Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519
Italian painter, sculptor, architect and engineer

Leonardo was born in Vinci, between Pisa and Florence, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and Caterina, a young peasant woman. He showed unusual gifts at an early age, and about 1470 he was sent to study in the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio, where Botticelli and Perugino were also pupils. To this period belong the Baptism of Christ and the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. In 1482 he settled in Milan in the service of Duke Ludovico Sforza. His famous Last Supper (1498), commissioned jointly by Ludovico and the monks of Santa Maria delle Grazie, was painted on a wall of the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Because of dampness, and the method of tempera painting (neither oil nor fresco) upon plaster, it soon showed signs of deterioration; yet it is still regarded as a masterpiece. Among other paintings in Milan were portraits of two mistresses of the duke, one of them perhaps La Belle Ferronni�re of the Louvre. He also devised a system of hydraulic irrigation of the plains of Lombardy and directed the court pageants.

After the fall of Duke Ludovico in 1500 Leonardo retired to Florence, and entered the service of Cesare Borgia, then Duke of Romagna, as architect and engineer. In 1503 he returned to Florence, and began work on a Madonna and Child with St Anne, of which only the cartoon now in the Royal Academy, London, was completed. Both he and Michelangelo received commissions to decorate the Sala del Consiglio in the Palazzo della Signoria with historical compositions. Leonardo dealt with The Battle of Anghiari, a Florentine victory over Milan, and finished his cartoon; but he employed a method of painting on the plaster which proved a failure, and abandoned the work in 1506.

About 1504 he completed his most celebrated easel picture, Mona Lisa. Another work portrayed the celebrated beauty Ginevra Benci; and Pacioli's De divina Proportione (1509)contained 60 geometrical figures from Leonardo's hand. In 1506 he was employed by Louis XII of France. Francis I bestowed on him in 1516 a yearly allowance, and assigned to his use the Ch�teau Cloux, near Amboise, where he lived until his death.

Among his later works are The Virgin of the Rocks, now in the National Gallery, London, a figure of St John the Baptist, and Saint Anne. There is no surviving sculpture which can positively be attributed to him, but he may well have designed or been closely associated with three works: the three figures over the north door of the Baptistery at Florence, a bronze statuette of horse and rider in the Budapest Museum, and the wax bust of Flora.

In his art Leonardo was hardly at all influenced by the antique; his practice was founded on the most patient and searching study of nature and in particular of light and shade. He occupies a supreme place as an artist, but so few of his works have survived that he may be most fully studied in his drawings, of which there are rich collections in Milan, Paris, Florence and Vienna, as well as in England in the British Museum and at Windsor Castle.

His celebrated Trattato della Pittura was published in 1651; but a more complete manuscript, discovered by Manzi in the Vatican, was published in 1817. Voluminous manuscripts by him in Milan (Codice-Atlantico), Paris, Windsor, and elsewhere have been reproduced in facsimile.

Leonardo was the outstanding all-round genius of the Renaissance. He had a wide knowledge and understanding far beyond his times of most of the sciences, including biology, anatomy, physiology, hydrodynamics, mechanics and aeronautics, and his notebooks, written in mirror writing, contain original remarks on all of these.

Bibliography: Robert Payne, Leonardo (1978); Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci (1959).