Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 - May 2, 1519) was a celebrated Italian Renaissance architect, inventor, engineer, sculptor and painter. He can be seen as the archetype of the Renaissance Man[?] and has been described as a genius.

Life His life was described in Giorgio Vasari's Vite. Leonardo was born in Vinci, Italy[?]. This was before modern naming conventions developed in Europe. Therefore, his full name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", which means "Leonardo, son of Piero, from Vinci". Leonardo himself simply signed his works "Leonardo" or "Io, Leonardo" ("I, Leonardo"). Presumably he did not use his father's name because he was an illegitimate child.

His father Ser Piero da Vinci was a well-off landowner or craftsman and his mother a peasant girl called Caterina. It has been suggested that Caterina was a slave of middle eastern origin owned by Piero, but the evidence is scant.

Leonardo grew up with his father in Florence. He became a painter's apprentice and later an independent painter in Florence.

From 1482 to 1499 he worked for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan and maintained his own workshop with apprentices there. 70 tons of bronze that had been set aside for Leonardo's "Gran Cavallo" horse statue was cast into weapons for the Duke to save Milan from the French under Charles VIII in 1495 - see also Italian Wars.

When the French returned under Louis XIII in 1498, Milan fell without a fight, overthrowing Sforza. Leonardo stayed in Milan for a time, until one morning he found French archers using his life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. He left with Salai[?] and his friend (and inventor of double-entry bookkeeping) Luca Pacioli for Mantua, moving on after 2 months for Venice, then moving again to Florence at the end of April 1500.

In Florence he entered the services of Cesare Borgia (also called "Duca Valentino" and son of Pope Alexander VI) as military architect and engineer. In 1506 he returned to Milan, now in the hands of Maximilian Sforza after Swiss mercenries drove out the French.

From 1513 to 1516 he lived in Rome, where painters like Raphael and Michelangelo were active at the time; he did not have much contact with these artists, however.

In 1515 Francis I of France retook Milan, and Leonardo was commissioned to make a centrepiece (of a mechanical lion) for the peace talks in Bologna between the French king and Pope Leo X, where he must have first met the king. In 1516, he entered Francis' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé next to the king's residence at the Royal Chateau at Amboise, and recieving a generous pension.

He died in Cloux[?], France and is buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise.

Leonardo appears to never have had intimate relations with women. In 1476 he was anonymously accused of homosexual contact with a 17-year-old model, Jacopo Saltarelli, a notorious prostitute. He was, together with three other young men, charged with homosexual conduct and acquitted because of lack of evidence. For a time Leonardo and the others were under the watchful eye of Florence's "Officers of the Night" - a kind of Renaissance vice squad[?].

Works

Leonardo da Vinci: The Last Supper (1498)

Leonardo is well known for his paintings, such as Mona Lisa (La Gioconda, now at the Louvre in Paris) and the Last Supper (Ultima Cena or Cenacolo, in Milan). Only seventeen of his paintings, and none of his statues, survive.

Leonardo often planned grand paintings with many drawings and sketches, only to leave the projects unfinished in the end.

In 1481 he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece "The Adoration of the Magi". After grand plans and many drawings, the painting was left unfinished and Leonardo left for Milan.

There he spent many years making plans and models for a monumental 8 metre (27 feet) high horse statue in bronze ("Gran Cavallo"), to be erected in Milan. Because of war with France, the project was never finished. Based on private initiative, a similar statue was completed according to his plans in 1999 in New York, given to Milan and erected there.

Back in Florence, he was commissioned for a large public mural; Michelangelo was to paint the opposite wall. After producing a fantastic variety of studies preparing for the work, he left town.

Maybe even more impressive than his artistic work are his detailed studies in anatomy (see "Vitruvian Man" below), engineering, bird flight and many other areas. He recorded his results in detailed notebooks which combine art and science. He was left-handed and used mirror writing[?] throughout his life.

In 1502 Leonardo da Vinci produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Sultan Bajazet II[?] of Constantinople. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosphorus known as the Golden Horn. The bridge was never built, but Da Vinci's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway.

His approach to science was an observatory one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanations. Throughout his life, he planned a grand encyclopedia based on detailed drawings of everything.

His notebooks contain drawings of several innovative machines, among them various flying machines and a helicopter, machine guns, an armored tank, a submarine, and a cog-wheeled device that has been interpreted as a mechanical calculator. On January 3, 1496 he unsuccessfully tested a flying machine he had constructed.

Leonardo did not publish or otherwise distribute the contents of these notebooks. The notebooks remained obscure until the 19th century, and were not directly of value to the development of science and technology until that time. On this basis, L. Sprague de Camp, in his book, The Ancient Engineers, considered Leonardo not the first modern engineer, but "the last of the ancient ones", pointing out that after Leonardo's time the practice of disseminating and publishing scientific discoveries began in earnest. In 1994, one of da Vinci's notebooks was purchased by American entrepreneur Bill Gates Chairman of Microsoft Corporation, for US$25 million.

See also:

• Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport near Rome
• Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute, Cairo

• List of painters
• List of Italian painters
• List of famous Italians

External links

• Discovery channel article on his mother (http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20020923/davinci)
• The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04/7ldvc09.txt)
• BBC Leonardo homepage (http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/leonardo)
• The Leonardo Bridge Project (http://www.vebjorn-sand.com/thebridge.htm)
• Anonymous accusation of homosexuality (http://www.kausal.com/leonardo/denunciation)