Leonardo Da Vinvi was born in April 15, 1452 and died May 2, 1519, He was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person that ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci states that while there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, in Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was, and is, renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number because of his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised flying machines, a tank, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull, also outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on later science.
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.
In 1482, Lorenzo de' Medici, a man from a prominent Italian family,
commissioned da Vinci to create a silver lyre and bring it to Ludovico il Moro,
the Duke of Milan, as a gesture of peace. Da Vinci did so and then wrote
Ludovico a letter describing how his engineering and artistic talents would be
of great service to Ludovico's court. His letter successfully endeared him to
Ludovico, and from 1482 until 1499, Leonardo was commissioned to work on a
great many projects. It was during this time that da Vinci painted "The
Last Supper."
Da
Vinci's most 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 1505 and 1507. Of the painting's wide appeal, James
Beck, an art historian at Columbia University, once explained, "It is the
inherent spirituality of the human creature that Leonardo was able to ingenuine
to the picture that raises the human figure to some kind of majesty."
It's been
said that the Mona Lisa had jaundice, that she was a pregnant woman and that
she wasn't actually a woman at all, but a man in drag. Based on accounts from
an early biographer, however, the "Mona Lisa" is a picture of Lisa
Gioconda, the real-life wife of a merchant, but that's far from certain. For da
Vinci, the "Mona Lisa" was forever a work in progress, as it was his
attempt at perfection. The painting was never delivered to its commissioner; da
Vinci 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.
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 utero, the heart and vascular system, sex organs,
and other bone and muscular structures, are some of the first on human record.
One of da Vinci's last commissioned works was a mechanical lion that could walk and open its chest to reveal a bouquet of lilies.
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not all my own work and took off a varied of websites but for got to reference it
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