Master painter Leonardo da Vinci – some events in his life
Leonardo da Vinci is usually thought to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever. We refer to him familiarly as “Leonardo” and everyone knows who we mean. He was one of the great creative minds of the Italian Renaissance, hugely influential as an artist and sculptor but also immensely talented as an engineer, scientist and inventor.
His epitomized the Renaissance ideal with his “unquenchable curiosity” and “feverishly inventive imagination”. It has been pointed out that, unusually for his time, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that he employed empirical methods.
Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a local lawyer. He was apprenticed to the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence and in 1478 became an independent master. In about 1483, he moved to Milan to work for the ruling Sforza family as an engineer, sculptor, painter and architect.
Da Vinci was in Milan until the city was invaded by the French in 1499 and the Sforza family forced to flee. He may have visited Venice before returning to Florence. During his time in Florence, he painted several portraits, but the only one that survives is the famous ‘Mona Lisa’ (1503-1506).
In 1506, Leonardo returned to Milan, remaining there until 1513. He then spent three years based in Rome. In 1517, at the invitation of the French king Francis I, Leonardo moved to the Château of Cloux, near Amboise in France, where he died on 2 May 1519.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s has usually been regarded primarily as an artist, but his notebooks reveal a most eclectic and brilliant mind. His subjects including geology, anatomy, flight, gravity and optics, often flitting from subject to subject on a single page, and writing in left-handed mirror script. He ‘invented’ the bicycle, aeroplane, helicopter, and parachute some 500 years ahead of their time.
His genius was neither as a scientist or an artist, but as a combination of the two: an ‘artist-engineer’. His painting was scientific, based on a deep understanding of the workings of the human body and the physics of light and shade. His science was expressed through art, and his drawings and diagrams show how he understood the world to work.
Leonardo da Vinci ‘invented’ and drew flying machines, an armoured vehicle,concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull, a diving suit. Few of his designs were feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions entered the world of manufacturing, unattributed. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings, so most were re-invented by later scientists.
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