Leonardo da Vinci

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• Born: 15 April 1452
• Birthplace: Vinci, Italy
• Died: 2 May 1519 (natural causes)
• Best Known As: Painter of the Mona Lisa

Leonardo da Vinci is best remembered as the painter of the Mona Lisa (1503-1506) and The Last Supper (1495). But he's almost equally famous for his astonishing multiplicity of talents: he dabbled in architecture, sculpture, engineering, geology, hydraulics and the military arts, all with success, and in his spare time doodled parachutes and flying machines that resembled inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries. He made detailed drawings of human anatomy which are still highly regarded today. Leonardo also was quirky enough to write notebook entries in mirror (backwards) script, a trick which kept many of his observations from being widely known until decades after his death.

Leonardo da Vinci means "Leonardo from the town of Vinci," and thus he is generally referred to in short as "Leonardo" rather than as "da Vinci"... He received a fresh burst of public interest in 2003 with the publication of The Da Vinci Code, the bestselling thriller by author Dan Brown.

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May 2, 1519. Italian artist, scientist and inventor. Painter of the famed Last Supper, perhaps the first painting of the High Renaissance, and of the Mona Lisa. Inventor of the first parachute. Born at Vinci, Italy, in 1452 (exact date unknown), he died at Amboise, France.

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For more information on Leonardo da Vinci, visit Britannica.com.

Leonardo da Vinci

Library of Congress

[b. Vinci (Italy), April 15, 1452, d. Amboise, France, May 2, 1519]

Leonardo's great reputation in science and invention is posthumous, based on the translation and publication of his coded notebooks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his lifetime, in addition to his famous paintings, he was known for his engineering of canal locks, cathedrals, and engines of war. The notebooks reveal Leonardo's correct interpretations of anatomy, explanations of physical concepts such as inertia, and sketches for working parachutes and helicopters, all well in advance of those ideas entering the scientific record.

(b Anchiano, nr Vinci, 15 April 1452; d Amboise, nr Tours, 2 May 1519). Italian painter, sculptor, architect, designer, theorist, engineer and scientist. He was the founding father of what is called the High Renaissance style and exercised an enormous influence on contemporary and later artists. His writings on art helped establish the ideals of representation and expression that were to dominate European academies for the next 400 years. The standards he set in figure draughtsmanship, handling of space, depiction of light and shade, representation of landscape, evocation of character and techniques of narrative radically transformed the range of art. A number of his inventions in architecture and in various fields of decoration entered the general currency of 16th-century design.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Leonardo was renowned in his lifetime as a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, and cartographer, but the degree of awareness of his anatomical work among his contemporaries is a mystery. Almost everything that we know today about his researches is contained in 200 sheets of drawings and notes housed in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.

As a young artist in Florence, Leonardo absorbed the prevailing theoretical interest in a quasi-scientific basis for painting. This included the study of superficial anatomy, through life drawing and attendance at the public dissections that were occasionally held by the medical schools. There is no evidence that he was interested in deep anatomy until the late 1480s, by which time he had moved to Milan. There he outlined a plan for a treatise on the human body, covering not only anatomy but also conception, growth, proportion, the emotions, and the senses. A number of sheets from around this date comprise syntheses of animal dissection, surface observation, and traditional beliefs, though Leonardo does not seem to have pursued his studies systematically. He reportedly compiled a manuscript treatise on the anatomy of the horse, now lost; his human material was primarily skeletal, most notably a series of highly accurate drawings of the skull, sectioned in an attempt to locate the sites of the mental faculties.

Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. Above: The skull bisected and sectioned (1489). Below: Orthogonal views of the skeleton (c 1510-11). (Collection of Her Majesty the Queen).


Due to other obligations, Leonardo's anatomical work ceased from about 1493 till around 1504, when in connection with the abortive Battle of Anghiari mural in Florence he systematically surveyed the superficial aspects of man. An interest in hydrodynamics soon led him back to a study of the deeper systems of the body, for he now had some access to corpses in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. In the winter of 1507-8, Leonardo was present at the peaceful demise of an elderly man, prompting him to perform an autopsy ‘to see the cause of so sweet a death’. The resulting drawings and notes include the first records of the appendix, cirrhosis of the liver, arteriosclerosis, calcification of vessels, and coronary vascular occlusion. He also returned briefly to an investigation of the structure of the brain, making a wax cast of an ox's ventricles.

Shortly afterwards Leonardo's interests changed fundamentally. A beautiful and highly accurate series of drawings, datable to the winter of 1510-11, concentrate on the mechanics of the osteological and myological systems. His methods of illustration were particularly inventive: the bones of the thorax drawn orthographically; the cervical vertebrae in an exploded view; the hand through six stages of dissection; the shoulder muscles reduced to lines of force to depict the whole system in a single drawing; the arm in seven views through 180 degrees; and so on.

This change in approach seems to have been due to a collaboration with Marcantonio della Torre, the young Galenist and professor of anatomy at the university of Pavia. Leonardo now had much greater access to human material: the number of dissections he claimed to have performed grows from ‘more than ten’ around 1509, to ‘more than thirty’ towards the end of his life. This was the only phase of his researches when he achieved a working compromise between coverage and detail, for it was still his intention to publish a treatise, and, after Marcantonio's death in 1511, Leonardo concentrated primarily on cardiology and embryology.

Leonardo dissected a fetus of about six months, studying the relative sizes of the viscera, though his understanding of the structure of the human placenta was coloured by observations made in an earlier dissection of a gravid cow. More rewarding was his work on the bovine heart. He identified the auricles and described the movements of diastole and systole; he constructed a glass model of the aortic valve and, observing the vortices in the sinuses, he correctly deduced the exact mechanism of closure of the valves. Leonardo was on the verge of discovering the circulation of the blood, but he could not abandon the ancient belief in the independence of the arterial and venous systems, and he modified his results to accommodate this.

In late 1513, Leonardo moved to Rome, where he conducted research in the Ospedale di Santo Spirito, though few resulting drawings can be identified. In 1515 he was accused before Pope Leo X of unspecified sacrilegious practices and was barred from the Ospedale. The following year he went to France, dying there without resuming his anatomical work, and without having completed the treatise that he had planned for thirty years. Leonardo's papers passed to a pupil, Francesco Melzi, at whose villa near Milan they were occasionally seen by visitors, but they were not widely known until the publication of a series of facsimiles around 1900.

— Martin Clayton

Bibliography

• Keele, K. and Pedretti, C. (1979). Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen at Windsor Castle. Johnson Reprint Co., London and New York.
• O'Malley, C. D. and Saunders, J. (1952). Leonardo da Vinci on the human body. H. Schuman, New York

See also anatomy; dissection.

The place of Leonardo in history as an artist and even as a scientist is well known. Many of his inventions, such as the helicopter, were only on paper, however. His actual achievements and contributions to the technology of his time are less well known and somewhat problematical. On the one hand, it is said that none of his ideas were practical, while on the other, it is said that his improvements in canal locks have been imitated ever since.

After striking success as a painter in his youth, Leonardo, at about age 30, began to take commissions in fields that we would today identify as architecture or engineering. From then on, he made at least part of his living designing improvements on buildings and canals, some of which he then built and some of which languished. Increasingly he designed in secret devices that anticipated flight, steam power, and much more.

Much of the reason for the apparent mystery of his ideas about technology is that he wrote and drew them in coded notebooks that, although he worked on them for much of his adult life, were never sufficiently organized to decode and publish. Indeed, most pages of the notebooks were not published until late in the 19th century. All his life he found it difficult to complete a task, even abandoning paintings for which he had been paid. Single pages of the famous notebooks, although nearly all written so that each deals with a separate chain of thought, often slip from one topic to another.

Among the public achievements that contributed to the technology of his time are the maps of Italy he made at the beginning of the 16th century. Although none of his architectural plans were executed, many were known at the time and became a major influence on such buildings as St. Peter's in Rome. In addition to canal lock gates, replacements in 1497 for worn-out gates on the oldest canal in Italy, it is thought that he actually built a screw-cutting machine and a turret windmill, both advanced for the time and not followed by others until much later. Some give Leonardo partial credit (along with Palladio) for the truss bridge, but trusses were occasionally used by the Romans and did not become common in bridges until centuries after Leonardo's death.

It is thought that some may have seen his notebooks and been influenced, notably Girolamo Cardano, but that is not certain. If they had been, we might have earlier had the advantage of Leonardo's experiments with tensile strength, his analysis of forces produced by arches and hoisting devices, and his work on the strength of beams and columns. A half century after Leonardo's death, another great Italian, Galileo, repeated such experiments and analyses -- and published them in a clear, coherent form.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Florentine Renaissance man, genius, artist in all media, architect, military engineer. Possibly the most brilliantly creative man in European history, he advertised himself, first of all, as a military engineer. In a famous letter dated about 1481 to Ludovico Sforza, of which a copy survives in the Codice Atlantico in Milan, Leonardo asks for employment in that capacity. He had plans ‘for bridges, very light and strong’, and ‘plans for destroying those of the enemy’. He knew how to cut off water to besieged fortifications, and how to construct bridges, mantlets, scaling ladders, and other instruments. He designed cannon, ‘very convenient and easy of transport’, designed to fire ‘small stones, almost in the manner of hail’—grape- or case-shot (see ammunition, artillery). He offered cannon ‘of very beautiful and useful shapes, quite different from those in common use’ and, ‘where it is not possible to employ cannon … catapults, mangonels and trabocchi [trebuchets—see siege engines] and other engines of wonderful efficacy not in general use’. And he said he made ‘armoured cars, safe and unassailable, which will enter the serried ranks of the enemy with their artillery … and behind them the infantry will be able to follow quite unharmed, and without any opposition’. He also offered to design ‘ships which can resist the fire of all the heaviest cannon, and powder and smoke’.

The large number of surviving drawings and notes on military art show that Leonardo's claims were not without foundation, although most date from after the Sforza letter. Most of the drawings, including giant crossbows (see bows), appear to be improvements on existing machines rather than new inventions. One exception is the drawing of a tank dating from 1485-8 now in the British Museum—a flattened cone, propelled from inside by crankshafts, firing guns. Another design in the British Museum, for a machine with scythes revolving in the horizontal plane, dismembering bodies as it goes, is gruesomely fanciful.

Most of the other drawings are in the Codice Atlantico in Milan but some are in the Royal Libraries at Windsor and Turin, in Venice, or the Louvre and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Two ingenious machines for continuously firing arrows, machine-gun style, powered by a treadmill are shown in the Codice Atlantico. A number of other sketches of bridges, water pumps, and canals could be for military or civil purposes: ‘dual use technology’.

Leonardo lived at a time when the first artillery fortifications were appearing and the Codice Atlantico contains sketches of ingenious fortifications combining bastions, round towers, and truncated cones. Models constructed from the drawings and photographed in Calvi's works reveal forts which would have looked strikingly modern in the 19th century, and might even feature in science fiction films today. On 18 August 1502 Cesare Borgia appointed Leonardo as his ‘Military Engineer General’, although no known building by Leonardo exists.

Leonardo was also fascinated by flight. Thirteen pages with drawings for man-powered aeroplanes survive and there is one design for a helicoidal helicopter. Leonardo later realized the inadequacy of the power a man could generate and turned his attention to aerofoils. Had his enormous abilities been concentrated on one thing, he might have invented the modern glider.

Bibliography

• Calvi, Ignazio, L'architettura militare de Leonardo da Vinci (Milan, 1943).
• —— L'ingegneria militare di Leonardo da Vinci (Milan, 1958).
• Popham, A. E., The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (London, 1973)

— Christopher Bellamy

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was an Italian painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. He was one of the greatest minds of the Italian Renaissance, and his influence on the painting of the following generations was enormous.

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, near the village of Vinci about 25 miles west of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a prominent notary of Florence, who had no other children until much later. Ser Piero raised his son himself, a common practice at the time, arranging for Leonardo's mother to marry a villager. When Leonardo was 15, his father apprenticed him to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading artist of Florence and a characteristic talent of the early Renaissance.

Verrocchio, a sculptor, painter, and goldsmith, was a remarkable craftsman, and his great skill and passionate concern for quality of execution, as well as his interest in expressing the vital mobility of the human figure, were important elements in Leonardo's artistic formation. Indeed, much in Leonardo's approach to art was evolutionary from tradition rather than revolutionary against it, although the opposite is often true of his results.

Assistant in Verrocchio's Workshop

After completing his apprenticeship, Leonardo stayed on as an assistant in Verrocchio's shop, and his earliest known painting is a product of his collaboration with the master. In Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (ca. 1475), Leonardo executed one of the two angels, a fact already recorded in the 16th century, as well as the distant landscape, and he added the final touches to the figure of Christ, determining the texture of the flesh. Collaboration on a major project by a master and his assistant was standard procedure in the Italian Renaissance. What is special is that Leonardo's work is not, as was usual, a slightly less skilled version of Verrocchio's manner of painting but an original approach altering it. It completely possesses all the fundamental qualities of Leonardo's mature style and implies a criticism of the early Renaissance. By changing hard metallic surface effects to soft yielding ones, making edges less cutting, and increasing the slight modulations of light and shade, Leonardo evoked a new flexibility within the figures. This "soft union," as Giorgio Vasari called it (1550), is also present in the special lighting and is emphatically developed in the spiral turn of the angel's head and body and the vast depth of the landscape.

Apparently Leonardo had painted one extant work, the Annunciation in Florence, before this. It is much nearer to Verrocchio in the stability of the two figures shown in profile, the clean precision of the decorative details, and the large simple shapes of the trees, but it already differs in the creamier modeling of the faces. A little later is Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, the young wife of a prominent Florentine merchant, in which her oily face with softly contoured lips is seen against a background of mysteriously dark trees and a pond.

Independent Master in Florence

About 1478 Leonardo set up his own studio. In 1481 he received a major church commission for an altarpiece, the Adoration of the Magi. In this unfinished painting, Leonardo's new approach is far more developed. A crowd of spectators, with odd and varied faces, flutters around and peers at the main group of the Virgin and Child, and there is a strong sense of continuing movement. In the background the three horses of the kings prance among intricate architectural ruins. However, the painting also illustrates Leonardo's strong sense of the need for a countervailing order: he placed in the center of the composition the Virgin and Child, who traditionally in paintings of this theme had appeared at one side of the picture, approached by the kings from the other side. Similarly, the picturesque ruins are rendered in sharp perspective.

The simultaneous increase in both the level of activity and the organized system which controls it will climax later in Leonardo's Last Supper, and it shows us his basically scientific temperament - one concerned with not only adding to the quantity of accurate observations of nature but also subjecting these observations to newly inferred physical or mathematical laws. In their paintings earlier Renaissance artists had applied the rules of linear perspective, by which objects appear smaller in proportion as they are farther away from the eye of the spectator. Leonardo joined this principle to two others: perspective of clarity (distant objects progressively lose their separateness and hence are not drawn with outlines) and perspective of color (distant objects progressively tend to a uniform gray tone). He wrote about both of these phenomena in his notebooks.

The Adoration of the Magi was, as noted above, left unfinished. In his later career Leonardo often failed over a period of years to finish a work, essentially because he would not accept established answers. For example, in his project for a bronze equestrian statue he began his work by delving into such matters as the anatomy of horses and the method by which the heavy monument could be transported from his studio to its permanent location. In the case of the Magi altarpiece, however, the unfinished state may merely result from the fact that Leonardo left Florence in 1482 to accept the post of court artist to the Duke of Milan. In leaving, Leonardo followed a trend set by the leading Florentine masters of the older generation, Verrocchio and Antonio Pollaiuolo, who went to Venice and Rome to execute commissions larger than any available in their native Florence.

Milan (1482-1499)

Leonardo presented himself to the Duke of Milan as skilled in many crafts, but particularly in military engineering, asserting that he had worked out improved methods for shooting catapults and diverting rivers. Such inventions, as well as the remarkable machinery that Leonardo produced in Milan for stage pageants, point to his profound interest in the laws of motion and propulsion, a further aspect of his interest in living things and their workings. Again, this preoccupation differs from older artists only in degree.

Leonardo's first Milanese painting is the altarpiece Virgin of the Rocks. It exists in two versions: the one in Paris is earlier and was executed by Leonardo; the one in London is later, and there is controversy as to whether Leonardo participated in its execution. A religious brotherhood in Milan commissioned an altarpiece from Leonardo in 1483, and it is also a matter of argument as to which version is the one commissioned. Some scholars believe that it is the London work and that the Paris version was painted while Leonardo was still in Florence. But this view requires some remarkable coincidences, and the more usual opinion is that the picture in Paris is the original one executed for the Milanese commission and that it was taken away by Leonardo's admirer the king of France and replaced in Milan by the second painting.

Although the Virgin of the Rocks is a very original painting, it makes use of a venerable tradition in which the Holy Family is shown in a cave. This setting becomes a vehicle for Leonardo's interests in depicting nature and in dimmed light, which fuses the outlines of separate objects. The artist once commented that one should practice drawing at dusk and in courtyards with walls painted black. The figures in the painting are grouped in a pyramid.

The other surviving painting of Leonardo's Milanese years is the Last Supper (1495-1497), commissioned by the duke for the refectory of the convent of S. Maria delle Grazie. Instead of using fresco, the traditional medium for this theme, Leonardo experimented with an oil-based medium, because painting in true fresco makes areas of color appear quite distinct. Unfortunately, his experiment was unsuccessful; the paint did not adhere well to the wall, and within 50 years the scene was reduced to a confused series of spots. What we see today is largely a later reconstruction, but the design is reliable and remarkable. The scene seems at first to be one of tumultuous activity, in response to the dramatic stimulus of Christ's words "One of you will betray me," which is a contrast to the traditional static row of figures. But the 12 disciples form four equal clusters around Christ, isolated as a fifth unit in the middle. Thus, Leonardo once again enriches the empirical observation of vital activity but simultaneously develops a containing formula and emphasizes the center. This blend of the immediate reality of the situation and the underlying order of the composition is perhaps the reason the painting has always been extraordinarily popular and has remained the standard image of the subject.

In its own time, the Last Supper was perhaps less well known than the project for a bronze equestrian statue of the previous Duke of Milan, on which Leonardo worked during most of his Milanese years. He wanted to show the horse leaping, a technical problem of balance in sculpture that was solved only in the 17th century. Numerous drawings of the project exist.

Besides apparatus for pageants and artillery, architectural projects also occupied Leonardo in Milan. He and the great architect Donato Bramante, also a recent arrival at the court, clearly had a mutually stimulating effect, and it is hard to attribute certain innovative ideas to one of them rather than the other. The architectural drawings of Leonardo, very similar to the buildings of Bramante, mark the shift from the early Renaissance to the High Renaissance in architecture and show a new interest in and command of scale and grandeur within the basic harmonious geometry of Renaissance structure. No buildings can be attributed with certainty to Leonardo.

When Leonardo's patron was overthrown by the French invasion in 1499, Leonardo left Milan. He visited Venice briefly, where the Senate consulted him on military projects, and Mantua. He planned a portrait of Isabella d'Este, Duchess of Mantua, one of the most striking personalities and great art patrons of the age. The surviving drawing for this portrait suggests that the concept of the later Mona Lisa had already been formulated.

Florence (1500-1506)

In 1500 Leonardo returned to Florence, where he was received as a great man. Florentine painters of the generation immediately following Leonardo were excited by his modern methods, with which they were familiar through the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, and he also now had a powerful effect on a still younger group of artists. Thus it was that a younger master passed on to Leonardo his own commission for the Virgin and Child with St. Anne, and the monks who had ordered it gave Leonardo a workroom. Leonardo's large preparatory drawing was inspected by crowds of viewers. This theme had traditionally been presented in a rather diagrammatic fashion to illustrate the family tree of Christ; sometimes this was done by representing Anne, the grandmother, in large scale with her daughter Mary on her knee and with Mary in turn holding the Christ Child. Leonardo sought to retain a reference to this conceptual pattern while drawing sinuous, smiling figures in a fluid organic interrelationship. Several varying designs exist, the last version being the painting of about 1510 in Paris; this variety suggests that Leonardo could not fuse the two qualities he desired: an abstract formula and the immediacy of life.

During his years in Florence (1500-1506), even though they were interrupted in 1502 by a term as military engineer for Cesare Borgia, Leonardo completed more projects than in any other period of his life. In his works of these years, the emphasis is almost exclusively on portraying human vitality, as in the Leda and the Swan (lost; known only through copies), a spiraling figure kneeling among reeds, and the Mona Lisa, the portrait of a Florentine citizen's young third wife, whose smile is mysterious because it is in the process of either appearing or disappearing.

Leonardo's great project (begun 1503) was the battle scene that the city commissioned to adorn the newly built Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. In the choice of theme, the Battle of Anghiari, patriotic references and the wish to show off Leonardo's special skills were both apparently required. Leonardo depicted a cavalry battle - a small skirmish won by Florentine troops - in which horsemen leap at each other, churning up dust, in quick interlocking motion. The work today is known through some rapid rough sketches of the groups of horsemen, careful drawings of single heads of men which are extraordinarily vivid in suggesting immediate response to a stimulus, and copies of the entire composition. Leonardo began to paint the scene, experimenting with encaustic technique (the paint is fused into hot wax on the surface of the panel), but he was called back to Milan before the work was completed. A short time thereafter, the room was remodeled and the fragment was destroyed.

Both the Battle of Anghiari and the Mona Lisa contain their animation in neatly balanced designs. In the battle scene, the enemies are locked in tense symmetry; in the portrait, the crossed arms form the base of a pyramid capped by the head, which gives the lady her quality of classic rightness and prevents the less than full-length portrait from seeming incomplete and arbitrarily amputated at the lower edge.

Milan (1506-1513)

Called to Milan in 1506 by the French governor in charge, Leonardo worked on an equestrian statue project, but he produced no new paintings. Instead he now turned more and more to scientific observation. Most of his scientific concerns were fairly direct extensions of his interests as a painter, and his research in anatomy was the most fully developed. Verrocchio and other early Renaissance painters had attempted to render the human anatomy with accuracy, but Leonardo went far beyond any of them, producing the earliest anatomical drawings which are still considered valid today, although he occasionally confused animal and human anatomy and accepted some old wives' tales.

The notebooks Leonardo was now filling with data and drawings, later piously arranged by his heirs, and the visual intensity that was always his starting point reveal his other scientific interests also: firearms, the action of water, the flight of birds (leading to designs for human flight), the growth of plants, and geology. Leonardo's interests were not universal: theology, history, and literature moved him little. All his interests had in common a concern with the processes of action, movement, pressure, and growth; it has been rightly said that his drawings of the human body are less anatomical than physiological.

Last Years

In 1513 Leonardo went to Rome, where he remained until 1516. He was much honored, but he was relatively inactive and remarkably aloof from its rich social and artistic life. He continued to fill his notebooks with scientific entries.

The French king, Francis I, invited Leonardo to his court at Fontainebleau, gave him the title of first painter, architect, and mechanic to the king, and provided him with a country house at Cloux. Leonardo was revered for his knowledge more than for any work he produced in France. He died on May 2, 1519, at Cloux.

His Influence

Leonardo's influence on younger artists was enormous; it is often said to have first affected his teacher, Verrocchio. By the time Leonardo left Florence in 1482, he had already begun to influence the city's most talented younger painter, Filippino Lippi, only 5 years his junior. During the 1490s Filippino and Piero di Cosimo, another admirer of Leonardo, were the leading painters in Florence. In Milan, Leonardo overwhelmingly dominated a rather weak generation of artists, who were soon turning out smiling Madonnas in imitation of his style.

Leonardo's greatest impact came in Florence just after his return in 1500, when young artists already conditioned by the master's early work were able to absorb and transmit his message rather than merely copy the superficial aspects of his style. Fra Bartolommeo soon reflected this new approach, as did Andrea del Sarto shortly afterward.

On a subtle and more significant level, Leonardo at this time transformed the two greatest young artists to come in contact with him. Raphael came to Florence in 1504 at the age of 21, eager to increase his knowledge of perspective and anatomy, and he quickly revealed Leonardo's influence in his portraits and Madonnas; his results were less intellectual, psychological, and energetic and more coolly formal, but with Leonardo's vitality. About 1503 Michelangelo changed from a sculptor of merely grand scale to one whose figures are charged with energy. This may be seen in the contrast between Michelangelo's David and St. Matthew.

From this time on Leonardo influenced, directly or indirectly, all painting, as Vasari implies. His influence on science was much less, although his drawings may have been known to the anatomist Andreas Vesalius and had an effect on his great publication of 1543. However, most of Leonardo's scientific observations remained unknown until the same questions were again investigated in later centuries.

Further Reading

Jean Paul Richter edited The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci (2 vols., 1883; 2d rev. ed. 1939). Two excellent books are Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist (1939; rev. ed. 1967), which is relatively brief and emphasizes Leonardo's work as a painter, and Ludwig H. Heydenreich, Leonardo da Vinci (trans. 1954), which is more detailed and concerned with the definition of his personality. A collection of essays which shows all sides of Leonardo's genius is C. D. O'Malley, ed., Leonardo's Legacy: An International Symposium (1969). An illuminating collection of articles is Morris Philipson, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Aspects of the Renaissance Genius (1966). Leonardo's scientific work is emphasized in Ivor Blashka Hart, The World of Leonardo da Vinci: Man of Science, Engineer and Dreamer of Flight (1962), and Richard B. McLanathan, Images of the Universe: Leonardo da Vinci, the Artist as Scientist (1966). A fine specialized study is Arthur E. Popham, ed., The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (1945).

(1452–1519)

Uomo Universale of the Italian Renaissance, he made important contributions to architectural theory and town-planning. He was involved in preliminary studies for the crossing of Milan Cathedral (c.1487) and, with Francesco di Giorgio, was consulted about the building of Pavia Cathedral in c.1490. He provided plans for Milan's urban renewal and expansion (1490s), and produced sketches in which his interest in relating buildings geometrically to streets, squares, and gardens using axes is demonstrated. Like others of his time, he was fascinated by the possibilities of centrally planned domed buildings, and in this respect his relationship with Bramante in Milan is important, for the two men developed their ideas under the aegis of the Sforza family. Leonardo was involved with Bramante in the design of the domed crossing and chancel of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan (1490s), intended as a mausoleum for the Sforzas, and painted his beautiful Last Supper (which contains an architectural setting of remarkable modernity for its date, almost anticipating Palladio) in the refectory (c.1495). It would seem that the maturing of Bramante's style to the gravitas of his Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, and his development of centralized geometries at the basilica of San Pietro, Rome, may be due in no small part to Leonardo's influence.

Leonardo's notebooks give a fascinating glimpse of his architectural interests. Apart from his important scientific and mechanical drawings, his lively mind often experimented with the Classical vocabulary in a way that looked forward to much later developments. Fortifications, centralized plans, and technology were all his concerns, but there are also studies of designs for villas (c.1506) that anticipate Palladianism, and even Mannerism, with columns inserted in recesses, something Michelangelo was to do years later. With Bramante, he seems to have acted as some kind of adviser for the Church of Santa Maria della Consolazione at Todi (1508), begun by Cola da Caprarola. In his last years Leonardo worked in France, planning a vast Royal residence and settlement at Romorantin (c.1517–19), complete with huge canals linking the English Channel to the Mediterranean.

Bibliography

• Arata (1953)
• Firpo (ed.) (1963)
• Heydenreich (1996)
• P.Murray (1969, 1986)
• Pedretti (1985)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Leonardo Da Vinci Self-Portrait

Leonardo Da Vinci's workshop, which was located in the Santissima Annunziata convent, in Florence, was discovered last month. It still had several of Da Vinci's frescoes on the walls. Some believe that Lisa Gherardini, the woman who was most likely the model for his painting, the Mona Lisa, worshipped at the convent. (story)

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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, February 3, 2005

Leonardo da Vinci (də vĭn'chē, Ital. lāōnär'dō dä vēn'chē), 1452-1519, Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, and scientist, b. near Vinci, a hill village in Tuscany. The versatility and creative power of Leonardo mark him as a supreme example of Renaissance genius. He depicted in his drawings, with scientific precision and consummate artistry, subjects ranging from flying machines to caricatures; he also executed intricate anatomical studies of people, animals, and plants. The richness and originality of intellect expressed in his notebooks reveal one of the greatest minds of all time.

Early Life and Work: Vinci and Florence

Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a peasant woman. Presumably he passed his childhood with his father's family in Vinci, where he developed an enduring interest in nature. Early sources describe his beauty, charm of manner, and precocious display of artistic talent.

In 1466 Leonardo moved to Florence, where he entered the workshop of Verrocchio and came into contact with such artists as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Lorenzo di Credi. Early in his apprenticeship he painted an angel, and perhaps portions of the landscape, in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (Uffizi). In 1472 he was registered in the painters' guild. The culmination of Leonardo's art during his first period in Florence is the magnificent unfinished Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi) commissioned in 1481 by the monks of San Donato a Scopeto. In this work is revealed the integration of dramatic movement and chiaroscuro that characterizes the master's mature style.

Middle Life and Mature Work: Milan and Florence

Leonardo went to Milan c.1482 and remained at the court of Ludovico Sforza for 16 years. In this time he composed the greater part of his Trattato della pittura and the extensive notebooks that demonstrate the marvelous versatility and penetration of his genius. As court artist he also organized elaborate festivals. Severe plagues in 1484 and 1485 drew his attention to problems of town planning, an interest which was revived during his last years in France. Many drawings of plans and elevations for domed churches reflect a concern with architectural problems that must have been stimulated by contact with Bramante during these years. He worked c.1488 on a model for the tambour and dome of the cathedral at Milan. In 1490 he was employed with Francesco di Giorgio as consulting engineer on the restoration of the cathedral at Pavia and later on the cathedral at Piacenza.

In 1483, Leonardo, with his pupil Ambrogio de Predis, was commissioned to execute the famous Madonna of the Rocks. Two versions of the painting exist-one in the Louvre (1483-c.1486), another in the National Gallery, London (1483-1508). Leonardo's fresco of the Last Supper (Milan) was begun c.1495 and completed by 1498. This work is now badly damaged. Leonardo's own experiments with the fresco medium account in part for its disintegration, which was already noticed by 1517. Deterioration and repeated restorations had obliterated details and individual figures. Nonetheless, the composition and general disposition of the figures reveal a power of invention and a sublimity of spiritual content that mark the painting among the world's masterpieces. In 1978 a major (and controversial) restoration was begun, and in 1994-95 protective air-filtration and climate-control equipment were installed. The restoration was completed in 1999, leaving the fresco brightened considerably with details clarified, but also revealing the extensive loss of the original painting.

While at Ludovico's court Leonardo also worked on an equestrian monument to the duke's father, Francesco Sforza. The work was never cast, and the model, admired by his contemporaries, perished during the French invasion of 1499. In 1511 he undertook a similar work with the commission of an equestrian monument for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio. This work was also never completed and known only through drawings related to the project. After the fall (1499) of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo left Milan and, following brief sojourns in Mantua and Venice, returned to Florence in 1500.

Back in Florence Leonardo engaged in much theoretical work in mathematics and pursued his anatomical studies at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. In 1502 he entered the service of Cesare Borgia as a military engineer. His engagement took him to central Italy to study swamp reclamation projects in Piombino and to tour the cities of Romagna. At Urbino he met Niccolò Machiavelli, who later became a close friend.

By 1503 he was back in Florence, where he was commissioned to execute the fresco of the battle of Anghiari. This work, like its companion piece assigned to Michelangelo, was never completed, and the cartoons were subsequently destroyed. The work exerted enormous influence on later artists, however, and some impression of the original may be had from anonymous copies in the Uffizi and Casa Horne (Florence), from an engraving of 1558 of Lorenzo Zacchia, and from a drawing by Rubens (Louvre). From about this time dates the celebrated Mona Lisa (Louvre), the portrait of the wife of a Florentine merchant.

In 1506, Leonardo returned to Milan, engaged by Charles d'Amboise in the name of the French king, Louis XII. Here he again served as architect and engineer. Gifted with a gargantuan curiosity concerning the physical world, he continued his scientific investigations, concerning himself with problems of geology, botany, hydraulics, and mechanics. In 1510-11 his interest in anatomy quickened considerably. At the same time he was active as painter and sculptor, had many pupils, and profoundly influenced the Milanese painters. A painting generally ascribed to this period is the St. Anne, Mary, and the Child (Louvre), a work that exemplifies Leonardo's handling of sfumato-misty, subtle transitions in tone.

Late Life and Work: Rome and France

In 1513 Leonardo went to Rome, attracted by the patronage of the newly elected Medici pope, Leo X, and his brother Giuliano. Here he found the field dominated by Michelangelo and Raphael. The aging master was assigned to various architectural and engineering projects at the Vatican and received commissions for several paintings. It was perhaps in this period that he executed the enigmatic painting of the young St. John the Baptist (Louvre). Giuliano de' Medici left Rome in 1515 and died at Fiesole in the following year.

It is conjectured that Leonardo left with him, attached to his household, and that soon afterward he accepted an invitation of Francis I of France to settle at the castle of Cloux, near Amboise. Here the old master was left entirely free to pursue his own researches until his death. Although there is no certain record of his last years, he seems to have been active with festival decoration and to have been interested in a canal project. Notes and drawings ascribed to this late period show his continued interest in natural philosophy and experimental science.

Bibliography

In 1965 two previously lost notebooks were discovered in the National Library of Spain, Madrid. The first is a vast work concerning technological principles; the second is an intellectual diary spanning 14 years. The lost notebooks were published as The Madrid Codices (1974).

See also Leonardo da Vinci: Life and Work, Paintings and Drawings, ed. by L. Goldschneider (8th ed. 1967); The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. by J. P. Richter (2 vol., 1970); The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. by J. P. Richter (3d ed. 1970); I. B. Hart, The World of Leonardo da Vinci (1962, repr. 1970); P. R. Ritchie-Calder, Leonardo and the Age of the Eye (1970); C. Pedretti, Leonardo: A Study in Chronology and Style (1973); L. Reti, ed., The Unknown Leonardo (1974); K. Clark, Leonardo da Vinci (rev. ed. 1989); M. Kemp, ed., Leonardo on Painting: Anthology of Writings by Leonardo da Vinci (1989); A. R. Turner, Inventing Leonardo (1993); P. C. Marani, Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings (2001); C. C. Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman (2003); F. Zöllner, Leonardo da Vinci: 1452-1519, The Complete Paintings and Drawings (2003); M. Kemp, Leonardo (2004); C. Nicholl, Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind (2004).

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519), Italian painter, sculptor, architect, and inventor. The illegitimate son of a young notary and a farm girl, both of whom married other people of their own social station shortly after his birth, Leonardo was adopted into his father's household when his stepmother remained childless. Unlike his father, Ser Pietro, who had learned Latin in connection with his profession, Leonardo, for all his evident intelligence, proved a poor and distracted student; he received the arithmetical training known as "abacus school" (scuola di abbaco) and then seems to have quit his formal schooling to be apprenticed to the famous Florentine sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488).

Leonardo's first biographer, Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), tells how the young apprentice painted so ethereal an angel for Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ that the master threw up his hands and admitted defeat. But Verrocchio also helped to create Leonardo's famous sfumato or "smudged" shading technique, and encouraged his reliance on drawing as the chief medium for artistic composition, whether in painting, sculpture, architecture, or mechanics. Leonardo's first independent commission, an altarpiece for the Chapel of Saint Bernard in Palazzo della Signoria, contracted in 1478, was never completed, and this unfinished business set a pattern for the rest of his life. When his father procured for him the assignment of an altarpiece with the Adoration of the Magi for the Augustinian Canons Regular at San Donato in 1481, he put in several months of hard work on the ambitious painting, then abruptly left Florence for Milan in September, where he joined the court of Ludovico Sforza (duke of Milan 1481–1499).

This move represented more than a change of place; it also brought on a change in Leonardo's whole way of life. Florence, despite the heavy hand of the Medici clan in every government office and public commission, was nominally a republic, a large city-state with an elaborate set of public institutions. Ludovico, on the other hand, was a professional soldier who had seized Milan by force and aimed to keep control of the city by maintaining an efficient system of government and an active cultural life.

Leonardo seems to have applied to Ludovico Sforza with an offer to serve as a military architect. He spent much of his time with Donato Bramante (1444–1514) and the mathematician Luca Pacioli, providing the illustrations for Pacioli's popular book On Divine Proportion (1509), some of them originally pillaged from Piero della Francesca

Sometime between 1493 and 1495, Leonardo obtained the commission to decorate the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie with a Last Supper. The fresco was widely influential despite the failure of Leonardo's experimental formula for its paint, which began to deteriorate almost immediately.

In 1494, Charles VIII, the king of France, invaded Italy. By 1499, Milan had fallen to French troops, who imprisoned Ludovico. Leonardo, in the company of Luca Pacioli, returned to Florence, but not before he had seen the huge clay model for his never-completed statue of Francesco Sforza used for target practice by Gascon bowmen.

In 1502 Leonardo worked briefly as a military engineer in central Italy for Cesare Borgia. When Borgia's military campaigns began to be reined in by his father, Rodrigo (later Pope Alexander VI; reigned 1492–1503), Leonardo again returned to the Florentine republic, where an extensive remodeling of the great city hall, the Palazzo della Signoria, was under way. Here, in a monumental room designed to hold the republic's new representative council, Leonardo was asked to paint scenes from the battle of Anghiari, a skirmish in which Florence had gotten the best of her inveterate rival (and sometime port) Pisa. On the opposite wall, the city council had engaged Michelangelo Buonarroti, whose newly completed David still provides the most eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of this early-sixteenth-century Florentine republic.

Leonardo worked up at least part of his design for the Battle of Anghiari (begun 1503) to full size and transferred it to the wall of the council hall, but he decided to paint it in a medium that would lend the chalky plaster surface of the fresco something of the sheen of oil paint. The experiment failed miserably, and Leonardo never finished the work. It was finally covered by another fresco executed by Giorgio Vasari. Also in Florence, Leonardo became preoccupied with water and its motions. Another side of nature shows forth in Leonardo's sketches for his lost painting of Leda and the Swan.

From 1506 to 1513, Leonardo moved between Milan and Florence, evading the irate city councilmen who clamored for the rest of their Battle of Anghiari and also evading the violent skirmishes that plagued the area around Milan. He filled a series of notebooks with his writings, sketches, and anatomical studies. In 1512, the Florentine republic fell to a restored Medici dynasty; in 1513, Medici rule was reinforced by the election in Rome of a Medici pope, Leo X (reigned 1513–1521), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. When the pope invested his brother, Giuliano de' Medici, with honorary Roman citizenship, Leonardo traveled with Giuliano's entourage and continued to study and write from his own special apartment in the Vatican Palace. In a city dominated by the imposing influence of Raphael, who had transformed himself from a painter to a designer (disegnatore) of international fame, Leonardo began to compile his own notes on painting, which would eventually be gathered together by his pupil Francesco Melzi and published in 1651 as Treatise on Painting.

In 1516, the aging artist accepted an invitation to become peintre du roi by Francis I of France and moved north with Melzi and his servant Salai. He died there in 1519 at the age of sixty-seven.

Bibliography

Bambach, Carmen C., ed. Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman. New York, 2003. Includes an extensive bibliography.

Bramly, Serge. Leonardo: The Artist and the Man. Translated by Sian Reynolds. New York, 1994.

Clark, Kenneth. Leonardo da Vinci. Revised edition with an introduction by Martin Kemp. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1988.

Pedretti, Carlo, ed. The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. Berkeley, 1977.

Turner, A. Richard. Inventing Leonardo. Berkeley, 1993.

—INGRID ROWLAND

(lee-uh-nahr-doh, lay-uh-nahr-doh duh vin-chee)

An Italian artist, scientist, and inventor of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. His wide range of interests and abilities makes him a grand example of a “Renaissance man.” Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. His drawings include brilliant studies of the human body and of natural objects. Some of his sketches anticipate modern inventions such as the airplane and the tank.

(1452–1519). Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and engineer–inventor, born at Vinci near Florence, the natural son of a notary. He was apprenticed to Verrocchio (about 1470) in Florence and in 1482 settled in Milan, working with Lodovico Sforza. In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, as architect and engineer. The Mona Lisa was painted about 1504.

Leonardo's Notebooks are of great interest in describing his work and ideas on hydraulics, the casting of statues, and many inventions, as well as in giving his advice to painters and clear accounts of perspective and the use of shadow. He did not, however, appreciate that the two eyes give perception of depth (by stereopsis), and he wrongly thought that light must cross twice in the eye to produce a right-way-up retinal image, for perception to be non-inverted. He was also confused on why mirrors normally reverse left and right but not up and down — see MacCurdy (1938: vol. i, ch. 9). Leonardo recognized, however, many properties of the eye, such as 'irradiation' — bright objects appearing larger than dark ones — and his anatomical drawings are masterpieces, even though they sometimes incorporate features which he believed present when in fact they are not. Leonardo is generally recognized as the most universal genius of all time.

A feature of Leonardo's Notebooks of particular psychological interest is that these manuscripts were consistently written in mirror script. As is well known, mirror writing is not an altogether uncommon accomplishment, particularly among the left-handed. Although Leonardo's handedness is not reliably known, some experts have claimed that careful study of the detail and shading of his marginal sketches indicates that — at all events before he sustained a partial left-sided paralysis in later life — the pen was held in his left hand. It appears probable, therefore, that Leonardo was naturally left-handed and, like some other left-handed individuals, had a particular facility in mirror writing.

(Published 1987)

— O. L. Zangwill

Bibliography
• Critchley, M. (1928). Mirror-Writing.
• MacCurdy, E. (1938). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

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Quotes:

"I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have."

"Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power."

"Just as courage imperils life; fear protects it."

"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."

"[Three classes of people]: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see."

"Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect."

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