Living of Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, artist, architect, cartographer, engineer, scientist and inventor in the 15th century. Yet, despite his genius, he known himself as "senza lettere" (the illiterate, the man without words). For good reason: until late in life, he was not able to read, or write, Latin, the language employed by almost all other Renaissance intellectuals, the lingua franca, akin to English today. Or was he familiar with arithmetic until he was 30.
Leonardo was born out of wedlock but was raised by his real father, a rich Florentine notary. He served at least 10 years (1466-1476) as Garzone (apprentice) to Andrea del Verrocchio and painted details in Verrocchio's canvasses. Only in 1478, when he was 26, did he become independent.
He was not down to an auspicious start. He never executed his first commission (an altarpiece in the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio della Signoria, Florence's city hall). His first large pictures were left unfinished ("The Adoration of the Magi" and "Saint Jerome", both 1481).
A lot of the sketches and studies for Leonardo's works of art and design are found on his shopping lists, personal records, and personal expenditure ledgers.
No-one was permitted to enter Leonardo's bedroom, where he held, as Giorgio Vasari in "Lives of the Artists", describes: "a number of natural and other types of lizards, crickets, serpents, butterflies, locusts, hats, and various strange creatures of the nature."
Leonardo's customers were usually dissatisfied with his glacial pace, lack of professional control, and inability to end his tasks. He was usually involved with litigation. He was sued by the Cofraternity of the Immaculate Conception when he didn't make the Virgin on the Rocks, an they commissioned from him in 1483. Ten years the court proceedings lasted. The top of Jesus in "The Last Supper" was left empty patent pending since Leonardo didn't dare to paint a human product, nor did he trust his imagination completely. Leonardo labored four years on the Mona Lisa but never finished it, both. He carried it with him wherever he went.
Leonardo's terra cota design for a large bronze statue of the daddy of his benefactor and employer, Ludovico Sforza, was used for target practice by invading French troops in 1499. The metal which was likely to go into this thing of beauty was cast into cannon balls.
Leonardo was an associate of the commission which deliberated where you can place Michelangelo's magnificent statue of David. His cartographic work was so forward of its time, that the express highway from Florence to the sea - built-in the 20th century - uses precisely the way of a canal he imagined. His scientific investigations - in anatomy, hydraulics, mechanics, ornithology, botany - are believed useful for this very day. Some hisn'tebooks are owned by bill Gates containing scientific data and findings the Codex Hammer) (known.
But Leonardo's loyalties were fickle. He changed sides to the conquering French and in 1506 came back to Milan to work for its French governor, Charles D'Amboise. Later, he became court painter for King Louis XII of France who, at the time, resided in Milan. In 1516, he transferred to France, to serve King Francis I and there he died.
Leonardo summed up the lessons of his art in a series of missives to his students, probably in Milan. We were holding later (1542) gathered by his close associate, Francesco Melzi, as "A Treatise on Painting" and published in publications (1651, 1817).
