Overview
“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 then from human art.” – Giorgio Vasari on Leonardo in Lives of the Artists, 1568.
Leonardo is given a separate section of notes because, although he lived in Florence when young, he soon went to Milan and finally France. You can therefore use these notes for Florence, for Milan, for Amboise in the Loire Valley where he died, or for general road commentary about Italian art.
Leonardo da Vinci was an extraordinarily multi-talented person, very much a Renaissance man – one who could turn his hand to all manner of things. In Italy in the late fifteenth century there were not such clear-cut divisions between different branches of the arts as there are today. Goldsmiths would branch out into sculpture, sculptors might design a new palace for their patron, and painters famed for portraits or altarpieces would be asked to decorate the walls of a nobleman’s house or the chapel built onto the local church for family tombs. Leonardo, trained principally as a painter, also became passionately interested in all branches of the arts, as well as in mathematics, anatomy, botany, geology and even aeronautics.
Early Life and Training in Florence
Born the illegitimate son of a lawyer in the small town of Vinci outside Florence in 1452, Leonardo was brought up by his father until he was 14 years old, when he was apprenticed to the workshop of the Florentine artist Verrocchio. Florence in the 1460s would have looked to the young apprentice much as it does today. Brunelleschi’s great cathedral dome had been finished thirty years earlier, the Ponte Vecchio would have been bustling with traders and their clients, and the main streets and public squares, with their cobblestones and high stone palaces whose forbidding street fronts hide splendid interiors, would all have seemed familiar to Leonardo.
Leonardo settled into his apprenticeship and, like Michelangelo nearly twenty years later, proved himself a precocious genius. On one occasion he decorated a shield with a great monster so horrible that his father, on seeing it, jumped back thinking it was real. Vasari tells us that the young artist liked to find someone unusual on the streets of Florence – with a strange profile or an enormous beard – and follow them about all day so that he could draw them perfectly when he got home. This must have been extremely annoying for his unsuspecting models, but it was excellent training for his powers of observation and visual memory.
Scientific Curiosity and the Natural World
Leonardo’s sharp interest in the world around him and his desire to investigate and experiment with it were not limited to drawing and painting. He became fascinated with the structure of living things – the anatomy of humans, animals and birds – as well as the way plants are put together. He recorded what he observed diligently in the notebooks he kept throughout his life, filling them with descriptions and diagrams.
His passionate interest in nature and his careful, exact study of it were new. Artists at this time often painted stylised, decorative landscapes and trees from memory rather than from observation. Leonardo’s approach made his paintings much more realistic, both in the figures themselves and in their natural settings.
Leonardo’s Artistic Style
The young apprentice’s paintings, mainly religious commissions, soon began to look very different from those of his master Verrocchio. Verrocchio’s colours were bright and unsubtle, and his landscapes, scattered with neat groups of mountains and clusters of flowers, were peopled with robust Madonnas and chubby angels – often recognisable portraits of Florentines from the streets around his workshop.
Leonardo’s style was much more subtle and startlingly new. His elegant, delicate-featured figures had a grace and nobility inspired by his study of classical carvings, and a soft, dreamy, rather mysterious look achieved by deep, smoky shadow – sfumato. This technique, one of the most characteristic features of his work, means there are no hard edges in his painting, just gentle, subtle recession into space. His landscape settings were equally original – romantic, mist-covered lakes with far-off rocky hills, trees drawn as delicately as his angels, and beautifully observed plants and flowers. His colours were distinctive: olive greens, smoky greys and blues, adding to the poetic, slightly melancholy feeling of his pictures. Younger painters studying in Florence – Raphael especially – were much influenced by the noble grace of Leonardo’s work.
Milan and The Last Supper
In 1482 Leonardo went to Milan, supposedly because Lorenzo de’ Medici sent him there with a gift for its Duke of a silver lyre. Leonardo was by now a fine musician and an elegant young man who dressed in beautiful clothes and had exquisite manners. The luxurious, pleasure-loving court of the great northern city suited him well. Milan also offered more doctors, scientists, mathematicians and military engineers than Florence, which clearly appealed to his restless curiosity.
In Milan, Leonardo was given a large range of duties – from supervising pageants to designing cannons and even central heating – all of which suited his interest in experiment and invention.
From 1495 to 1497 he worked on The Last Supper, the great fresco for the refectory of the Dominican friars at Santa Maria delle Grazie, which became one of his most celebrated works. A contemporary wrote that he would arrive early in the morning and stay on the platform before the painting from sunrise until darkness, never laying down the brush, painting without eating or drinking. The unity of composition, wonderfully realistic perspective and sense of drama made the fresco instantly famous. Unfortunately his experimental mixture of materials caused it to deteriorate almost immediately, and today its condition is very poor.
Mantua, Florence and the Mona Lisa
After the French invaded Milan, Leonardo spent the last years of the fifteenth century at the court of Isabella d’Este in Mantua, and then returned to Florence. There, in 1503, he painted the Mona Lisa. His sitter was the 24-year-old second wife of an obscure Florentine merchant – no one special – yet the painting has become perhaps the most famous in the world.
Her fame has much to do with her celebrated mystery and half-smile. Vasari tells us that to keep her expression of contented serenity, Leonardo “retained musicians who played and sang and continually jested in order to take away that melancholy that painters are used to give their portraits.” Originally the painting would have been much more colourful – it has faded considerably. Its appeal also lies in the harmonious outline Leonardo made of her, self-contained in the picture space with her folded hands and loose hair falling to her shoulders. Her setting is absolutely typical of his work – poetic, rocky and romantic – and adds to her mystery with its complete lack of prosaic detail from her real Florentine life.
This period in Florence was otherwise difficult and sad for Leonardo. Now fifty, he faced many younger, ambitious artists competing for commissions. He was asked to paint a series of frescoes for the Palazzo Vecchio, but again experimented with different materials and techniques. The results darkened and even began to melt, and he did not have the heart to finish the work. The Signoria, angry at the time and money they felt had been wasted, accused him of being a laggard and gave the job to someone else.
Rome and Late Experiments
In 1513 Leonardo went to Rome, attracted like many other artists by the notorious liberality of the Medici pope, Leo X. But there too he found many young, vigorous artists jockeying for position, with Michelangelo and Raphael as favourites of the day. Lonely and sad, Leonardo retreated into his fertile imagination, filling his days with the construction of wax-winged dragons to fly in the wind and with optical instruments, reminders of his earlier ingenious paper designs for prototype helicopters and submarines.
Final Years in France
In 1516 Francis I of France invited Leonardo to live at his court. The French had tried before to lure him there without success, but now the proposal seemed extremely attractive and he went at once. Francis treated him with great kindness and respect, giving him the manor of Cloux (Le Clos-Lucé) near one of his palaces at Amboise and asking for nothing in return except the honour of daily conversation with the old artist.
Benvenuto Cellini, the Italian artist and goldsmith who later worked for the French king, reports having heard Francis say, twenty years later, that he believed no other man had been born who knew so much as Leonardo in sculpture, painting and architecture, and that he was a very great philosopher.
Leonardo produced little major work in France, although the famous double-helix staircase at the château of Chambord has been attributed to him. He spent his last years in peaceful and happy retirement, with a congenial patron and a charming house in which to think and write, which in many ways he most enjoyed.
He died in 1519 and is buried at Amboise.
Key Dates
- Born: 1452
- Died: 1519