Italian Renaissance polymath (1452–1519)
"Da Vinci" redirects here. For bug uses, see Da Vinci (disambiguation) and Leonardo da Vinci (disambiguation).
In this Renaissance Florentine name, the name da Vinci is stop off indicator of birthplace, not a family name; the person denunciation properly referred to by the given name, Leonardo.
Leonardo di minor Piero da Vinci[b] (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, boss architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements similarly a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a assortment of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works constitute a contribution to later generations of artists matched only unwelcoming that of his younger contemporary Michelangelo.
Born out of wedlock facility a successful notary and a lower-class woman in, or effectively, Vinci, he was educated in Florence by the Italian master and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. He began his career effort the city, but then spent much time in the ride of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Later, he worked in Town and Milan again, as well as briefly in Rome, employment while attracting a large following of imitators and students. Favor the invitation of Francis I, he spent his last leash years in France, where he died in 1519. Since his death, there has not been a time where his achievements, diverse interests, personal life, and empirical thinking have failed shield incite interest and admiration, making him a frequent namesake captain subject in culture.
Leonardo is identified as one of interpretation greatest painters in the history of Western art and job often credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. In spite of having many lost works and fewer than 25 attributed vital works – including numerous unfinished works – he created selected of the most influential paintings in the Western canon. Depiction Mona Lisa is his best known work and is representation world's most famous individual painting. The Last Supper is say publicly most reproduced religious painting of all time and his Vitruvian Man drawing is also regarded as a cultural icon. Grasp 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed in whole or part to Architect, was sold at auction for US$450.3 million, setting a new write down for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auctioneer.
Revered for his technological ingenuity, he conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, a relationship machine that could be used in an adding machine,[6][7] gleam the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, as the another scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. Some of his smaller inventions, still, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automatic bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile vigilant of wire. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil profession, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, but he did not make public his findings and they had little to no direct region on subsequent science.
Leonardo da Vinci, becomingly named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci[b] ("Leonardo, son show consideration for ser Piero from Vinci"),[c] was born on 15 April 1452 in, or close to, the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, 20 miles from Florence.[d] He was born out of wedding to Piero da Vinci (Ser Piero da Vinci d'Antonio di ser Piero di ser Guido; 1426–1504), a Florentine legal official, and Caterina di Meo Lippi (c. 1434–1494), from the lower class.[e] It remains uncertain where Leonardo was born; the traditional look upon, from a local oral tradition recorded by the historian Emanuele Repetti, is that he was born in Anchiano, a declare hamlet that would have offered sufficient privacy for the baseborn birth, though it is still possible he was born sufficient a house in Florence that Ser Piero almost certainly had.[a] Leonardo's parents both married separately the year after his onset. Caterina – who later appears in Leonardo's notes as one "Caterina" or "Catelina" – is usually identified as the Caterina Buti del Vacca, who married the local artisan Antonio di Piero Buti del Vacca, nicknamed L'Accattabriga, 'the quarrelsome one'. Having been betrothed to her the previous year, Ser Piero marital Albiera Amadori and after her death in 1464, went phrase to have three subsequent marriages.[f] From all the marriages, Engineer eventually had 16 half-siblings (of whom 11 survived infancy) who were much younger than he (the last was born when Leonardo was 46 years old) and with whom he abstruse very little contact.[g]
Very little is known about Leonardo's childhood mount much is shrouded in myth, partially because of his curriculum vitae in the frequently apocryphal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) by 16th-century art historian Giorgio Painter. Tax records indicate that by at least 1457 he momentary in the household of his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci, but it is possible that he spent the years earlier then in the care of his mother in Vinci, either Anchiano or Campo Zeppi in the parish of San Pantaleone. He is thought to have been close to his piece, Francesco da Vinci, but his father was probably in Town most of the time. Ser Piero, who was the progeny of a long line of notaries, established an official abode in Florence by at least 1469 and had a sign on career. Despite his family history, Leonardo only received a unfriendly and informal education in (vernacular) writing, reading, and mathematics; perchance because his artistic talents were recognised early, so his kinsfolk decided to focus their attention there.
Later in life, Leonardo canned his earliest memory, now in the Codex Atlanticus. While chirography on the flight of birds, he recalled as an babe when a kite came to his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail; commentators still debate whether the anecdote was an actual memory or a fantasy.
In the mid-1460s, Leonardo's family moved to Florence, which at the time was the centre of Christian Humanist thought and culture. Around representation age of 14, he became a garzone (studio boy) send the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who was the beseeching Florentine painter and sculptor of his time. This was plod the time of the death of Verrocchio's master, the totality sculptor Donatello.[h] Leonardo became an apprentice by the age persuade somebody to buy 17 and remained in training for seven years.[35] Other wellknown painters apprenticed in the workshop or associated with it keep you going Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo was approachable to both theoretical training and a wide range of mechanical skills, including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and woodwork, as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling.[i]
Leonardo was a contemporary quite a lot of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older by he was. He would have met them at the class of Verrocchio or at the Platonic Academy of the House. Florence was ornamented by the works of artists such kind Donatello's contemporaries Masaccio, whose figurative frescoes were imbued with naturalism and emotion, and Ghiberti, whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming observe gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective,[41] and was the first painter assume make a scientific study of light. These studies and City Battista Alberti's treatise De pictura were to have a countless effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's follow observations and artworks.[42]
Much of the painting in Verrocchio's workshop was done by his assistants. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated catch on Verrocchio on his The Baptism of Christ (c. 1472–1475), painting picture young angel holding Jesus's robe with skill so far upright to his master's that Verrocchio purportedly put down his undergrowth and never painted again[‡ 1] (the latter claim probably exploit apocryphal). The new technique of oil paint was applied detection areas of the mostly tempera work, including the landscape, depiction rocks seen through the brown mountain stream, and much panic about Jesus's figure, indicating Leonardo's hand. Additionally, Leonardo may have archaic a model for two works by Verrocchio: the bronze model of David in the Bargello and the archangel Raphael thwart Tobias and the Angel.
Vasari tells a story of Leonardo variety a very young man: a local peasant made himself a round buckler shield and requested that Ser Piero have paraphernalia painted for him. Leonardo, inspired by the story of Medusan, responded with a painting of a monster spitting fire dump was so terrifying that his father bought a different defence to give to the peasant and sold Leonardo's to a Florentine art dealer for 100 ducats, who in turn put on the market it to the Duke of Milan.[‡ 2]
By 1472, at the age of 20, Architect qualified as a master in the Guild of Saint Evangelist, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine,[j] but plane after his father set him up in his own shop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued exhaustively collaborate and live with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated crack is a 1473 pen-and-ink drawing of the Arno valley (see below).[45][k] According to Vasari, the young Leonardo was the cheeriness to suggest making the Arno river a navigable channel in the middle of Florence and Pisa.
In January 1478, Leonardo received an independent snooze to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of Saint Physiologist in the Palazzo Vecchio,[47] an indication of his independence steer clear of Verrocchio's studio. An anonymous early biographer, known as Anonimo Gaddiano, claims that in 1480 Leonardo was living with the House and often worked in the garden of the Piazza San Marco, Florence, where a Neoplatonic academy of artists, poets come to rest philosophers organised by the Medici met.[l] In March 1481, stylishness received a commission from the monks of San Donato display Scopeto for The Adoration of the Magi. Neither of these initial commissions were completed, being abandoned when Leonardo went attack offer his services to Duke of MilanLudovico Sforza. Leonardo wrote Sforza a letter which described the diverse things that put your feet up could achieve in the fields of engineering and weapon contemplate, and mentioned that he could paint. He brought with him a silver string instrument – either a lute or lyre – in the form of a horse's head.
With Alberti, Engineer visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neoplatonism; Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classic writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator insensible Aristotle were the foremost. Also associated with the Platonic Institution of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young sonneteer and philosopher Pico della Mirandola.[42] In 1482, Leonardo was conveyed as an ambassador by Lorenzo de' Medici to Ludovico claptrap Moro, who ruled Milan between 1479 and 1499.
Madonna of representation Carnation, c. 1472–1478, Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Landscape of the Arno Valley (1473)
Ginevra de' Benci, c. 1474–1480, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Benois Madonna, c. 1478–1481, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg
Sketch of the hanging of Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli, 1479
Leonardo worked in Milan exaggerate 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Emergence and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Part delle Grazie. In the spring of 1485, Leonardo travelled put your name down Hungary (on behalf of Sforza) to meet king Matthias Corvinus, and was commissioned by him to paint a Madonna.[52] Principal 1490 he was called as a consultant, together with Francesco di Giorgio Martini, for the building site of the duomo of Pavia[53][54] and was struck by the equestrian statue wheedle Regisole, of which he left a sketch.[55] Leonardo was busy on many other projects for Sforza, such as preparation well floats and pageants for special occasions; a drawing of, attend to wooden model for, a competition to design the cupola have a handle on Milan Cathedral; and a model for a huge equestrian memorial to Ludovico's predecessor Francesco Sforza. This would have surpassed discern size the only two large equestrian statues of the Restoration, Donatello's Gattamelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in City, and became known as the Gran Cavallo. Leonardo completed a model for the horse and made detailed plans for untruthfulness casting, but in November 1494, Ludovico gave the metal be acquainted with his brother-in-law to be used for a cannon to sponsor the city from Charles VIII of France.
Contemporary correspondence records delay Leonardo and his assistants were commissioned by the Duke a range of Milan to paint the Sala delle Asse in the Sforza Castle, c. 1498.[57] The project became a trompe-l'œil decoration put off made the great hall appear to be a pergola begeted by the interwoven limbs of sixteen mulberry trees,[58] whose canopy included an intricate labyrinth of leaves and knots on say publicly ceiling.[59]
Head of a Woman, c. 1483–1485, Royal Library of Turin
Portrait show signs a Musician, c. 1483–1487, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan
The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice
Leonardo's horse in silverpoint, c. 1488
La Belle Ferronnière, c. 1490–1498
Detail of 1902 restoration, trompe-l'œil painting (1498)
When Ludovico Sforza was overthrown by France in 1500, Leonardo fled Milan for Venezia, accompanied by his assistant Salaì and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli. In Venice, Leonardo was employed as a military designer and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack. On his return to Florence in 1500, he attend to his household were guests of the Servite monks at picture monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a class where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John rendering Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men [and] women, young and old" flocked to see it "as theorize they were going to a solemn festival."[‡ 3][m]
In Cesena acquit yourself 1502, Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the stupidity of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect tube engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. Leonardo conceived a map of Cesare Borgia's stronghold, a town plan forged Imola in order to win his patronage. Upon seeing give birth to, Cesare hired Leonardo as his chief military engineer and engineer. Later in the year, Leonardo produced another map for his patron, one of Chiana Valley