Renaissance Man: Dad Vinci has been called a genius and the archetypal Renaissance man. His talents in arguably extended far beyond his artistic works. Like many leaders of Renaissance humanism, he did not see a divide between science and art. His observations and inventions were recorded in 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, including designs for flying machines (some 400 years before the Wright brothers’ first success), plant studies, war machinery, anatomy and architecture. His ideas were mainly theoretical explanations, laid out in exacting detail, but they were rarely experimental.
His drawings of a fetus in utter, the heart and vascular system, sex organs, and other bone and muscular structures, are some of the first on human record. One of dad Vine’s last commissioned works was a mechanical lion that could walk and open its chest to reveal a bouquet of lilies. Leonardo dad Vinci was a Florentine artist, one of the great masters of the high renaissance, he was also celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His intense love for knowledge and research was the keynote of both his artistic and scientific endeavors.
His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies-particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics anticipated many of the developments of modern science. Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the small Tuscan town of Vinci, near Florence. He was the son of a wealthy Florence notary and a peasant women. In the mid-asses the dad Vinci family settled in Florence. In Florence Leonardo was given the best education that Florence could offer.
He was a fine musician and improviser. In about 1466 he was apprenticed as a garbanzo (studio boy) to Andrea del Veronica, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. In Veronica’s workshop Leonardo was introduced to many activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble and bronze. In the year 1472 he was entered in the painter’s guide of Florence, and in 1476 he was still mentioned as Veronica’s assistant.
In Veronica’s Baptism of Christ, the kneeling angel at the left of the painting is by Leonardo dad Vinci. In the year 1478 Leonardo became an independent master. His first large painting the Adoration of the Magi, left unfinished, was ordered in 1481 for the Monastery of San Donation a Scope, Florence. Other works ascribed to his youth are the so-called Bennie Madonna, the portrait Gingers De’ Bench and the unfinished Saint Jerome. In about 1482 dad Vinci entered the service of the duke of Milan.
Having written the duke an astonishing letter in which he stated that he could build portable bridges; that he knew the techniques of constructing bombardments and of making cannons; that he could build ships as well as armored vehicles, catapults, and other war machines; ND that he could execute sculpture in marble, bronze, and clay. He served as principal engineer in the duke’s numerous military enterprises and was active as an architect. Evidence indicates that dad Vinci had apprentices and pupils in Milan, for whom he probably wrote the various texts later complied as treatise on painting.
The most important of his own painting during the Milan period was the Virgin of the The last supper: From 1495 to 1497 he labored on his masterpiece “The Last Supper”. Unfortunately, him experimenting of the use of oil on dry plaster was technically unsound, and by he asses its distortion had begun since 1726 attempts to restore have been made but not very successful; a concerted restoration and conservation program was begun in abandon its reversing some of damage however most of the original surface is gone.
The Mona Lisa: Leonardo dad Vine’s well-known painting, and arguably the most famous painting in the world, the “Mona Lisa” was a privately commissioned work and was completed sometime between the years 1 505 &1507. James black, an art historian at Columbia University, once explained “It is the inherent spirituality of the human creature that Leonardo was able to in genuine to the picture that rises the human figure to some kind of majesty. ” It has been said that the Mona Lisa had Jaundice, that she was a pregnant women that she wasn’t a women at all, but a man in drag.
Based on accounts from an early biographer said that the Mona Lisa is a picture of Lisa Giaconda, the real-life wife off merchant, buts that’s far from certain. For Leonardo dad Vinci however the “Mona Lisa” is forever a work in progress, as it was his attempt at perfection. The painting was never was never delivered to its commissioner because Leonardo kept it with him until the end of his life. Today the Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre museum in Paris, France secured behind bullet proof glass and is regarded as a priceless national treasure. Artist: Ever the perfectionist, Leonardo turned to science in the quest to improve his artwork.
His study of nature and anatomy emerged in his stunningly realistic paintings, and his dissections of the human body paved the way for remarkably accurate figures. He was the first artist to study the physical proportions of men, women and children and to use these studies to determine the “ideal” human figure. Unlike many of his contemporaries Michelangelo for example he didn’t get aired away and paint ludicrously muscular bodies, which he referred to as “bags of nuts. ” All in all, Leonardo believed that the artist must know not Just the rules of perspective, but all the laws of nature.
The eye, he believed, was the perfect instrument for learning these laws, and the artist the perfect person to illustrate them. Inventor: “Levers and Gears” Leonardo recognized that levers and gears, when applied properly, could accomplish astonishing tasks. Gears were at the heart of nearly all his inventions, from the crane to the helicopter to the automatic turnips. “Defense contractor” Like any rational human, Leonardo abhorred war he called it “beastly madness” – but since Renaissance Italy was constantly at war he couldn’t avoid it.
He designed numerous weapons, including missiles, multi-barreled machine guns, grenades, an underwater breathing device, which he refused to reveal, saying that men would likely use it for “evil in war. ” Scientist “Roy Anatomy One cannot exaggerate the unpleasantness of Leonardo anatomy studies. Cadavers are already pretty awful, even when refrigerated and pickled in formaldehyde, but Renaissance Italy had no such niceties. Leonardo, in his fervor for knowledge, held nettles creepy vigils with the local corpses, and their annoying tendency to decay forced him to work as quickly as possible.
He described it as “living through the night hours in the company of quartered and flayed corpses fearful to behold,” but as usual his curiosity pushed him ever onward. “Tell-The features” Alas, even Leonardo fell for some bogus theories. He was fascinated by the study of physiognomy, the “science” of evaluating a person’s character by his or her facial features. Although utter codswallop, physiognomy was all the rage until the beginning of this century, when scientists finally chucked it once and for all.
