Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci personified the
Renaissance
, the extraordinary age in which he lived. Born a bastard in a hillside town in northern Italy, he became the protégé of princes, popes, and kings. Though many of his projects went unfinished, he set new benchmarks in painting and created stunning works of architecture, sculpture, and the written word. He mastered so many branches of science that scholars still debate whether he was more accomplished as an anatomist, botanist, cartographer, engineer, geographer, or naturalist.

By the time he died in 1519, Leonardo seemed to have accomplished his boyhood ambition: “I wish to work miracles.” Nevertheless, he died unhappy, believing he had failed to live up to his potential.

Leonardo’s genius set the standard that Western civilization still struggles to attain, and he serves as a reminder of the untold breadth and depth a single brilliant mind can span.

After the gloom and superstitions of the
Middle Ages
, the Renaissance that began in the early 1400s dispelled the immense cloud suspended over a Europe devastated by
plague
and war. A new spirit of intellectual rigor and scientific inquiry spread through universities and monasteries, where unconventional notions of liberty were born and depictions of nature appeared in a fresh guise. Artists and sculptors, confined for generations within the conventions of medieval art, embraced and explored naturalism and new forms of human expression. It appeared to many that a new world was emerging, one where people would be freed by reason and knowledge and all the secrets of the universe could be found and put to use.

At the center of this vortex was
Florence
, but as the new era expanded, it became evident that the Renaissance would transform all of European civilization and eventually the world.

The man who came to personify the era, Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452. Widely admired in his own day, he left a posthumous treatise on the art of painting - 7,000 pages of manuscripts and 3,000 pages of notes filled with his writings and drawings. Yet at his core, he remains a puzzle. “Leonardo is the
Hamlet
of art history,” wrote scholar and art critic
Kenneth Clark
, “whom each of us must recreate for himself.”

What we know of him is pieced together from surviving church and town records, a few contemporary letters, and brief accounts of his life written in the century after his death. Scholars and historians have expanded that material into nuanced, insightful studies, but they remain partly speculations. “His mind and personality seem to us superhuman,” noted art historian
Helen Gardner
, “the man himself mysterious and remote.”

Leonardo sprang from the provincial village of Vinci, and lacking the pedigree to warrant a surname, he made do with da Vinci - “from Vinci.” The town was a long day’s ride - and an even longer cultural journey - from Florence twenty miles away. His family history gave no hint of greatness. Leonardo’s father, Piero, was a notary charged with handling the legal affairs of the town. The people of Vinci called him “Ser” or “Master” out of respect. Ser Piero da Vinci was a link between the slow, backward town - a cluster of stone buildings around a castle and a church - and the wealth and glamour of Florence, where he had many friends among the city’s artists, craftsmen, and merchants.

Leonardo was born from Piero’s liaison with a young woman named Caterina. She is usually described as a peasant, but the only early biographer who mentions her - Anonimo Gaddiano, who wrote about the lives of several Renaissance artists in 1540 - said she came “of good blood.” The baby was baptized the next day in the parish church in a rough stone font. Some eight months later, Piero married the bride his family had chosen: sixteen-year-old Albiera di Giovanni Amadori, daughter of another prosperous notary. After Albiera proved childless, young Leonardo, who had spent his first five years in his mother’s house, moved in with Piero and Albiera in their home just outside the castle walls. There he found ample affection from his stepmother and Piero’s younger brother, Francesco, who made time to play with Leonardo and take him for long walks in the Tuscan countryside.

Vinci sat high on the slopes of Mount Albano, between the olive trees and orchards of
Lucca
and the rugged mountain range with its rushing streams, twisting paths, and dramatic vistas, and uncle and nephew delighted in exploring the valley below Florence. These walks gave the boy a love of nature and its creatures.
Giorgio Vasari
, himself an accomplished painter, wrote of Leonardo in 1550: “He took an especial delight in animals of all sorts, which he treated with wonderful love and patience. For instance, when he was passing the places where they sold birds, he would often take them out of their cages with his hand, and having paid whatever price was asked by the vendor, he would let them fly away into the air, giving them back their lost liberty.”

Leonardo himself told only two stories of his childhood. The first, which he took as an omen, has usually been interpreted as a fantasy, but he wrote of it as a vivid vision of a hawk hovering over him: “. . . I was in my cradle . . . a kite came to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.” Leonardo was taking notes on the flight of birds when the memory struck him, and he preceded the story with this line: “Writing like this so particularly about the kite seems to be my destiny, since the first memory . . .”

The second story rings with both authenticity and hidden meanings. He wrote that while walking alone, “I came to the mouth of a huge cavern before which for a time I remained stupefied . . . my back bent to an arch, my left hand clutching my knee, while with the right I shaded my eyes; and I bent first one way and then another in order to see whether I could make out anything inside, though this was almost impossible because of the intense darkness within. And after remaining there for a time, suddenly there were awakened in me two emotions, fear and desire: fear of the dark, threatening cavern and desire to see whether there might be any marvelous thing in it.”

Leonardo seemed not much different from other boys, but the older he grew, the more he felt like a misfit in Vinci – not just because he was illegitimate and a stepchild, but because of his intense intelligence and curiosity.

Leonardo described himself as an “unlettered man,” because he had not been taught the formal language of Latin. His education was haphazard and informal, and he dropped a subject as soon as he learned what he wanted to know. “He would have been proficient at his early lessons if he had not been so volatile and unstable,” Vasari wrote. “He set himself to learn many things only to abandon them almost immediately. When he began to learn arithmetic, in a few months he made such progress that he bombarded the master who was teaching him with questions and problems and very often outwitted him.” Perhaps because he was left-handed, he took to his famous mirror-writing - from right to left on the page, with each letter formed in reverse. Viewed in a mirror, it looks like normal handwriting. The boy was fond of music, Vasari reported, and “he never left off drawing and sculpting, which suited his imagination better than anything.”

As he grew older, Leonardo regretted this magpie style of learning, but it’s doubtful he could have absorbed half as much had he been more methodical. In any case, he could not have progressed in a more formal education; because Piero never married Caterina and legitimized him, Leonardo could not have entered a university.

Leonardo had a talent for drawing. He kept a collection of snakeskins, bird eggs, small animal skulls, insects dried on pins, and odd-looking plants in his room and made repeated sketches of them. His father provided him with as much paper as he wanted, a precious resource in those days. Looking over the boy’s work one day, Piero made the obvious connection: His son could become an artist.

When Leonardo reached the age of fourteen or fifteen, Piero took a crucial step. On one of his frequent visits to Florence, he brought along a selection of the boy’s drawings and showed them to his friend, the painter and sculptor Andrea di Cione, known as
Verrocchio
.

Beginning as a goldsmith, Verrocchio had become one of Florence’s most illustrious painters and sculptors. After making his fortune working for Pope
Sixtus IV
in Rome, he had come home to Florence to establish a studio and a school. His apprentices and associates included such famed artists as
Domenico Ghirlandaio
,
Pietro Perugino
,
Sandro Botticelli
, and
Lorenzo di Credi
. Verrocchio immediately agreed with Piero that Leonardo was talented, and the boy moved to Florence to start his apprenticeship.

Florence in 1466 was home to 50,000 people, studded with 108 churches, twenty-three grand palazzi, and no fewer than fifty piazzas of varying sizes. It was a city of craftsmen, with 270 woolworkers’ shops and eighty-three silk makers; the eighty-four woodcarvers outnumbered the butchers. Little more than twenty years after
Johannes Gutenberg
built the first printing press, Florence was full of books – not only religious works, but volumes of maps, books on math and astronomy, and the writings of
Aristotle
,
Plato
, and other great philosophers. Leonardo devoured them and began collecting books of every description.

Florence was ruled by the greatest of all the dynasties in the Italian city-states. The
Medicis
were financiers, statesmen, warriors, popes, and patrons of the arts. Beginning as wool merchants in the 1300s and then as bankers, they became most likely the wealthiest family in Europe. Around 1400,
Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici
opened the Medici Bank and quietly emerged as the most powerful man in the city. When he died in 1434, his son
Cosimo
assumed his mantle. Neither held formal office, but they ran Florence behind the scenes, rewarding their friends and bankrupting their enemies.

Cosimo controlled Florence for thirty years and expanded the city’s influence by taking over Arezzo,
Livorno
, and
Pisa
, successfully keeping a balance of power with the rival city-states of Milan and
Venice
. After his death, his weak and ailing son Piero ruled for only five years; then Piero’s son, just twenty years old, began the twenty-three-year reign that won him the name
Lorenzo the Magnificent
. Lorenzo was the patron of Leonardo’s teacher, Verrocchio, and may have helped Leonardo in his early career.

Apprentice artists in those days might begin work around the age of ten, setting out on a long path to learn their craft and become members of the artists’ guild. Leonardo lived in Verrocchio’s house; in return for food, lodging, and education, he did various chores around the workshop.

Verrocchio’s apprentices swept the floor and kept the studio tidy. Slowly they learned the secrets of master painters – for instance, how to prepare wooden panels for painting. Canvases weren’t yet used, and the seasoned wooden panels were first boiled to prevent them from splitting, then dried, coated with glue, and given another coat of gesso, a fine plaster used to provide a smooth surface for the paint. The paint used in those days was egg-based tempera, with colors ground by hand from minerals and chunks of raw pigment, another chore for the apprentices. Brushes were made from bundles of animal hairs stuck into wooden handles.

The apprentices also tried their hand at sculpture, working with chisels in both wood and stone. They drew with chalk or pencils, beginning with studies of folds of cloth and progressing to figures drawn from plaster casts or live models. They learned proportion and perspective and molded figures out of clay or wax. Leonardo was an eager student, quick to learn and always willing to attempt a new technique.

He showed both aptitude and originality. According to Vasari, a peasant in Vinci had made himself a round shield and asked Piero da Vinci to have it decorated. Piero took it to Florence to Leonardo, who painted the shield with an image of a monster spitting fire, a work so intimidating that Piero sold it to an art dealer in Florence for the considerable sum of 100 ducats. Piero then bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he handed off to the grateful peasant. Vasari doesn’t say whether Leonardo got any of the profit.