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The life long work of the great Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci has proved most fascinating for so many generations. What impresses people most today is perhaps, the diversity and numbers of his achievements. In the past, however, he was admired and most recognized for his achievements in art, and art theory. Leonardo's equally impressive contribution to science has only recently been rediscovered. Many of Leonardo s contributions has been preserved in a vast quantity of notes that became widely known only recently.
Leonardo was born in 1452, near the town of Vinci, not far from Florence. His artistic talent must have revealed itself early, for he was soon apprenticed to Andrea Verrocchio, a leading Renaissance master. In this versatile Florentine workshop Leonardo acquired a variety of skills. He entered the painters guild in 1472, and his earliest works date from this time.
Leonardo left Florence for Milan in 1482 to begin working for Duke Sforza in Milan. Although active painting portraits, as a court artist, designing festivals, and projecting an equestrian monument in sculpture to the dukes father, Leonardo also became fascinated in non-artistic matters during this period. He put his profound growing knowledge of mechanics to his duties as a civil and military engineer; in addition, he took up scientific fields as diverse as anatomy, biology, mathematics, and physics. These activities, however, did not prevent him from completing his single most important painting, The Last Supper. However, during this period, Leonardo began many projects which would be left unfinished, or become interrupted. With the fall of Milan to the French (1499), Leonardo left the city to find a home and job elsewhere.
By 1500 he was back in Florence where he would begin working for Cesare Borgia as a military engineer. Again in Florence in 1503, Leonardo undertook several very significant and important artistic projects, including the portrait of Mona Lisa. At the same time, his scientific interests broadened: he began studying the flight pattern of birds, and his amazement with the human body led him to perform dissections. Asked to work for the new French government, Leonardo returned to Milan in 1506. Leonardo would live here for the next seven years o his life. The artistic project on which he focused at this time was mostly kept in the planning stages.
In Milan, Leonardo would keep a vast and accurate set of records and details in his notebooks documenting the many advances and achievements of his studies. Leonardo's experiments and observations into the workings of nature are all well documented in his sketches and in his many notebooks. The mechanical objects that he drew and described were also concerned with the transformation of energy. Leonardo's many investigations took him from surface to structure, from catching the exact appearance of things in nature, to visually analyzing how they function. His paintings, drawings, and many documentations show that he was the foremost creative mind of his time, and maybe ever.
Leonardo's art and science are not separate, as was once believed, but belong to the same lifelong pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. Leonardo s contributions to science will not be forgotten, and not be left unnoticed. He will continue to influence people though his innovations and masterful works of art.
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Research essay sample on Leonardo Contributions Military Engineer Milan
