Leonardo Da Vinci
1452-1519
One of the Greatest Painters Of
All Time
The Greatest Italian Painter of the
High Renaissance
Influences -Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Lorenzetti , Francesco Traini, Giotto Bondone, Paolo Veneziano, Jacopo di Cione, Andrea del Verrocchio and Donatello
Education: Apprenticed to the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio
Cause of Death: Old Age
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His life has
three divisions--thirty years at Florence, nearly twenty years at Milan,
then nineteen years of wandering, till he sinks to rest under the
protection of Francis the First at the Chateau de Clou. The dishonor of
illegitimacy hangs over his birth. Piero Antonio, his father, was of a
noble Florentine house, of Vinci in the Val d'Arno, and Leonardo,
brought up delicately among the true children of that house, was the
love-child of his youth, with the keen, puissant nature such children
often have. We see him in his youth fascinating all men by his
beauty, improvising music and songs, buying the caged birds and setting
them free, as he walked the streets of Florence, fond of odd bright
dresses and spirited horses.
From his earliest years he designed many objects, and constructed models
in relief, of which Vasari
mentions some of women smiling. His father, pondering over this promise
in the child, took him to the workshop of
Andrea del Verrocchio,
then the most famous artist in Florence. Beautiful objects lay about
there--reliquaries, pyxes, silver images for the pope's chapel at Rome,
strange fancy-work of the
middle age, keeping
odd company with fragments of antiquity, then but lately discovered.
Another student Leonardo may have seen there--a boy into whose soul the
level light and aerial illusions of Italian sunsets had passed, in after
days famous as Perugino. Verrocchio was an artist of the earlier Florentine type, carver,
painter, and worker in metals, in one; designer, not of pictures only,
but of all things for sacred or household use, drinking-vessels,
ambries, instruments of music, making them all fair to look upon,
filling the common ways of life with the reflection of some far-off
brightness; and years of patience had refined his hand till his work was
now sought after from distant places.
The remaining years of Leonardo's life are more or less years of
wandering. From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and he
returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit
excited: the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of
invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authentic
works, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First,
at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the Saint Anne--not the Saint Anne
of the Louvre, but a mere cartoon, now in London--revived for a moment a
sort of appreciation more common in an earlier time, when good pictures
had still seemed miraculous; and for two days a crowd of people of all
qualities passed in naive excitement through the chamber where it hung,
and gave Leonardo a taste of Cimabue's triumph. But his work was less
with the saints than with the living women of Florence; for he lived
still in the polished society that he loved, and in the houses of
Florence.
According to
Giorgio Vasari "The
loss of Leonardo
caused exceptional grief to those who had known him, because there never
was a man who did so much honor to painting. By the splendor of his
magnificent mien he comforted every sad soul, and his eloquence could
turn men to either side of a question. His personal strength was
prodigious, and with his right hand he could bend the clapper of a
knocker or a horseshoe as if they had been of lead. His liberality
warmed the hearts of all his friends, both rich and poor, if they
possessed talent and ability. His presence adorned and honored the most
wretched and bare apartment. Thus Florence received a great gift in the
birth of Leonardo, and its loss in his death was immeasurable."
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