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＞＞＞完形填空。 Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist. He lived i..
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&&&& Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist. He lived in&&&1&&&in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He painted some of&&&2&&&pictures in the world. Mona Lisa is a good example of his works. He&&&3&&&painting Mona Lisa in 1503. &&&& Da Vinci loved science and&&&4& . He used darkness and light in a clever way in the painting. And a person can&&&5&&&see that there is a lot of geometry (几何学) in Mona Lisa. The face of Mona Lisa is&&&6&&&many circles and round shapes like balls. Even her&&&7&&&can be seen as a small part of a large circle. &&&& The woman in the painting is&&&8&&&on a balcony ( 阳台)? and mountains can be seen behind her. Da Vinci loved to study rocks and mountains,&&&9&&&we can see these in his other paintings. &&&& The woman is sitting with her knees to the side. He hands are held together&&10&&her. This way of sitting is now used by many artists when they are painting a picture of a man or woman.
(&&&& )1. A. China&&&&& (&&&& )2. A. less famous(&&&& )3. A. forgot&&&& (&&&& )4. A. math&&&&&& (&&&& )5. A. early&&&&& (&&&& )6. A. used for&& (&&&& )7. A. cry&&&&&&& (&&&& )8. A. lying&&&&& (&&&& )9. A. so&&&&&&&& (&&&& )10. A. under&&&&
B. Italy&&&&&& B. more famous&& B. began&&&&&& B. music&&&&&& B. easily&&&&& B. worked out& B. tears&&&&&& B. walking&&&& B. but&&&&&&&& B. behind&&&&&
C. Japan&&&&&&&&&&&& C. the least famous& C. allowed&&&&&&&&&& C. English&&&&&&&&&& &C. safely&&&&&&&&&& &&&& C. put away&&&& &&&& C. smile&&&&&&& && C. sitting&&&&&&& C. or&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& C. next to&&&&&&&&&
D. Canada&&&&&&&&&& & D. the most famous& &&&&&&&& D. remembered&&&&&& & D. chemistry&&&&&&& &D. happily&&&&&&&&&& && D. made of&&&&&&&& D. sadness&&&&&&&&&&& D. reading&&&&&&&&&&& D. until&&&&&&&&&&&&& &D. in front of&&&&&&
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290563284498276414299042289888319170By Dana Demange
Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper"
STEVE EMBER: I'm Steve Ember.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: And I'm Shirley Griffith with EXPLORATIONS in VOA Special English. Today, we tell about one of the greatest thinkers in the world, Leonardo da Vinci. He began his career as an artist. But his interest in the world around him drove him to study music, math, science, engineering and building design. Many of his ideas and inventions were centuries ahead of his time.
STEVE EMBER: We start with one of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous drawings, called "Vitruvian Man." This work is a good example of his ever questioning mind, and his effort to bring together art, math and science.
"Vitruvian Man" is a detailed sketch of a man's body, which is drawn at the center of a square and circle. The man's stretched arms and legs are in two positions, showing the range of his motion. His arms and legs touch the edges of the square and circle.
Detail from the drawing "Vitruvian Man"
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: With this drawing Leonardo was considering the size of the human body and its relationship to geometry and the writings of the ancient Roman building designer Vitruvius.
Leonardo wrote this about how to develop a complete mind: "Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."
STEVE EMBER: Leonardo da Vinci spent his life studying and observing in order to develop a scientific understanding of the world. He wrote down his thoughts and project ideas in a series of small notebooks. He made drawings and explained them with detailed notes. In these notebooks, he would write the words backwards. Some experts say he wrote this way because he wished to be secretive about his findings. But others say he wrote this way because he was left-handed and writing backwards was easier and helped keep the ink from smearing.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: The notebooks show many very modern ideas. Leonardo designed weapons, machines, engines, robots, and many other kinds of engineering devices.? When disease spread in Milan, Leonardo designed a city that would help resist the spread of infection. He designed devices to help people climb walls, and devices to help people fly. He designed early versions of modern machines such as the tank and helicopter. Few of these designs were built during his lifetime. But they show his extraordinarily forward- thinking mind.
The notebooks also contain details about his daily life. These have helped historians learn more about the personal side of this great thinker.
STEVE EMBER: Very little is known about Leonardo's early life. He was born in fourteen fifty-two in the town of Vinci. His father, Ser Piero da Vinci, was a legal expert. Experts do not know for sure about his mother, Caterina. But they do know that Leonardo's parents were never married to each other. As a boy, Leonardo showed a great interest in drawing, sculpting and observing nature.
However, because Leonardo was born to parents who were not married to each other, he was barred from some studies and professions. He trained as an artist after moving to Florence with his father in the fourteen sixties.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: It was an exciting time to be in Florence, one of the cultural capitals of Europe. Leonardo trained with one of the city's very successful artists, Andrea del Verrocchio. He was a painter, sculptor and gold worker. Verrocchio told his students that they needed to understand the body's bones and muscles when drawing people.
Leonardo took his teacher's advice very seriously. He spent several periods of his life studying the human body by taking apart and examining dead bodies. Experts say his later drawings of the organs and systems of the human body are still unequalled to this day.
STEVE EMBER: While training as an artist, Leonardo also learned about and improved on relatively new painting methods at the time. One was the use of perspective to show depth. A method called "sfumato" helped to create a cloudy effect to suggest distance. "Chiaroscuro" is a method using light and shade as a painterly effect. The artist also used oil paints instead of the traditional tempura paints used in Italy during this period.
nga.govLeonardo's first known portrait "Ginevra de'Benci"
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Leonardo's first known portrait now hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. He made this painting of a young woman named Ginevra de'Benci around fourteen seventy-four. The woman has a pale face with dark hair. In the distance, Leonardo painted the Italian countryside.
He soon received attention for his extraordinary artistic skills. Around fourteen seventy-five he was asked to draw an angel in Verrocchio's painting "Baptism of Christ." One story says that when Verrocchio saw Leonardo's addition to the painting, he was so amazed by his student's skill, that he said he would never paint again.
STEVE EMBER: Leonardo once said the following about actively using one's mental abilities: "Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold we even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind." His mind was so active that he did not often finish his many projects.
One religious painting he never finished was called "Adoration of the Magi". He was hired to make the painting for a religious center. The complex drawing he made to prepare for the painting is very special. It shows how carefully he planned his art works. It shows his deep knowledge of geometry, volume and depth. He drew the many people in the painting without clothes so that he could make sure that their bodies would be physically correct once covered.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Around fourteen eighty-two, Leonardo moved to Milan. There, he worked for the city's ruler, Ludovico Sforza. This ruler invited Leonardo to Milan not as an artist, but as a musician. Historians say Leonardo was one of the most skillful lyre players in all of Italy. But he also continued his work as a painter. He also designed everything from festivals to weapons and a sculpture for Ludovico Sforza.
STEVE EMBER: One famous work from Leonardo's Milan period is called "Virgin of the Rocks." It shows Jesus as a baby along with his mother, Mary, and John the Baptist also as a baby. They are sitting outside in an unusual environment. Leonardo used his careful observations of nature to paint many kinds of plants. In the background are a series of severe rock formations. This painting helped Leonardo make it clear to the ruler and people of Milan that he was a very inventive and skillful artist.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Leonardo later made his famous painting "The Last Supper" for the dining room of a religious center in Milan. He combined his studies in light, math, psychology, geometry and anatomy for this special work. He designed the painting to look like it was part of the room. The painting shows a story from the Bible in which Jesus eats a meal with his followers for the last time. Jesus announces that one of them will betray him.
The work received wide praise and many artists tried to copy its beauty. One modern art expert described Leonardo's "Last Supper" as the foundation of western art. Unfortunately, Leonardo experimented with a new painting method for this work. The paint has suffered extreme damage over the centuries.
STEVE EMBER: In addition to the portrait of Ginevra de'Benci that we talked about earlier, Leonardo also painted several other non-religious paintings of women. One painting of Cecilia Gallerani has come to be known as "Lady with an Ermine" because of the small white animal she is holding. This woman was the lover of Milan's ruler, Ludovico Sforza.
Detail from the "Mona Lisa" in the Louvre Museum in Paris
However, Leonardo's most famous portrait of a woman is called the "Mona Lisa." It is now in the collection of the Louvre museum in Paris. He painted this image of Lisa Gherardini starting around fifteen-oh-three. She was the wife of a wealthy businessman from Florence named Francesco del Giocondo. It is from him that the painting takes its Italian name, "La Gioconda."
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Lisa Gherardini is sitting down with her hands crossed in her lap. She looks directly at the painter. She seems to be smiling ever so slightly. A great deal of mystery surrounds the painting. Experts are not sure about how or why Leonardo came to paint the work. But they do know that he never gave it to the Giocondo family. He kept the painting with him for the rest of his life, during his travels through France and Italy.
Leonardo da Vinci died in France in fifteen nineteen. A friend who was with him at his death said this of the great man's life: "May God Almighty grant him eternal peace. Every one laments the loss of a man, whose like Nature cannot produce a second time."
STEVE EMBER: This program was written and produced by Dana Demange. I'm Steve Ember.
SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: And I'm Shirley Griffith. You can see some of Leonardo da Vinci's work at our . Join us again next week for
in VOA Special English.
Related ArticlesLeonardo da Vinci,Mona Lisa,The Last Supper
Current place:///Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (pronunciation, April 15, 1452 ?May 2, 1519) was an Italian polymath, scientist,
mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect,
botanist, musician and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the
archetype of the renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was
equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of
the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented
person ever to have lived. Helen Gardner says &The scope and depth of his
interests were without precedent...His mind and personality seem to us
superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote&.
Born as the illegitimate son of a notary,
Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was
educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of
his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by
Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a
painter. Two of his works, the
and The Last Supper, are the most
famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of
all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation
of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural
icon, being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts.
Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant,
and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic
procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks,
which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of
painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled
by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological
ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a
calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate
tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible
during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated
bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered
the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the
state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and
hydrodynamics.
Vitruve Luc Viatour
Childhood,
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452,
&at the third hour of the night& in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno
River in the territory of Florence.
He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a
Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant who may have been a slave from the Middle East. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense,
&da Vinci& simply meaning &of Vinci&: his full birth name
was &Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci&, meaning &Leonardo, (son)
of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci&.
Little is known about Leonardo's early
life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano, then lived in
the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small
town of Vinci.
His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved
Leonardo but died young. In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood
incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the
sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. The
second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was
both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by
curiosity to find out what was inside.
Leonardo's early life has been the subject
of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance
painters tells of how a local peasant requested that Ser Piero ask his talented
son to paint a picture on a round plaque. Leonardo responded with a painting of
snakes spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a
Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made
a profit, Ser Piero bought a plaque decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow,
which he gave to the peasant.
Verrocchio's workshop,
In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo
was apprenticed to one of the most successful artists of his day, Andrea di
Cione, known as Verrocchio. Verrocchio's workshop was at the centre of the
intellectual currents of Florence,
assuring the young Leonardo of an education in the humanities. Other famous
painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Ghirlandaio,
Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to
a vast range of technical skills and had the opportunity to learn drafting,
chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working,
mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting
and modelling.
Much of the painted production of
Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo
collaborated with Verrocchio on his Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel
holding Jesus's robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that
Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. This is probably an
exaggeration. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been
painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint,
the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and
much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo.
Leonardo himself may have been the model
for two works by Verrocchio, including the bronze statue of David in the
Bargello, and the Archangel Michael in Tobias and the Angel.
By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo
qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors
of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his
attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him.
Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473.
Professional life,
Adoration of the Magi, return to text
Court records of 1476 show that Leonardo
and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. From that
date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts,
although it is assumed that Leonardo had his own workshop in Florence between 1476 and 1481. He was
commissioned to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard and
The Adoration of the Magi in 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. This
important commission was interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari
was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's
head. Lorenzo de?Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace
with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an
often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse
things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord
that he could also paint.
Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and
1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the
Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the
monastery of Santa Maria
delle Grazie. While living in Milan
between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his
dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of
funeral expenditure suggests that she was his mother.
He worked on many different projects for
Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special
occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge
equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons
of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for
several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of
the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian
statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known
as the &Gran Cavallo&.
Leonardo began making detailed plans for
its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to
cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to
defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.
At the start of the Second Italian War in
1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the
&Gran Cavallo& for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown,
Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli,
fled Milan for Venice, where he was employed as a military
architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.
On his return to Florence in 1500, he and
his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima
Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari,
Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John
the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that &men and women, young
and old& flocked to see it &as if they were attending a great
festival&. In 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son
of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and
travelling throughout Italy
with his patron. He returned to Florence
where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years
designing and painting a great mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the
Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of
Cascina. In Florence
in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's
will, Michelangelo's statue of David.
In 1506 he returned to Milan. Many of Leonardo's most prominent
pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including
Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. However, he
did not stay in Milan for long because his
father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his
brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 he was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta
Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila.
From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent
much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican
in Rome, where
Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis
I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19,
Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took
place in Bologna.
It was for Francis that Leonardo was commissioned to make a mechanical lion
which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. In
1516, he entered Fran?ois' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos
Lucé near the king's residence at the royal Chateau Amboise. It was here that
he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and
apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, supported by a pension totalling 10,000
Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519.
Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held
Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the
French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French
artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact.
Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make
his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. In accordance to his will,
sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in
the castle of Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir
and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library
and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and
companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half
of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman
who received a black cloak of good stuff with a fur edge.
Some twenty years after Leonardo's death,
Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as
saying: &There had never been another man born in the world who knew as
much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as
that he was a very great philosopher.&
Relationships and influences
Florence ?Leonardo's artistic and social background
Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with
Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor
Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective
were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man.
The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della
Robbia, and architect and writer Alberti were in their sixties. The successful
artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio
Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give
the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle
Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was
ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries,
Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and
Ghiberti whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of
combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds.
Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, and was the
first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's
Treatise were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on
Leonardo's own observations and artworks.
Massaccio's depiction of the naked and
distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully
expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light
and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was
to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of
Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John
the Baptist.
A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the
Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by
the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia
family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as the The Madonna with a carnation and
The Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing indiosyncratic
departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin
is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the
opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later
paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli,
Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would
have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations,
and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the
Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and
Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered
commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to
portray the wealthy citizens of Florence
within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude
of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence.
These three were among those commissioned
to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's
employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His
first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of
Scopeto, was never completed.
In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's
association with Verrocchio's workshop, Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing the Portinari Altarpiece and the new
painterly techniques from Northern Europe
which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In
1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in
oils, travelled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni
Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred
method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.
Like the two contemporary architects,
Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs
for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as
both plans and views, although none was ever realised.
Leonardo's political contemporaries were
Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular
younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478.
Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan
and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici
court, was also of Leonardo's age.
With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of
the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of
whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer
of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek
and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of
the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and
philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a
journal &The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me.& While it
was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important
Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this
cryptic comment.
Although usually named together as the
three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were
not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was
born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of
37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating
for another 45 years.
Personal life
Main article: Leonardo da Vinci's personal
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his
extraordinary powers of invention, his &outstanding physical beauty&,
&infinite grace&, &great strength and generosity&,
&regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind& as described by Vasari
attracted the curiosity of others. Many authors have speculated on various
aspects of Leonardo's personality. One such aspect is his respect for life
evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of
purchasing caged birds and releasing them.
Leonardo had many friends who are now
renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They
included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in
the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este.Leonardo appears
to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with
Isabella d'Este. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him
through Mantua,
and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.
Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his
private life secret. His sexuality has often been the subject of study,
analysis and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was
revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud.
Assistants and pupils
copyedit Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno,
nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino (&The Little Unclean One& i.e., the
devil), entered his household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list
of his misdemeanours, calling him &a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a
glutton&, after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five
occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Nevertheless, Leonardo's notebooks
during their early years contain many drawings of the student, who remained
within Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. Salai executed a number
of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo
&taught him a great deal about painting&, his work is generally
considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils
such as Marco d'Oggione and Boltraffio. In 1515 he painted a nude version of
the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of
his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an
exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.
In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil,
Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat,
who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with
Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's
death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and
collections of Leonardo, and would henceforth faithfully administer the estate.
Despite the recent awareness and admiration
of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred
years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a
handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been
regarded as among the supreme masterpieces ever created.
These paintings are famous for a variety of
qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great
length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's
work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint,
his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in
physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and
gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his
use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his
most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper and the Virgin of the
The Last Supper
Early works
Leonardo's early works begin with the
Baptism of Christ painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings
appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One
is small, 59 centimetres (23 in)
long and 14 centimetres (5.5 in)
high. It is a &predella& to go at the base of a larger composition,
in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated.
The other is a much larger work, 217 centimetres (85 in) long. In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has
used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of
the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the
picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing
garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to
Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.
In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes
and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In
the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful
girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in
her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting
or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of
God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young
Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's
role in God's incarnation.
Paintings of the 1480s
In the 1480s Leonardo received two very
important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of
ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately two of the
three were never finished and the third took so long that it was subject to
lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is
that of St. Jerome
in the Wilderness. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of
Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: &I thought I
I was only learning to die.&
Although the painting is barely begun the
composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies
the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from
above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to
the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction.
J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's
anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion
whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space.
The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against
which the figure is silhouetted.
The daring display of figure composition,
the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished
masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, (see above ) a commission from the
Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition about 250
square centimetres. Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies,
including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical
architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482
Leonardo went off to Milan
at the behest of Lorenzo de?Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il
Moro and the painting was abandoned.
The third important work of this period is
the Virgin of the Rocks which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate
Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis
brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Leonardo
chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant
John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to
In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as
the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures
kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling
rock and whirling water. While the painting is quite large, about 200 × 120
centimetres, it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks
of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky
landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was
in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which
remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo
carried away to France.
But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment,
until the next century.
Paintings of the 1490s
Leonardo's most famous painting of the
1490s is The Last Supper, also painted in Milan.
The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before
his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said
&one of you will betray me&. Leonardo tells the story of the
consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.
The novelist Matteo Bandello observed
Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk
without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time.
This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who
hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how
Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ
and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior
as his model.
When finished, the painting was acclaimed
as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, but it deteriorated rapidly,
so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as
&completely ruined&. Leonardo, instead of using the reliable
technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso,
resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. Despite this,
the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies
being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.
Lady with an Ermine
Paintings of the 1500s
Among the works created by Leonardo in the
1500s is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or &la Gioconda&, the
laughing one. The painting is famous, in particular, for the elusive smile on
the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that
the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the
exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the
work is renowned came to be called &sfumato& or Leonardo's smoke.
Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute,
said that &the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divin and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the
original&.
Other characteristics found in this work
are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from
other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be
in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of
the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and
blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari
expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even &the
most confident master ... despair and lose heart.& The perfect state of
preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is
extremely rare in a panel painting of this date.
In the Virgin and Child with St. Anne (see
below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape
which Wasserman describes as &breathtakingly beautiful& and harks
back to the St Jerome
picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual
is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the
knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as
he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This
painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael,
and Andrea del Sarto, and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in
composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and
Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he
was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and
detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As
well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can
be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the
Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper. His earliest dated drawing
is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in
great detail.
Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian
Man, a study of the proportions of the human body, the Head of an Angel, for
The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem
and a large drawing (160×100 cm)
in black chalk on coloured paper of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and
St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the
subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought
that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre.
Other drawings of interest include numerous
studies generally referred to as &caricatures& because, although
exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari
relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow
them around all day observing them. There are numerous studies of beautiful
young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial
feature, the so-called &Grecian profile&. These faces are often
contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress
costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may
be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A
marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early
works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by
Leonardo in Florence
in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the
murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With
dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the
colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.
Leonardo as observer, scientist and
Renaissance humanism saw no mutually
exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies
in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic
work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings,
which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). These
notes were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as
he made continual observations of the world around him.
The journals are mostly written in
mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than
for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his
left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to
His notes and drawings display an enormous
range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries
and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and
shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of
details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies,
dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters
and architecture.
These notebooks—originally loose papers of
different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his death—have found
their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle,
the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de Espa?a, the Victoria and Albert Museum,
the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex
Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its
notebook BL Arundel MS 263 online. The Codex Leicester is the only major
scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and
is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.
Leonardo's journals appear to have been
intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that
would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or
the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single
sheet. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.
Scientific studies
Leonardo's approach to science was an
observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and
depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical
explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics,
contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did
teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and
prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved
as plates for Pacioli's book De Divina Proportione, published in 1509.
It appears that from the content of his
journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of
subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during
a visit by Cardinal Louis D'Aragon's secretary in 1517. Aspects of his work on
the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication
by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting
by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, with
engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin.
According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions
in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as &the precursor of French
academic thought on art&.
A recent and exhaustive analysis of
Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra
argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist
from Galileo, Newton
and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed
clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising
integrated the arts and particularly painting, these, and Leonardo's unique
integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems
theory and complexity schools of thought.
Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy
of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his
teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly
became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons
and other visible anatomical features.
As a successful artist, he was given
permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital
of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan
and Rome. From
1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della
Torre and together they prepared a theoretical work on anatomy for which
Leonardo made more than 200 drawings. It was published only in
after his death) under the heading Treatise on painting.
Leonardo drew many studies of the human
skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews, the heart and vascular
system, the sex organs, and other internal organs. He made one of the first
scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. As an artist, Leonardo closely
observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the
physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many
figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.
He also studied and drew the anatomy of
many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs,
and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans.
He also made a number of studies of horses.
Engineering and inventions
During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as
an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create
all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he
fled to Venice
in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable
barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting
the flow of the Arno River in order to flood Pisa. His journals include a vast number of inventions,
both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic
pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.
In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a
single span 720-foot (240 m)
bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Istanbul. The bridge was
intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because
he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was
resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed
in Norway.
On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge
to span the Golden Horn.
For much of his life, Leonardo was
fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of
birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for
several flying machines, including a helicopter and a light hang glider. Most
were impractical, but the hang glider has been successfully constructed and
demonstrated.
Leonardo the legend
Main article: Cultural depictions of
Leonardo da Vinci
Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was
such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to
have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. Vasari,
in his Lives of the Artists written about thirty years after Leonardo's death,
described him as having talents that &transcended nature&.
The interest in Leonardo has never
slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts
bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at
his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what
one so intelligent actually believed in.
Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of
Lives of the Artists, 1568, introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with
the following words:
In the normal course of events many men and
women are born wit but occasionally, in a way that
transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with
beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind,
all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from
God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of
Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty, who displayed
infinite grace in everything that he did and who cultivated his genius so
brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.
The continued admiration that Leonardo
commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other
written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano (&The
Courtier&), wrote in 1528: &... Another of the greatest painters in
this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ...& while the
biographer known as &Anonimo Gaddiano& wrote, c. 1540: &His
genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a
miracle on his behalf ...&.
The 19th century brought a particular
admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801:
&Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with
a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that
constitute the essence of genius ...& This is echoed by A. E. Rio who
wrote in 1861: &He towered above all other artists through the strength
and the nobility of his talents.&
By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's
notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866:
&There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal,
so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally
refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries.&
The famous art historian Bernard Berenson
wrote in 1896: &Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with
perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal
beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or
a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade,
forever transmuted it into life-communicating values.&
The interest in Leonardo's genius has experts study and translate his writings, analyse his
paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for
works which have been recorded but never found. Liana Bortolon, writing in
1967, said: &Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to
pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly,
to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting
overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a
genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still
view Leonardo with awe.&