section_prefix"]VIII[/TD]
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[TD="class: section_title"]SCIENTIFIC AND THEORETICAL PROJECTS[/TD]
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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, Leonardos 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.
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