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Leonardo da Vinci was born in the year 1452 in the small hill town of Vinci. His father was a successful notary and his mother a peasant woman. The little town of Vinci has changed very little in 544 years since then. Stone houses are clustered together around the protective battlements of a castle. The tall church bell tower is still an important landmark which can be seen for miles. Vinci is surrounded by fertile farmland.
The hillsides are planted with grape vines and fruit trees and patches of silvery green olive trees dot the landscape. The slopes above Vinci lead to Mount Albano, a high peak where Leonardo later hiked and made observations about the atmosphere. Small mountain streams run down from the mountain past Vinci to the valley of the Arno River below. For a curious boy who loved nature, the area around Vinci must have been a wonderful childhood home. Leonardo was free to explore the woods and streams and to study the insects, animals, and birds which he later sketched in great detail in his notebooks. Leonardo's early fascination with nature clearly inspired the paintings he would create as an adult.
The detailed and lifelike plants and wildflowers that he painted at the feet of the angel in The Annunciation and the rocky caves and pools of water surrounding the figures in The Virgin of the Rocks were created from observations and sketches he began making as a child in Vinci. When he was about 12 years old, Leonardo moved to the bustling city of Florence with his father. Because young Leonardo demonstrated a great talent for drawing, his father later made him an apprentice in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio, a leading artist in Florence. In Verrocchio's studio Leonardo learned the painters craft of preparing canvases, making brushes, and grinding and mixing paints. Verrocchio also taught him to sculpt in wood, stone and clay, and how to cast metal objects in silver and gold. Artists in the fifteenth century Italy were more than just expert painters and sculptors however.
Verrocchio was hired by wealthy patrons to create furniture, musical instruments, navigational compasses, and bronze bells for cathedrals among other things. Leonardo watched carefully and learned every craft that went on in the workshop. He drew constantly to record what he observed. When he wasnt needed in the studio, Leonardo explored the city of Florence. He observed and sketched everything that interested him.
He visited the building site for the great cathedral being constructed in Florence and made careful drawings of the machinery he saw at work there. By the age of 21 Leonardo was a skilled painter, Verrocchio permitted him to help with an important painting of the Baptism of Christ. Leonardo painted the kneeling angel and some of the background for this work. The face of Leonardo's angel is delicately colored and shows Leonardo's talent at representing emotions. Legend has it that when Verrocchio first saw Leonardo's angel he was so impressed by Leonardo's abilities that he (Verrocchio) never wanted to touch colors again.
The hazy features of the background Leonardo painted for the Baptism of Christ show he had already begun to develop his sense of aerial perspective. After he finished his apprenticeship, Leonardo began work for the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de Medici. He was supposed to paint an Adoration of the Magi for a church altar, but he never completed it, and in 1483 he moved to Milan. After 17 years in Milan he returned several times to Florence, where he worked on many different projects. By 1503 Florence was at war with the neighboring city of Pisa, and Leonardo worked on a plan to divert the Arno River from the enemy city.
First it would cut off Pisa's supply route, and later the river would be turned into a canal for peacetime use. Neither project was ever finished, though Leonardo's reputation as a creative and talented engineer was firmly established. After the war with Pisa, Leonardo again took up painting. He completed his most famous portrait La Gioconda (Mona Lisa). He also wrote about and sketched the flight of birds and experimented with different designs for human powered flying machines. He was also commissioned to paint a huge mural commemorating a Florentine victory in the Battle of Anghiari.
Leonardo completed a full-size cartoon of the battle illustrating the horrors of war as he had seen them while in Borgia's service. But he never finished the war painting, and in 1506 he was glad to leave Florence to go work in Milan. From 1514 to 1516 Leonardo lived in Rome and worked under the patronage of Prince Giuliano the Magnificent, brother of Pope Leo X. Giuliano was fascinated by mechanical devices and Leonardo built many toys and machines to amuse him.
Among them was a machine to turn copper metal into strips of uniform size. He also completed another great painting of John the Baptist as a young man. Leonardo had wished to keep studying human anatomy, but the Church would not allow him to examine and cut up dead bodies. Instead he studied animal parts obtained from a butchers shop. From these he produced brilliant models of how the heart works. In Rome he also studied optics, and he attempted to make giant, rounded mirrors in his workshop.
They were similar to the mirrors used in modern telescopes, and some scholars think he hoped to observe the moon and stars. Leonardo also studied botany, and he observed that the same patterns exist in many natural things. For example, the rings in a tree trunk resemble the ripples made by a stone dropped in water. He was always happy when repeating patterns appeared in nature, because they showed evidence of universal natural laws. Modern scientists continue to discover such patterns, often at a microscopic level, and Leonardo would certainly have been thrilled.
The ruler of Florence sent Leonardo to Milan in 1482 bearing a silver lute as a gift to the powerful and warlike ruler of Milan, Duke Lodovico Sforza. Leonardo was by then known as a talented musician as well as a skilled painter and sculptor. Leonardo wrote an amazing letter to Duke Sforza. The letter described many of Leonardo's fascinating and original ideas for military engineering.
He wrote how he could build strong light bridges, create fantastic new weapons, and build armored chariots and warships to protect the Dukes soldiers in battle. Only at the end of this letter did Leonardo describe his talents as a sculptor and painter and offer to create a bronze horse statue to honor the Dukes father. Sforza was impressed by Leonardo and gave him a position at court as painter and engineer. Leonardo was kept busy in Milan.
He established a studio and had apprentices of his own. He planned the costumes and sets for festivals and plays, designed and built forts, laid out new canals for the city and painted many portraits. Leonardo also worked on his great painting, The Last Supper. Unfortunately, only a shadow of the original masterpiece remains. Leonardo used an experimental mixture of tempera and oil paints which did not stick well to the damp plaster wall. Soon after the painting was completed in 1498, the paint began to flake away.
At the same time as he was painting The Last Supper, Leonardo designed and constructed a full sized clay model for a 24 foot high statue of the Dukes father on horseback. In 1499 before the statue could be cast in bronze, Milan was attacked and overrun by the French troops. Duke Sforza's family fled, and French archers destroyed the gigantic clay horse while using it for target practice. The French governor of Milan, Charles d Amboise, invited Leonardo back to Milan in 1506. King Louis XII of France, living in Milan at the time, appointed Leonardo court painter one year later. Leonardo continued to work on engineering projects in Milan.
He also had time to continue his scientific studies of geology and anatomy, both human and animal, and to study astronomy. When the French governor of Milan died in 1511, political changes forced Leonardo to leave the city once again. Shortly after his patron Giuliano died in 1516, Leonardo left Italy forever to live and work in France. King Francis I of France appointed Leonardo to the position of First painter, architect and mechanic of the King and gave Leonardo a comfortable house near the Kings own residence in Amboise where he visited Leonardo often for conversation. The King paid Leonardo well and allowed him to pursue his own interests in engineering and architecture. During these last years of his life Leonardo began to arrange and edit his scientific papers, a task left unfinished at his death.
Leonardo died in his home in France on May 2, 1519. His notebooks and paintings passed into the possession of his favorite student and long-time friend Francesco de Multi, who had traveled to France with Leonardo in 1516. Interestingly, while we know that Leonardo was buried in the palace church, we no longer know where his grave is located. The church and palace were destroyed during the French Revolution, and the grave can no longer be found.
Leonardo wrote in Italian using a special kind of shorthand that he invented himself. People who study his notebooks have long been puzzled by something else, however. He usually used mirror writing, starting at the right side of the page and moving to the left. Only when he was writing something intended for other people did he write in the normal direction. People who were contemporaries of Leonardo left records that they saw him write and paint left handed. He also made sketches showing his own left hand at work.
Being a lefty was highly unusual in Leonardo's time. Because people were superstitious, children who naturally started using their left hands to write and draw were forced to use their right hands. No one knows the true reason Leonardo used mirror writing, though several possibilities have been suggested: He was trying to make it harder for people to read his notes and steal his ideas, he was hiding his scientific ideas from the powerful Roman Catholic Church, whose teachings sometimes disagreed with what Leonardo observed, writing left handed from left to right was messy because the ink just put down would smear as his hand moved across it. Leonardo chose to write in reverse because it prevented smudging.
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