Leonardo da Vinci
The Renaissance man above all others.
Leonardo was a painter, engineer, anatomist and inventor. He completed few paintings, but the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper are among the most famous images in the world.
Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 near the town of Vinci in Tuscany. He was the illegitimate son of the notary Ser Piero and a young woman named Caterina. As a teenager he was apprenticed to the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. There he learned painting, sculpture and mechanics. According to Vasari, he painted an angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, now in the Uffizi, so well that his master gave up painting, but this is probably a legend.
Around 1482 he moved to Milan and the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza. There he painted The Virgin of the Rocks, which exists in two versions, in the Louvre and in London, and Lady with an Ermine, now in Kraków. His greatest work from this period is The Last Supper in the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, painted in 1495–98. He experimented with a technique on a dry wall instead of traditional fresco, and the paint began to flake during his lifetime. After Milan he returned to Florence. There, around 1503, he began the Mona Lisa, on which he worked for many years. It is now in the Louvre and became world-famous when it was stolen in 1911 and recovered two years later.
Leonardo’s technique is called sfumato. He applied paint in thin, translucent layers so that the outlines dissolve into a soft haze. Faces and landscapes merge in light and shadow. He wanted the image to rest on knowledge of nature, and he dissected corpses and studied the eddies of water, the flight of birds and the structure of plants. Some 7,000 pages of his notes survive, written in mirror script.
He was an often unpredictable artist who started much and finished little. Fewer than twenty paintings are today considered securely his. A large fresco of the Battle of Anghiari in Florence has been lost. In his last years he lived in France as a guest of King Francis I, and he died at Amboise on 2 May 1519.
Leonardo has become the symbol of the Renaissance man, versed in art, science and technology. His sfumato and his way of giving figures life and inner movement changed painting for ever.