Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519)

LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452–1519)

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.

See also Art: Artistic Patronage ; Florence, Art in ; Medici Family ; Vasari, Giorgio .

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