Da Vinci 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.
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. From 1495 to 1497 he produced a mural of 'The Last Supper' in
the refectory of the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.
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, da Vinci returned to Milan, remaining there until 1513.
This was followed by 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.
The fame of Da Vinci's surviving paintings has meant that he has
been regarded primarily as an artist, but the thousands of surviving
pages of his notebooks reveal the most eclectic and brilliant of minds.
He wrote and drew on subjects including geology, anatomy (which he
studied in order to paint the human form more accurately), 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, airplane, helicopter, and parachute some 500 years ahead of
their time.
If all this work had been published in an intelligible form, da
Vinci's place as a pioneering scientist would have been beyond dispute.
Yet his true genius was not 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 what he meant, and how
he understood the world to work.
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