Leonardo da Vinci

レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ

WordNet

1. go `ding dong, like a bell (同)dong, dingdong
2. a ringing sound
3. an informal term for a father; probably derived from baby talk (同)dada, daddy, pa, papa, pappa, pop
4. Italian painter and sculptor and engineer and scientist and architect; the most versatile genius of the Italian Renaissance (1452-1519) (同)Leonardo_da_Vinci, da_Vinci

PrepTutorEJDIC

1. 〈鐘など〉‘を'ガンガン鳴らす / 〈鐘などが〉ガンガン鳴る / (鐘の)ガンガン鳴る音
2. 『おとうちゃん』
3. (おもに人称代名詞・固有名詞(人名),thereの後で)had, wouldの短縮形 / (疑問文でwhere,what,whenの後で)didの短縮形;Where'd he go?=Where did he go?
4. レオナルド ダ ビンチ(Leonardo da Vinci;1452‐1519;イタリアの画家・彫刻家・建築家・科学者)

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出典(authority):フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』「2021/05/10 16:01:28」(JST)

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レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ Leonardo da Vinci
トリノ王宮図書館が所蔵するレオナルドの自画像。1513年 - 1515年頃
生誕	Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452-04-15) 1452年4月15日 フィレンツェ共和国 ヴィンチ
死没	1519年5月2日(1519-05-02)（67歳） フランス王国 アンボワーズ
代表作	『モナ・リザ』 『最後の晩餐』 『ウィトルウィウス的人体図』
運動・動向	盛期ルネサンス

レオナルドのサイン

レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチの肖像がデザインされている50000リラ紙幣。1967年 - 1974年発行。

レオナルド=ダ=ヴィンチ(伊: Leonardo da Vinci、イタリア語発音: [leoˈnardo da ˈvintʃi]  発音）1452年4月15日 - 1519年5月2日（ユリウス暦））は、イタリアのルネサンス期を代表する芸術家。フルネームは、レオナルド・ディ・セル・ピエロ・ダ・ヴィンチ (Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci) 。「ダ・ヴィンチ」とはヴィンチ村出身であることを意味しており、個人名の略称としては「レオナルド」を用いるのが適切である。鏡文字、音楽、建築、料理、数学、幾何学、生理学、組織学、解剖学、美術解剖学、人体解剖学、動物解剖学、植物解剖学、博物学、動物学、植物学、鉱物学、天文学、気象学、地質学、地理学、物理学、化学、光学、力学、工学、飛行力学、飛行機の安定、航空力学、航空工学、自動車工学、材料工学、土木工学、軍事工学、潜水服など様々な分野に顕著な業績と手稿をのこした。

人物

ラファエロのアテナイの学堂に描かれたプラトン役のレオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ

レオナルドの名前は神話に包まれている。ルネサンス期を代表する芸術家であり、「飽くなき探究心」と「尽きることのない独創性」を兼ね備えた人物といわれている。史上最高の呼び声高い画家の一人であるとともに、人類史上もっとも多才の呼び声も高い人物である。アメリカ人美術史家ヘレン・ガードナーは、レオナルドが関心を持っていた領域分野の広さと深さは空前のもので「レオナルドの知性と性格は超人的、神秘的かつ隔絶的なものである」とした。しかしながらマルコ・ロッシは、レオナルドに関して様々な考察がなされているが、レオナルドのものの見方は神秘的などではなく極めて論理的であり、その実証的手法が時代を遥かに先取りしていたのであるとしている。

画家としても後輩筋のミケランジェロやラファエロと違って、美術の中心地のローマで活躍することはできず、17世紀から18世紀までは前述の2人の存在感と比較すると無名同然であった。現在の高い評価は19世紀に入って手稿が研究されてからである。20世紀になるとレオナルドはその個性から神話化され、ビジネスの対象となってしまい、過大評価がなされていると考える美術史家や科学史家も多い。

1452年4月15日、レオナルド=ダ=ヴィンチは、フィレンツェ共和国から、約20km程、離れたフィレンツ郊外のヴィンチ村において、有能な公証人であったセル・ピエーロ・ダ・ヴィンチと農夫の娘であったカテリーナとの間に非嫡出子として誕生した。

1466年頃、レオナルドは、当時、フィレンツェにおいて、最も優れた工房の1つを主宰していたフィレンツェの画家で、彫刻家でもあったヴェロッキオが、運営する工房に入門した。

画家としてのキャリア初期には、ミラノ公ルドヴィーコ・スフォルツァに仕えている。その後ローマ、ボローニャ、ヴェネツィアなどで活動し、晩年はフランス王フランソワ1世に下賜されたフランスの邸宅で過ごした。

レオナルドは多才な人物だったが、存命中から現在にいたるまで、画家としての名声がもっとも高い。とくに、その絵画作品中もっとも有名でもっとも多くのパロディ画が制作された肖像画『モナ=リザ』と、もっとも多くの複製画や模写が描かれた宗教画『最後の晩餐』に知名度の点で比肩しうる絵画作品はほとんどないだろう。また、ドローイングの『ウィトルウィウス的人体図』も文化的象徴と見なされており、イタリアの1ユーロ硬貨、教科書、Tシャツなど様々な製品に用いられている。現存するレオナルドの絵画作品は15点程度と言われており決して多くはない。これはレオナルドが完全主義者で何度も自身の作品を破棄したこと、新たな技法の実験に時間をかけていたこと、一つの作品を完成させるまでに長年にわたって何度も手を加える習慣があったことなどによる。それでもなお、絵画作品、レオナルドが残したドローイングや科学に関するイラストが描かれた手稿、絵画に対する信念などは近代以降の芸術家へ多大な影響を与えた。

レオナルドは科学的創造力の面でも畏敬されている。ヘリコプターや戦車の概念化、太陽エネルギーや計算機の理論、二重船殻構造の研究、さらには初歩のプレートテクトニクス理論も理解していた。レオナルドが構想、設計したこれらの科学技術のうち、レオナルドの存命中に実行に移されたものは僅かだったが、自動糸巻器、針金の強度検査器といった小規模なアイディアは実用化され、製造業の黎明期をもたらした。また、解剖学、土木工学、光学、流体力学の分野でも重要な発見をしていたが、レオナルドがこれらの発見を公表しなかったために、後世の科学技術の発展に直接の影響を与えることはなかった。

生涯

幼少期、1452年から1466年

ヴィンチにあるレオナルドが幼少期を過ごした家。

レオナルドは1452年4月15日（ユリウス暦）の「日没3時間後」に、トスカーナのヴィンチに生まれた。ヴィンチはアルノ川下流に位置する村で、メディチ家が支配するフィレンツェ共和国に属していた。父はフィレンツェの裕福な公証人セル（メッセル）・ピエロ・フルオジーノ・ディ・アントーニオ・ダ・ヴィンチで、母は（おそらく農夫の娘）カテリーナである 。

レオナルドの「姓」であるダ・ヴィンチは、「ヴィンチ（出身）の」を意味する。出生名の「レオナルド・ディ・セル・ピエロ・ダ・ヴィンチ」は、「ヴィンチ（出身）のセル（父親メッセルの略称）の（息子の）レオナルド」という意味となる。セル（メッセル (Messer)） は敬称であり、レオナルドの父親が公証人についていたことを示している。

現在知られている、レオナルドが描いた最初期のドローイング、ウフィツィ美術館（フィレンツェ）。

レオナルドの幼少期についてはほとんど伝わっていない。生まれてから5年をヴィンチの村落で母親とともに暮らし、1457年からは父親、祖父母、叔父フランチェスコと、ヴィンチの都市部で過ごした。レオナルドの父親セル・ピエロは、レオナルドが生まれて間もなくアルビエラという名前の16歳の娘と結婚しており、レオナルドとこの義母の関係は良好だったが、義母は若くして死去してしまっている。レオナルドが16歳のときに、父親が20歳の娘フランチェスカ・ランフレディーニと再婚したが、セル・ピエロに嫡出子が誕生したのは、3回目と4回目の結婚時のことだった。レオナルドは、西洋教育史の初等学校（7歳〜15歳）には通えず、正式にではなかったがラテン語学校（7歳〜24歳）に通うヴィンチ村の青年・少年達からラテン語、数学、幾何学の教育を受けたが、入学もせず、独学であった。後にレオナルドは幼少期の記憶として二つの出来事を記している。ひとつはレオナルド自身が何らかの神秘体験と考えていた記憶で、ハゲワシが空から舞い降り、子供用ベッドで寝ていたレオナルドの口元をその尾で何度も打ち据えたというものである。もうひとつの記憶は、山を散策していたレオナルドが洞窟を見つけたときのものである。レオナルドは、洞窟の中に潜んでいるかもしれない化け物に怯えながらも、洞窟の内部はどのようになっているのだろうかという好奇心で一杯になったと記している。

レオナルドの幼少期は様々な推測の的となっている。16世紀の画家で、ルネサンス期の芸術家たちの伝記『画家・彫刻家・建築家列伝』を著したジョルジョ・ヴァザーリは、レオナルドの幼少期について次のように記述している。小作農の家で育ったレオナルドに、あるとき父親セル・ピエロが絵を描いてみるように勧めた。レオナルドが描いたのは口から火を吐く化け物の絵で、気味悪がったセル・ピエロはこの絵をフィレンツェの画商に売り払い、さらに画商からミラノ公の手に渡った。レオナルドの描いた絵で利益を手にしたセル・ピエロは、矢がハートに突き刺さった装飾のある楯飾りを購入し、レオナルドを育てた小作人へ贈った。

ヴェロッキオの工房時代、1466年 - 1476年

ヴェロッキオとレオナルドが描いた『キリストの洗礼』、1472年 - 1475年、ウフィツィ美術館（フィレンツェ）。

1466年に、14歳だったレオナルドは「フィレンツェでもっとも優れた」工房のひとつを主宰していた芸術家ヴェロッキオに弟子入りした。ヴェロッキオの弟子、あるいは協業関係にあった有名な芸術家として、ドメニコ・ギルランダイオ、ペルジーノ、ボッティチェッリ、ロレンツォ・ディ・クレディらがいる。レオナルドはこの工房で、理論面、技術面ともに目覚しい才能を見せた。レオナルドの才能は、ドローイング、絵画、彫刻といった芸術分野だけでなく、設計分野、化学、冶金学、金属加工、石膏鋳型鋳造、皮細工、機械工学、木工など、様々な分野に及んでいた。

ヴェロッキオの工房で製作される絵画のほとんどは、弟子や工房の雇われ画家による作品だった。ヴァザーリはその著書で『キリストの洗礼』はヴェロッキオとレオナルドの合作で、レオナルドが受け持った箇所は、キリストのローブを捧げ持つ幼い天使であるとしている。そして、弟子レオナルドの技量があまりに優れていたために、師ヴェロッキオは二度と絵画を描くことはなかったと記されている。『キリストの洗礼』はテンペラで描かれた絵画の上から、当時の新技法だった油彩で加筆された作品であり、近代の分析によると、風景、岩、キリストの大部分などもレオナルドの手によるものだと言われている。また、レオナルドはヴェロッキオの美術作品2点のモデルになったとも言われている。それらの作品はフィレンツェのバルジェロ美術館が所蔵するブロンズ彫刻『ダビデ像』と、ロンドンのナショナル・ギャラリーが所蔵する『トビアスと天使』に描かれている大天使ラファエルである。

レオナルドは20歳になる1472年までに、聖ルカ組合からマスター（親方）の資格を得ている。レオナルドが所属していた聖ルカ組合は、芸術だけでなく医学も対象としたギルドだった。その後、おそらく父親セル・ピエロがレオナルドに工房を与えてヴェロッキオから独立させ、レオナルドはヴェロッキオとの協業関係を継続していった。制作日付が知られているレオナルドの最初期の作品は、1473年8月5日に、ペンとインクでアルノ渓谷を描いたドローイングである。

円熟期、1476年 - 1513年

『東方三博士の礼拝』（1481年、ウフィツィ美術館（フィレンツェ））。未完成のこの作品には、多くの人々に囲まれた聖母子が描かれている。遠景には風景と崩壊した建物が表現され、聖母子のほうへとやってくる多くの人々が描かれている。

1476年のフィレンツェの裁判記録に、レオナルド他3名の青年が同性愛の容疑をかけられたが放免されたというものがある。この1476年以降、1478年になるまで、レオナルドの作品や居住地に関する記録が残っていない。1478年にレオナルドは、ヴェロッキオとの共同制作を中止し、父親の家からも出て行ったと思われる。アノニモ・ガッディアーノという正体不明の人物が、1480年にレオナルドがメディチ家の庇護を受けており、フィレンツェのサン・マルコ広場庭園で新プラトン主義者の芸術家、詩人、哲学者らが集まった、メディチ家が主宰するプラトン・アカデミーの一員だったという説を唱えている。1478年1月にレオナルドは、最初の独立した絵画制作の依頼を受けた。ヴェッキオ宮殿サン・ベルナルド礼拝堂の祭壇画の制作で、1481年5月にはサン・ドナート・スコペート修道院の修道僧から、『東方三博士の礼拝』の制作依頼も受けている。しかしながら、礼拝堂祭壇画は未完成のまま放置された。『東方三博士の礼拝』もレオナルドがミラノ公国へと向かったために制作が中断され、未完成に終わっている。

ヴァザーリの著書によると、レオナルドは才能溢れる音楽家でもあり、1482年に馬の頭部を意匠とした銀のリラを制作したとされている。フィレンツェの支配者ロレンツォ・デ・メディチが、この銀のリラを土産にレオナルドをミラノ公国へと向かわせ、当時のミラノ公ルドヴィーコ・スフォルツァとの間で平和条約を結ぼうとした。当時のレオナルドがルドヴィーコに送った書簡の記述で、現在もよく引用される文章がある。レオナルドが自然科学分野で驚嘆すべき様々な業績を挙げていたことを物語る内容で、さらにレオナルドが絵画分野でも非凡な能力を有していることをルドヴィーコに告げる文章である。

レオナルドは1482年から1499年まで、ミラノ公国で活動した。現在ロンドンのナショナル・ギャラリーが所蔵する『岩窟の聖母』は、1483年に聖母無原罪の御宿り信心会からの依頼で、サンタ・マリア・デッレ・グラツィエ修道院の壁画『最後の晩餐』（1495年 - 1498年）も、このミラノ公国滞在時に描かれた作品である。1493年から1495年のレオナルドの納税記録が現存しており、レオナルドの扶養家族の中にカテリーナという女性が記載されている。この女性は1495年に死去しているが、このときの葬儀費用明細から、レオナルドの生母カテリーナだと考えられている。

馬の側面と、胸から上、右脚が描かれた習作。ロイヤル・コレクション、ウィンザー城。

レオナルドはミラノ公ルドヴィーコから、様々な企画を命じられた。特別な日に使用する山車とパレードの準備、ミラノ大聖堂円屋根の設計、スフォルツァ家の初代ミラノ公フランチェスコ・スフォルツァの巨大な騎馬像の制作などである。ただしこの騎馬像は、レオナルドが手がける作品としては異例なことに、その後数年間にわたって制作が開始されなかった。騎馬像の原型となる粘土製の馬の像が完成したのは1492年である。このフランチェスコの騎馬像を大きさの点で凌ぐルネサンス期の彫刻作品は、ドナテッロの『ガッタメラータ騎馬像』（1453年、サンタントーニオ・ダ・パードヴァ聖堂前サント広場）と、ヴェロッキオの『バルトロメーオ・コッレオーニ騎馬像』（1496年、サン・ジョヴァンニ・エ・パオロ教会前広場）の2作品だけであり、レオナルドが制作した粘土製の馬の像は、「巨大な馬」として知られるようになっていった。レオナルドはこの『バルトロメーオ・コッレオーニ騎馬像』の鋳造を具体的に進めようとしたが、レオナルドを嫌っていた競争相手のミケランジェロは、レオナルドにこのような大仕事ができるわけがないと侮辱したといわれている。この騎馬像制作のために17tのブロンズが用意されたが、フランス王シャルル8世のミラノ侵攻に対抗するために、1494年11月にこのブロンズが大砲の製作材料に流用されてしまった。

1499年に第二次イタリア戦争が勃発し、イタリアに侵攻したフランス軍が、レオナルドがブロンズ像の原型用に制作した粘土像「巨大な馬」を射撃練習の的にして破壊した。ルドヴィーコ率いるミラノ公国はフランスに敗れ、レオナルドは弟子のサライや友人の数学者ルカ・パチョーリとともにヴェネツィアへと避難した。レオナルドはこのヴェネツィアで、フランス軍の海上攻撃からヴェネツィアを守る役割の軍事技術者として雇われている。レオナルドが故郷フィレンツェに帰還したのは1500年のことで、サンティッシマ・アンヌンツィアータ修道の修道僧のもとで、家人ともども賓客として寓された。ヴァザーリの著書には、レオナルドがこの修道院で工房を与えられ、『聖アンナと聖母子』の習作ともいわれる『聖アンナと聖母子と幼児聖ヨハネ』（1499年 - 1500年、ナショナル・ギャラリー）を描いたとされている。さらにこの『聖アンナと聖母子と幼児聖ヨハネ』は「老若男女を問わず」多くの人が見物に訪れ、「祭りの様相を呈していた」と記されている

。

レオナルドがチェーザレ・ボルジアの命令で制作した、非常に精密なイーモラの地図。

1502年にレオナルドはチェゼーナを訪れ、ローマ教皇アレクサンデル6世の息子チェーザレ・ボルジアの軍事技術者として、チェーザレとともにイタリア中を行脚した。1502年にレオナルドはチェーザレの命令で、要塞を建築するイーモラの開発計画となる地図を制作した。当時の地図は極めて希少であるだけでなく、その制作に当たってはレオナルドのまったく新しい概念が導入されていた。チェーザレはレオナルドを、土木技術に特化した工兵の長たる軍事技術者に任命している。同年にレオナルドは、トスカーナの渓谷地帯ヴァルディキアーナ（en:Valdichiana）の地図も制作している。この地図もチェーザレが軍事戦略上有利な地位を占めるのに役立った。

レオナルドは再びフィレンツェに戻り、1508年10月18日にフィレンツェの芸術家ギルド「聖ルカ組合」に再加入した。そして、フィレンツェ政庁舎（ヴェッキオ宮殿）大会議室の壁画『アンギアーリの戦い』のデザインと制作に2年間携わった。このとき大会議室の反対側の壁では、ミケランジェロが『カッシーナの戦い』の制作に取り掛かっていた。またレオナルドは1504年に、ミケランジェロが手がけていた完成間近の『ダヴィデ像』をどこに設置するべきかを決める委員会の一員になっている。

1506年にレオナルドはミラノを訪れた。ベルナルディーノ・ルイーニ、ジョヴァンニ・アントーニオ・ボルトラッフィオ、マルコ・ドッジョーノら、絵画分野におけるレオナルドの主要な弟子や追随者たちは、このミラノ滞在時に関係があった人々である。ただし、1504年に父親セル・ピエロが死去したこともあって、このときのレオナルドのミラノ滞在は短期間に終わった。1507年にはフィレンツェに戻り、父親の遺産を巡る兄弟たちとの問題解決に腐心している。翌1508年にミラノへ戻り、サンタ・バビーラ教会区のポルタ・オリエンターレに購入した邸宅に落ち着いた。

晩年、1513年 - 1519年

レオナルドの肖像画

1513年9月から1516年にかけて、レオナルドはヴァチカンのベルヴェデーレで多くのときを過ごしている。当時のヴァチカンはミケランジェロと若きラファエロが活躍していた場所でもあった。1515年10月にフランス王フランソワ1世がミラノ公国を占領し、レオナルドはボローニャで開催された、フランソワ1世とローマ教皇レオ10世との和平会談に招かれた。このときレオナルドは、歩いていって胸部からユリの花がこぼれる絡繰仕掛けのライオンの制作を依頼された 。

レオナルドが1519年に息を引き取ったクルーの館。

レオナルドは1516年にフランソワ1世に招かれ、フランソワ1世の居城アンボワーズ城近くのクルーの館が邸宅として与えられた。レオナルドは死去するまでの最晩年の3年間を、弟子のミラノ貴族フランチェスコ・メルツィら、弟子や友人たちとともに過ごした。レオナルドがフランソワ1世から受け取った年金は、死去するまでの合計額で10,000スクードにのぼっている。

レオナルドは1519年5月2日にクルーの館で死去した。フランソワ1世とは緊密な関係を築いたと考えられており、ヴァザーリも自著でレオナルドがフランソワ1世の腕の中で息を引き取ったと記している。このエピソードはフランス人芸術家たちに親しまれ、ドミニク・アングル、フランソワ・ギョーム・メナゴーらが、このエピソードをモチーフにした作品を描き、オーストリア人画家アンゲリカ・カウフマンも同様の絵画を制作しているが、このエピソードはおそらく史実ではなく、伝説の類である。さらにヴァザーリは、レオナルドが最後の数日間を司祭と過ごして告解を行い、臨終の秘蹟を受けたとしている。レオナルドの遺言に従って、60名の貧者がレオナルドの葬列に参加した。フランチェスコ・メルツィがレオナルドの主たる相続人兼遺言執行者で、メルツィはレオナルドの金銭的遺産だけでなく、絵画、道具、蔵書、私物なども相続した。また、長年の弟子で友人でもあったサライと使用人バッティスタ・ディ・ビルッシスに所有していたワイン畑を半分ずつ遺しているほか、自身の兄弟たちには土地を、給仕係の女性には毛皮の縁飾りがついた最高級の黒いマントを遺した。レオナルドの遺体は、アンボワーズ城のサン＝ユベール礼拝堂に埋葬された。

レオナルドの死後20年ほど後に、フランソワ1世が「かつてこの世界にレオナルドほど優れた人物がいただろうか。絵画、彫刻、建築のみならず、レオナルドはこの上なく傑出した哲学者でもあった」と語ったことが、彫金師、彫刻家ベンヴェヌート・チェッリーニの記録に記されている。

交友関係と影響

フィレンツェでレオナルドを取り巻いていた芸術的、社会的背景

ロレンツォ・ギベルティが制作したサン・ジョヴァンニ洗礼堂の『天国への門』。当時のフィレンツェが誇る芸術作品で、その制作には多くの芸術家が参画した。

レオナルドが若年だった当時のフィレンツェは、ルネサンス人文主義における思想、文化の中心地だった。レオナルドがヴェロッキオに弟子入りした1466年は、ヴェロッキオの師で偉大な彫刻家だったドナテッロが死去した年でもある。遠近法を絵画作品に最初に取り入れて、風景画の発展に多大な貢献をなした画家パオロ・ウッチェロは、すでに老境に入っていた。画家ピエロ・デッラ・フランチェスカ、フィリッポ・リッピ、彫刻家ルカ・デッラ・ロッビア、建築家・著述家レオン・バッティスタ・アルベルティも60歳代だった。これら初期ルネサンスを代表する芸術家たちの次世代で成功を収めたのが、レオナルドの師ヴェロッキオ、アントニオ・デル・ポッライオーロ、ミーノ・ダ・フィエゾーレらである。フィエゾーレは人物彫刻を得意とした彫刻家で、ロレンツォ・デ・メディチの父親ピエロや伯父ジョヴァンニ・ディ・コジモ・デ・メディチの胸像は、本人に非常によく似ていると言われている。

また当時のフィレンツェは、写実的で感情豊かな人物像をフレスコで描いた画家マサッチオ、人物と建築物が複雑な構成で表現されたサン・ジョヴァンニ洗礼堂の金箔に彩られた東扉『天国への門』を制作した彫刻家ロレンツォ・ギベルティなど、ドナテッロと同時代の芸術家たちの作品で飾り立てられていた。ピエロ・デッラ・フランチェスカは空気遠近法の研究を推し進め、科学的に正確な光の描写を絵画にもたらした最初の画家となった。これらの研究とレオン・バッティスタ・アルベルティの『絵画論』といった芸術論文が、当時の若年の芸術家たちに大きな影響を与え、レオナルドも先人たちからの影響のなかで独自の観察眼や芸術観を培っていった。

マサッチオの『楽園追放』（1425年ごろ、ブランカッチ礼拝堂壁画）は、裸身で取り乱すアダムとイヴを力強い造形で描いた作品である。光と陰の対比を用いて三次元的に人物を描写した『楽園追放』はレオナルドに大きな影響を与え、自身の作品でこの三次元的描写を発展させていくことになる。また、ドナテッロの彫刻『ダヴィデ』における人文主義的作風が、後のレオナルドの作品群、とくに『洗礼者ヨハネ』（1513年 - 1516年、ルーヴル美術館所蔵）に影響を与えている。

『カーネーションの聖母』、1478年 - 1480年、アルテ・ピナコテーク（ミュンヘン）。レオナルドが描いた初期の聖母子像。

フィレンツェで伝統的に好まれていた絵画分野に、聖母子を描いた小規模な祭壇画がある。当時、これらの祭壇画はリッピ、ヴェロッキオ、デッラ・ロッビア一族らの工房で制作された作品が多かった。レオナルドが聖母子を描いた初期の作品に『カーネーションの聖母』（1478年 - 1480年、アルテ・ピナコテーク）と『ブノアの聖母』（1478年頃、エルミタージュ美術館）がある。これらレオナルドが描いた聖母子は、基本的にはフィレンツェの伝統的な聖母子の作風に則っている。しかしながら『ブノアの聖母子』に顕著な聖母子をピラミッド型に配する構成は、伝統的な作風からは逸脱した表現となっている。後に同様の構成で描かれたレオナルドの作品に『聖アンナと聖母子』（1508年ごろ、ルーヴル美術館）がある。

レオナルドはボッティチェッリ（1445年ごろ - 1510年）、ギルランダイオ（1449年 - 1494年）、ペルジーノ（1450年ごろ - 1523年）と同時代人で、わずかに年少である。レオナルドはこの3人と相弟子としてヴェロッキオの工房で出会い、メディチ家が主宰するプラトン・アカデミーに出入りした。ボッティチェッリはとくにメディチ家に気に入られており、画家としての成功は約束されていたも同然だった。ギルランダイオとペルジーノはどちらも多作な画家で、後に大規模な工房を経営するにいたった。両者共に制作依頼主を満足させるだけの技量を持った芸術家で、ギルランダイオは大規模なフレスコ宗教画に裕福なフィレンツェ市民の肖像を描き入れた作品を、ペルジーノは甘美で無垢な多数の聖者や天使を描いた作品を、それぞれ得意としていた。

フーホ・ファン・デル・フースが描いた『ポルティナーリの三連祭壇画』中央パネル（1475年頃、ウフィツィ美術館）。フィレンツェのサンタ・マリーア・ヌオーヴァ施薬院付属サンテディジオ教会の祭壇画用として制作された。

ボッティチェッリとギルランダイオは、ローマ教皇シクストゥス4世から、ヴァチカンのシスティーナ礼拝堂壁画制作の依頼を受けた。1479年にペルジーノがローマ教皇庁から、礼拝堂壁画制作の責任者に任じられて間もなくのことである。しかしながらこの栄誉ある壁画制作には、レオナルドは関与していない。レオナルドが依頼を受けた最初の重要な絵画制作は、1481年にサン・ドナート・スコペート修道院の修道僧からの『東方三博士の礼拝』だが、未完のままに終わっている。

レオナルドがヴェロッキオの工房で働いていた時期の1476年に初期フランドル派の画家フーホ・ファン・デル・フースの油彩画『ポルティナーリの三連祭壇画』（1475年ごろ、ウフィツィ美術館）がフィレンツェに持ち込まれた。北方ヨーロッパの初期フランドル派が完成させた新たな絵画技法である油彩は、レオナルド、ギルランダイオ、ペルジーノら、フィレンツェで活動していた芸術家たちに多大な影響を与えた。その後、シチリア出身の画家アントネッロ・ダ・メッシーナが油彩技法を身につけ、1479年にヴェネツィアを訪れた。当時のヴェネツィアで第一人者であった画家ジョヴァンニ・ベリーニがメッシーナから油彩技法を伝授され、たちまちのうちにヴェネツィアでも油彩による絵画制作が主流となった。そして、後にレオナルドもヴェネツィアを訪れることになる。

当時の代表的な建築家ドナト・ブラマンテとアントニオ・ダ・サンガッロ・イル・ヴェッキオと同じように、レオナルドも集中形式の教会のデザインを試みた。多くの設計図や外観図がその手稿に残されているが、実現した計画はひとつもなかった。

ギルランダイオが描いたフレスコ画。左から、アントニオ・プッチ（en:Antonio di Puccio Pucci）、ロレンツォ・デ・メディチ、フランチェスコ・サセッティ（en:Francesco SassettFrancesco Sassetti）、ジュリオ・デ・メディチ。

レオナルドがフィレンツェに在住していたときのフィレンツェの支配者はロレンツォ・デ・メディチだった。ロレンツォはレオナルドよりも3歳年長で、弟のジュリアーノは1478年に起きた、いわゆるパッツィ家の陰謀で暗殺された。後にレオナルドがメディチ家の使者として派遣されるミラノ公国を1479年から1499年まで統治したミラノ公ルドヴィーコ・スフォルツァは、レオナルドと同年の生まれである。

レオン・バッティスタ・アルベルティの紹介を受けてメディチ一族の邸宅を訪れたレオナルドは、哲学者で新プラトン主義の提唱者マルシリオ・フィチーノ、古典文学の注釈書の著者クリストフォロ・ランディーノ、ギリシア語教授でアリストテレスの著作の翻訳者ジョヴァンニ・アルギロプーロら、当時第一流のルネサンス人文主義者たちの知遇を得た。また、メディチ家が主催するプラトン・アカデミーには、才能に溢れた若き哲学者ピコ・デラ・ミランドラの姿もあった。後にレオナルドは手稿の余白に「メディチが私を創り、そしてメディチが私を台無しにした」と書き入れている。レオナルドが、ロレンツォの推挙によってミラノ公の宮廷に迎え入れられたのは間違いなく、なぜレオナルドがこのような謎めいた書込みを残したのかは分かっていない。

「盛期ルネサンス三大巨匠」と並び称されるレオナルド、ミケランジェロ、ラファエロだが、この三名は同年代人ではない。ミケランジェロが生まれたときにレオナルドは23歳で、ラファエロが生まれたときにはレオナルドは31歳だった。レオナルドは1519年に67歳で、ラファエロは1520年に37歳でそれぞれ死去しているが、長命を保ったミケランジェロが死去したのは1564年で88歳のことである。

私生活

マントヴァ侯妃イザベラ・デステの肖像習作。1500年、ルーヴル美術館

詳細は「en:Leonardo da Vinci's personal life」を参照

レオナルドはその生涯を通じて、異常なまでの創意工夫の才を示し続けた。ヴァザーリはレオナルドを「ずば抜けた肉体美」「計り知れない優雅さ」「強靭な精神力と大いなる寛容さ」「威厳ある精神と驚くべき膨大な知性」と評し、レオナルドがあらゆる面で人を惹きつける人物だったと記している。さらにヴァザーリは、レオナルドが菜食主義者であり、籠に入って売られている鳥を購入してはその鳥を放してやるような、命あるものをこよなく愛する人物だったとしている。レオナルドには様々な分野の、歴史的に見ても重要な多くの友人がいた。例えば、近代会計学の父ともいわれる数学者ルカ・パチョーリは、1490年代にレオナルドと共著で数学の論文を著している。フェラーラ公エルコレ1世・デステの娘で、マントヴァ侯妃イザベラとミラノ公妃ベアトリーチェの姉妹を除くと、レオナルドと親しかった女性は伝わっていない。レオナルドはマントヴァ滞在中にイザベラの肖像習作を描いており、この習作をもとに肖像画を描いたと考えられているが、現存していないと思われていた。しかし2013年10月、スイス銀行の貴重品保管庫から彩色された肖像画が発見され、当局に押収された。レオナルド研究家であるペドレッティ教授の鑑定では、レオナルドの真筆であることはほぼ間違いないとみられている。

交友関係以外のレオナルドの私生活は謎に包まれている。とくにレオナルドの性的指向は、さまざまな当てこすり、研究、憶測の的になっている。最初にレオナルドの性的指向が話題になったのは16世紀半ばのことだった。その後19世紀、20世紀にもこの話題が取り上げられており、中でもジークムント・フロイトが唱えた説が有名である。レオナルドともっとも親密な関係を築いたのは、おそらく弟子のサライとメルツィである。メルツィはレオナルドの死を知らせる書簡をレオナルドの兄弟に送った人物で、その書簡にはレオナルドがいかに自分たちを情熱的に愛したかということが書かれていた。16世紀になって、このようなレオナルドの人間関係は性的なものだったのではないかという説が生まれた。1476年のフィレンツェの裁判記録に、当時24歳だったレオナルド他3名の青年が、有名だった男娼と揉め事を起こしたとして、同性愛の容疑をかけられたという記録がある。この件は証拠不十分で放免されているが、容疑者の一人リオナルデ・デ・トルナブオーニがロレンツォ・デ・メディチの縁者であり、メディチ家が圧力をかけて無罪とさせたのではないかという説もある。この記録はレオナルドに同性愛者の傾向があったことを示唆しており、『洗礼者ヨハネ』や『バッカス』といった絵画作品、その他多くのドローイングに両性具有的な性愛表現が見られるとする研究者もいる 。

助手と弟子

『洗礼者ヨハネ』、1514年頃、ルーヴル美術館（パリ）。ヨハネのモデルは弟子のサライだといわれている。

「小悪魔」を意味する「サライ」という通称で知られるジャン・ジャコモ・カプロッティがレオナルドの邸宅に住み込んだのは1490年である。その後1年足らずで、サライはレオナルドの金銭や貴重品を少なくとも5度にわたって盗んだ。サライはこれらの盗品を高価な衣装の購入に充て、レオナルドはサライの不品行を「盗人、嘘吐き、強情、大食漢」と論っている。しかしながらレオナルドはサライをこの上なく甘やかし、その後30年にわたって自身の邸宅に住まわせている。サライはアンドレア・サライという名前で多くの絵画を描いた。しかしながら、レオナルドがサライに「絵画について非常に多くのことを教えた」が、レオナルドのほかの弟子たち、例えばマルコ・ドッジョーノ、ジョヴァンニ・アントーニオ・ボルトラッフィオらの作品に比べると、レオナルドの作品の贋作ばかりで、芸術的価値に劣るといわれている。1515年にサライは『モナ=ヴァンナ』として知られる、『モナ=リザ』の裸体ヴァージョンの絵画を描いている。後にレオナルドが死去すると、サライは『モナ・リザ』を譲られた。サライはこの『モナ・リザ』は505リラの価値があると考えていたが、この評価額は当時の小さな肖像画としては異例なまでに高額だった。

レオナルドは1506年にロンバルディアの貴族の子息フランチェスコ・メルツィを弟子にした。メルツィはレオナルドお気に入りの弟子で、レオナルドがフランスへ移住したときにも同行し、レオナルドが死去するまで起居を共にしている。メルツィはレオナルドの遺産として、芸術、科学の諸作品、写本、コレクションを贈られ、遺言執行人にも任命されていた。

絵画作品

「en:List of works by Leonardo da Vinci」も参照

近年の研究ではレオナルドの科学者や発明家としての才能が高く評価されているが、400年以上にわたってレオナルドがもっとも賞賛されてきたのは画家としての才能である。現存するレオナルドの真作、あるいはレオナルド作であろうと考えられている絵画作品は僅かではあるが、1490年時点で「神の手を持つ」画家だと言われており、いずれの作品も傑作だと見なされている。

レオナルドの作品は、様々な出来の多くの模写が存在することでも有名で、長年にわたって美術品鑑定家や批評家を悩ませ続けてきた。レオナルドの真作に見られる優れた点は顔料の塗布手法だけでなく、解剖学、光学、植物学、地質学、人相学などの詳細な知識に立脚した、革新的な絵画技法である。人物の表情やポーズで感情を描写する技法、人物の配置構成における創造性、色調の繊細な移り変わりなど、レオナルドの絵画作品には際立った点が多くみられる。これらレオナルドの革新的絵画技法の集大成といえるのが『モナ=リザ』、『最後の晩餐』、『岩窟の聖母』である。

初期の絵画作品

『受胎告知』、1475年 - 1485年、ウフィツィ美術館（フィレンツェ）。レオナルドの完成している絵画としては、最初期の作品と見なされている。

レオナルドの画家としてのキャリアは、師ヴェロッキオとの合作『キリストの洗礼』に始まる。ほかにレオナルドの徒弟時代の作品として、2点の『受胎告知』がある。そのうち1点は縦14cm、横59cmの小さな絵画で、もともとはロレンツォ・ディ・クレディの大きな祭壇画の飾絵だったものが散逸した作品である。もう1点の『受胎告知』は縦98cm、横217cmという大規模な作品となっている。どちらの『受胎告知』も、フラ・アンジェリコの『受胎告知』などとよく似た伝統的な構図で描かれている。座した、あるいは跪いた聖母マリアを画面右に配し、背中の羽を高く掲げ、豪奢な衣装を身につけた横向きの天使が、純潔を意味するユリとともに画面左に配されている。大きな『受胎告知』（1472年 - 1475年、ウフィツィ美術館）は、かつてはギルランダイオの作品と考えられていたが、現在ではレオナルドの真作にほぼ間違いないと考えられている。小さな『受胎告知』では、マリアは天使から眼を背け、両手を握りしめている。このポーズは神の意思への服従を象徴する。しかしながら大きな『受胎告知』のマリアは、このような服従を示すポーズをとっていない。予期せぬ天使の訪れで読書を中断させられたマリアの右手は、今まで読んでいた聖書に置かれ、左手は歓迎あるいは驚きを意味する、立てた状態で描かれている。冷静ともいえるこの若きマリアのポーズは、神の母たる役割に服従するのではなく、自信に満ちて受け入れることを意味している。若きレオナルドはこの『受胎告知』でマリアを神格化せずに、人間の女性として描いた。これは神の顕現において人間が果たす役割を認識していることを表している 。

1480年代の絵画作品

『荒野の聖ヒエロニムス』、1480年頃、ヴァチカン宮殿、未完。

レオナルドは1480年代に、非常に重要な絵画2点の制作を引き受け、ほかに革新的な構成をもつ重要な絵画1点の制作を開始した。これら3点の絵画のうち2点は未完に終わり、残る1点が完成度合いや支払を巡って長い論争となった。未完に終わった絵画のうちの1点が『荒野の聖ヒエロニムス』で、美術史家リアナ・ボルトロンはこの絵画がレオナルドが不遇だった時代の作品ではないかとしており、その根拠としてレオナルドの日記の「生きることを学んできたつもりだったが、単に死ぬことを学んでいたらしい」という記述を挙げている。

『岩窟の聖母』、1483年 - 1486年、ルーヴル美術館（パリ）。

『荒野の聖ヒエロニムス』は描き始めの時点で放棄された作品だが、極めて異例な構成をもって描かれている。ヒエロニムスは苦行者として画面中央一杯に描かれ、傾けられた顔はやや上を向いている。左膝は地面に付けられており、右手は画面端まで伸ばされ、視線は右手とは反対の方向に向けられている。J.ワッサーマンは、この作品にレオナルドが持つ解剖学の知識が反映されていると指摘した。前面にはヒエロニムスの象徴である大きなライオンが寝そべり、その胴体と尾が別方向のカーブを描いている。背景に粗く描かれた岩地の風景が、ヒエロニムスの身体を浮かび上がらせている。

『荒野の聖ヒエロニムス』と同様に、大胆な構成、風景描写、さらには人間模様が描かれているのが『東方三博士の礼拝』（1481年、ウフィツィ美術館）で、サン・ドナート・スコペート修道院の修道僧から依頼された作品だった。250cm四方で、非常に複雑な構成が採用されている。レオナルドは『東方三博士の礼拝』を制作するにあたって、線遠近法で描かれた背景の古代ローマ建築物など、数多くのドローイングと習作を描いた。しかしながら、1482年にロレンツォ・デ・メディチから、ミラノ公ルドヴィーコ・スフォルツァへの使者としてミラノ公国へ向かうように命じられたため、『東方三博士の礼拝』の制作も未完のまま放棄されてしまった。

この時期に描かれたもうひとつの重要な絵画が『岩窟の聖母』で、ミラノの聖母無原罪の御宿り信心会からの依頼による作品である。『岩窟の聖母』は、ジョヴァンニ・アンブロージオ・デ・プレディスと弟エヴァンジェリスタが協力した作品で、既に完成していた祭壇を飾る大きな祭壇画として描かれた。レオナルドはこの作品を、聖アンナ、聖母マリア、幼児キリストの聖家族が、天使に守られてのエジプトへの逃避中に幼い洗礼者ヨハネと出会うという、聖書の正典ではありえない場面に設定した。さらに幼いヨハネはキリストを救世主と認め、祈りを捧げている情景が表現されている。崩れ落ちそうな岩と渦巻く川を背景にして、青白い顔をした美しい人々が、幼児キリストを愛情をこめて崇拝している場面が描かれている。『岩窟の聖母』は200cm × 120という比較的大規模な作品ではあるが、『東方三博士の礼拝』のような複雑な画面構成にはなっていない。『東方三博士の礼拝』にはおよそ15名の人物像と詳細な建築物が描かれているが、『岩窟の聖母』に描かれているのは4名の人物像と岩の洞窟だけである。『岩窟の聖母』は異なるヴァージョンで2点制作され、1点は聖母無原罪の御宿り信心会の礼拝堂に（現在ロンドンのナショナル・ギャラリーが所蔵しているヴァージョン）、もう1点はレオナルドの手元に留め置かれ、後にレオナルドと共にフランスへと持ち込まれている（現在パリのルーヴル美術館が所蔵するヴァージョン）。しかしながら聖母無原罪の御宿り信心会が正式に『岩窟の聖母』を入手、ないし制作代金を支払ったのは16世紀になってからのことだった。

1490年代の絵画作品

レオナルドが1490年代に描いた絵画作品のなかでもっとも有名な作品は、ミラノのサンタ・マリア・デッレ・グラツィエ修道院の食堂にある壁画『最後の晩餐』である。この作品にはキリストが捕縛、処刑される直前に、12名の弟子たちとともにとった夕餐の情景が描かれており、キリストが「あなたがたのうちのひとりが、わたしを裏切ろうとしている」と口にした瞬間が描写されている。レオナルドは、このキリストの言葉によって12名の弟子たちが狼狽したという『ヨハネによる福音書』の一場面をこの壁画に描き出したのである。

レオナルドの同時代人のイタリア人著述家マッテオ・バンデッロ（1480年頃 - 1562年）は、レオナルドがこの『最後の晩餐』の製作中には、数日間夜明けから夕暮れまで食事も採らずに絵画制作に没頭し、その後3、4日はまったく絵筆を取らなかったとしている。この制作手法は修道院長には理解し難いものであり、レオナルドがミラノ公ルドヴィーコ・スフォルツァに苦情を申し立てるまで、上級幹部たちはレオナルドに迅速な作業を要求した。ヴァザーリは、レオナルドが『最後の晩餐』に描くキリストと裏切り者ユダの顔の表現に苦労しており、修道院長をモデルにするかもしれないとルドヴィーコに語ったと記している。

完成した『最後の晩餐』は、構成、人物表現ともに非常に優れた作品だと評価されたが、急速に状態が劣化していき、完成の百年後には「完全に崩壊した」といわれるようになった。レオナルドはこの壁画を制作するにあたって信頼の置けるフレスコ技法ではなく、ジェッソを主材料とした下塗りの上からテンペラを用いたため、作品表面にカビが生じ、顔料の剥落を招いてしまったのである。このような非常に大きな損傷を被っているとはいえ、『最後の晩餐』はもっとも模写や複製などが制作された絵画作品のひとつであり、絵画だけではなく絨毯やカメオなど、さまざまな媒体に複製されている。

1500年代の絵画作品

『モナ・リザ』、1503年 - 1505年/1507年、ルーヴル美術館。

レオナルドが16世紀に描いた小規模な肖像画で、ルーヴル美術館が所蔵する『モナ・リザ』は、世界でもっとも有名な絵画作品といわれている。描かれている女性が浮かべているとらえ所のない微笑が高く評価されている作品で、口元と目に表現された微妙な陰影がこの女性の謎めいた雰囲気をもたらしている。この微妙な陰影技法は「スフマート」あるいは「レオナルドの煙」と呼ばれている。ヴァザーリはこの『モナ・リザ』を直接目にしたことはなく、噂でしか知らなかったといわれているが、「その微笑は魅力的で、人間ではなく神が浮かべているようにみえる。この絵画を目にしたものは、まるでモデルが生きているかのように描かれていることに驚くことだろう」としている 。

その他『モナ・リザ』の特徴として、飾り気のない衣装、うねって流れるような背後の風景、抑制された色調、極めて高度な写実技法などが挙げられる。これらの特徴は顔料に油絵の具を使用することによってもたらされたものだが、絵画技法はテンペラと同様な手法が用いられており、画肌表面で顔料を混ぜ合わせた筆あとはほとんど見られない。ヴァザーリはレオナルドを「他者を絶望、落胆させるような、自信に満ちた芸術家」として、その絵画技術を絶賛している。ルネサンス期に制作された板絵としては、『モナ・リザ』の保存状態は完璧に近く、修復加筆の痕跡もほとんど見られない。

自然の風景の中に人物像を描くという『聖アンナと聖母子』の構成は、ジャック・ワッサーマンが「息をのむような美しさ」としており、『荒野の聖ヒエロニムス』の傾いた人物像を髣髴とさせる。『聖アンナと聖母子』が群を抜いている点は、二人の人物が斜めに重ねあわされている構図にある。母アンナの膝に座る聖母マリアが、自身が将来遭遇する受難の象徴である子羊を手荒に扱うキリストをたしなめようと、身体を傾けて腕を伸ばしている。『聖アンナと聖母子』も多くの模写が制作された絵画で、ミケランジェロ、ラファエロ、アンドレア・デル・サルトらにも影響を与え、さらにはその弟子であるヤコポ・ダ・ポントルモ、コレッジョらにも影響を与えた。また、『聖アンナと聖母子』の画面構成はヴェネツィアの画家ティントレットやパオロ・ヴェロネーゼらが好んで採用した。

ドローイング

『聖アンナと聖母子』、1510年頃、ルーヴル美術館。

『聖アンナと聖母子と幼児聖ヨハネ』、1499年 - 1500年ごろ、ナショナル・ギャラリー。

レオナルドは多作な画家ではなかったが、多くのデッサンやドローイングを残しており、その手稿にはレオナルドが興味をもったあらゆる事象の小さなスケッチや詳細なドローイングで埋め尽くされている。現存するデッサンは９００種とも言われている。絵画作品の習作や下絵も多く現存しており、『東方三博士の礼拝』、『岩窟の聖母』、『最後の晩餐』などの習作であると特定できるものもある。制作日時が判明している最初期のドローイングは1473年の『アルノ川の風景』で、川、山、モンテルーポ城、農地が極めて詳細に描かれている。レオナルドが描いたドローイングの中で有名な作品として、人体の調和を表現した『ウィトルウィウス的人体図』（アカデミア美術館）、『岩窟の聖母』の習作『天使の頭部』（ルーヴル美術館）、植物が描かれた習作『ベツレヘムの星』（ウィンザー城ロイヤル・コレクション）、160cm ×100cmの『聖アンナと聖母子と幼児聖ヨハネ』（ナショナル・ギャラリー）などがある。色つきの紙に黒チョークで描かれた『聖アンナと聖母子と幼児聖ヨハネ』には、陰影表現に『モナ・リザ』に見られるスフマート技法が用いられている。この『聖アンナと聖母子と幼児聖ヨハネ』を直接の習作として描かれた絵画作品は存在しないともいわれているが、ルーヴル美術館が所蔵する『聖アンナと聖母子』は構成がよく似ている。

実在の人物をモデルとしていると思われるものの、大げさに誇張して描かれた「カリカチュア」と呼ばれる多くのドローイングがある。ヴァザーリは、レオナルドは興味を惹かれる容貌の持ち主を見かけると、一日中その後を着いてまわって観察し続けたと記している。美しい少年を描いた習作も数多く存在する。弟子のサライに関連するものも多いが、いわゆる「ギリシア人風の横顔」と称される、希少かつ高く評価されている習作がある。これら端整な「ギリシア人風の横顔」は、レオナルドの戦士を描いた習作と好対照であるといわれることもある。また、サライは仮装のような装束で描かれていることも多い。レオナルドはショーや行列の演出を任されることもあり、これらはそのための習作だった可能性もある。その他に衣服の習作もあり、なかには極めて詳細に描かれたものも存在している。レオナルドは初期の作品から優れた衣服の表現技法を見せている。1479年にレオナルドがフィレンツェで描いた、猟奇的ともいえるスケッチがある。ロレンツォ・デ・メディチの弟ジュリアーノが暗殺されたパッツィ家の陰謀に加担したベルナルド・バロンチェッリが、絞首刑に処せられた場面を描いたスケッチである。このスケッチにはレオナルドが流麗な鏡文字で書いた、バロンチェッリが処刑されたときに身につけていた衣服のことが記されている。

ギャラリー

以下は、記事本文中で使用している絵画作品以外の、レオナルドの「真作 (Universally accepted)」、あるいは「ほぼ真作 (Generally accepted)］とされている絵画作品である。

• 『ジネーヴラ・デ・ベンチの肖像』、1476年 - 1478年頃（諸説あり）、ナショナル・ギャラリー・オブ・アート

• 『ブノアの聖母』、1479年 - 1480年頃（諸説あり）、エルミタージュ美術館

• 『リッタの聖母』、1481年 - 1497年頃（諸説あり）、エルミタージュ美術館、他者との合作という説もある

• 『音楽家の肖像』、1485年頃（諸説あり）、アンブロジアーナ図書館

• 『白貂を抱く貴婦人』、1490年頃、チャルトリスキ美術館

• 『ミラノの貴婦人の肖像』、1496年 - 1497年頃（諸説あり）、ルーヴル美術館

• 『糸車の聖母』、1501年 - 1507年頃（諸説あり）、2点のバージョンのうち、スコットランド国立美術館（バクルー公爵家からの貸与絵画）所蔵の作品で他者との合作という説もある

• 『救世主』、1504年 - 1507年頃（諸説あり）、プライベートコレクション

• 『ほつれ髪の女性』、1508年頃、パルマ国立美術館

手稿

『ウィトルウィウス的人体図』、1485年頃、アカデミア美術館（ヴェネツィア）

「レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ手稿」も参照

ルネサンス人文主義では、科学と芸術をかけ離れた両極端なものとは見なしてはいなかった。レオナルドが残した科学や工学に関する研究も、その芸術作品と同じく印象深い革新的なものだった。これらの研究は13,000ページに及ぶ手稿にドローイングと共に記されており、現代科学の先駆ともいえる、芸術と自然哲学が融合したものである。手稿には日々の暮らしや旅行先でレオナルドが興味を惹かれた事柄が記録されており、レオナルドは自身を取り巻く世界への観察眼を終生持ち続けた。

レオナルドの手跡はほとんどが草書体の鏡文字で記されている。この理由としてレオナルドの秘密主義によるものだとする説もあるが、単にレオナルドが書きやすかっただけだとする説もある。レオナルドは左利きであり、右から左へと文字を書くほうが楽だったと思われる。

子宮内の胎児が描かれた手稿。1510年頃、ロイヤル・コレクション（ウィンザー城）

レオナルドの手稿とそのドローイングには、レオナルドが興味と関心を持ったあらゆる分野の事象が書かれている。食料品店や自身の召使いの一覧といった日常的なものから、翼や水上歩行用の靴の研究にいたるまで、極めて幅広いジャンルにまたがっている。そのほか、絵画の構成案、詳細表現や衣服の習作を始め、顔、感情表現、動物、乳児、解剖、植物の習作や研究、岩石の組成、川の渦巻き、兵器、ヘリコプター、建築の研究などが手稿に書かれている。さまざまな種類、大きさの紙に記されたこれらの手稿はレオナルドの死後に散逸し、現在ではウィンザー城のロイヤル・コレクション、ルーヴル美術館、スペイン国立図書館、ヴィクトリア&アルバート博物館などに所蔵されている。また、アンブロジアーナ図書館には12巻の「アトランティコ手稿」が、大英博物館には「アランデル手稿」がそれぞれ所蔵されている。ビル・ゲイツが所蔵する「レスター手稿」は科学に関する研究が多く記された手稿で、毎年1度、1カ国、1カ所のみで展示されている。

レオナルドの手稿は、最終的には出版することを目的として書かれたものだと考えられている。これは多くの手稿で様式や順番が整理されているためである。1枚の手稿にひとつの事柄について記されているものが多い。例えば人間の心臓や胎児について書かれた手稿には、詳細な説明とドローイングが1枚の紙に記されている。しかしながら、レオナルドの存命中にこれらの手稿が出版されなかった理由は分かっていない。

科学に関する手稿

ルカ・パチョーリの『神聖比率』の挿絵。レオナルドが描いたドローイングを版画にしたもの。

レオナルドの科学への取り組み方も観察によるものだった。ある事象を理解するために詳細な記述と画像化を繰り返し、実験や理論は重視していなかった。レオナルドはラテン語や数学の正式な教育を受けておらず、独力でラテン語を習得したものの、当時の多くの学者からは科学者であるとは見なされていなかった。レオナルドは1495年に修道士・数学者のルカ・パチョーリの数学書『スムマ』を購入しており、1496年にはパチョーリとミラノで出会い、彼のもとで数学を学ぶ。1509年に出版されることになるパチョーリの著書『神聖比率』の挿絵に使用する版画の下絵として、正多面体骨格モデルのドローイングを複数描いている。残された手稿の内容から判断すると、レオナルドはさまざまな主題を扱った科学論文集を出版する予定だったと考えられる。平易な文章で書かれた解剖学を扱った手稿は、枢機卿ルイ・ダラゴンの秘書官がフランスを訪れていた1517年に実施された解剖を、レオナルドが見学した体験から書かれているといわれている。弟子のフランチェスコ・メルツィが編纂した解剖学、光や風景の表現手法に関するレオナルドの手稿が、1651年にフランスとイタリアで絵画論、ウルビーノ手稿とも呼ばれる）として出版された。1724年にはドイツでも出版されている。『絵画論』がフランスで出版後50年間で62版まで版を重ねたこともあって、レオナルドは「フランス芸術学教育者の始祖」と見なされるようになっていった。科学分野でレオナルドが行った実験は当時の科学理論に適ったものだったが、物理学者フリッチョフ・カプラのようにレオナルドを徹底的に追求した研究者たちは、後世のガリレオ・ガリレイ、アイザック・ニュートンといった科学者たちと比べると、レオナルドは本質的に全く別種の研究者であるとし、レオナルドの科学的理論と仮説は芸術、とくに絵画と一体化したものだったと主張している。

解剖学に関する手稿

腕骨格の研究手稿、1510年頃。

レオナルドが人体解剖学の正式な教育を受け始めたのは、ヴェロッキオの徒弟時代のことで、これは師のヴェロッキオが弟子全員に解剖学の知識の習得を勧めたためである。レオナルドはすぐに画家にとって必要とされる局所解剖学の知識を身につけ、筋肉、腱など、人体の内部構造を描いた多くのドローイングを残している。その中にはセックスを行っている男女の断面図も含まれる。

著名な芸術家だったレオナルドは、フィレンツェのサンタ・マリーア・ヌオーヴァ病院での遺体解剖の立会いを許可されており、さらに後にはミラノとローマの病院でも同様の立会いを許されている。レオナルドは1510年から1511年にかけてパドヴァ大学解剖学教授マルカントニオ・デッラ・トッレとともに共同研究を行った。レオナルドは200枚以上の紙にドローイングを描き、それらの多くに解剖学に関する覚書を記している。レオナルドの死後、これらの手稿を受け継いだ弟子のフランチェスコ・メルツィが出版しようとしたが、手稿の言及範囲の広さとレオナルド独特の筆記法のために作業は困難を極めた。結局メルツィの存命中には出版することができず、メルツィの死後50年以上にわたって作業は放置されてしまった。結局、1651年に出版された『絵画論』にも含まれることになる、解剖学に関する僅かな手稿のみが、フランスで1632年に出版されただけとなった。メルツィはレオナルドの手稿を出版するにあたってその編纂を任されていた時期に、多数の解剖学者や芸術家たちがレオナルドの手稿を研究しており、画家のヴァザーリ、チェッリーニ、デューラーらが、この手稿の挿絵をもとにした多くのドローイングを描いている。

レオナルドは筋肉や腱などと同じく、人体骨格を扱った手稿も多数制作している。骨格と筋肉の機能に関するこれらの研究は、現代科学でいうバイオメカニクスの初歩にも適用可能な先駆的研究ともいわれている。レオナルドは心臓や循環器、性器、臓器などの手稿も残しており、胎児を描いた最初期の科学的なドローイングを描いている。芸術家としてのレオナルドは綿密な観察によって、加齢による影響、生理学的観点からみた感情表出を記録し、とくに激しい感情が人間に及ぼす影響について研究した。また、顔部に奇形や罹病跡をもつ人物のドローイングも多数描いている。

レオナルドは人間だけではなく、解剖に付されたウシ、鳥、サル、クマ、カエルといった動物の解剖画も手稿に描いており、人間との内部構造の違いを比較している。また、ウマに関する手稿も多く残している。

工学と創案に関する手稿

オーニソプターの概念図、1488年頃、フランス学士院。

存命時のレオナルドは工学技術者としても評価されていた。ミラノ公ルドヴィーコ・スフォルツァに宛てた書簡で、レオナルドは自らのことを都市防衛、都市攻略に用いるあらゆる兵器を作ることができると書いている。1499年にフランス軍に敗れたミラノ公国からヴェネツィアへと避難したレオナルドは、当地で工学技術者の職を得て、都市防衛のための移動要塞を考案している。また、ニッコロ・マキャヴェッリも参画していたアルノ川流路変更計画にも、土木技術者として加わった。レオナルドの手稿には、数多くの現実的あるいは非現実的な創案があり、楽器ヴィオラ・オルガニスタ、水圧ポンプ、迫撃砲、蒸気砲などの創案が含まれている。

1502年にレオナルドは、オスマン帝国スルタンのバヤズィト2世が構想した土木工事計画のために長さ200メートルにおよぶ橋の設計図を制作している。この橋はボスポラス海峡入り江の金角湾に架けられる予定だった。しかしながらバヤズィト2世はこのような大規模な土木工事は不可能だとして、この工事計画を承認しなかった。このときレオナルドがデザインした橋は、2001年にノルウェーで実施されたレオナルド・ブリッジ・プロジェクトで実際に建設された。

レオナルドはその生涯を通じて空を飛ぶことを夢見ていた。1505年ごろの『鳥の飛翔に関する手稿』などで鳥の飛翔を研究し、ハンググライダーやヘリコプターのような飛行器具の概念図を制作している。イギリスのテレビ局チャンネル4は2003年のドキュメンタリー番組『レオナルドが夢見た機械』(Leonardo's Dream Machines)で、レオナルドの手稿に残る設計どおりにさまざまな器具を製作した。設計どおりに動作したものもあれば、全く役に立たないものまでさまざまな結果となった。1506年にレオナルドと彼の友人でもあり、共同研究者でもあるトマス・マシニはフィレンツェ共和国のチェチェリ山で飛行実験を行うも失敗した。

名声と評価

詳細は「en:Cultural references to Leonardo da Vinci」を参照

画家列伝でのレオナルド

『レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチの死』、ドミニク・アングル、1818年。レオナルドはフランス王フランソワ1世に看取られながら死去したという伝承をもとに描かれた作品。

レオナルドの名声は生前から一貫している、とよく誤解されている。当時はフランス王フランソワ1世がレオナルドをまるで戦利品であるかのようにフランスへと連れて行くほどだった。フランソワ1世は最晩年のレオナルドを支え、レオナルドはフランソワ1世の腕の中で息を引き取ったという伝承が残っている。しかし留意しなければならないのは、当時のフランスは美術的には後進国であり、本当に才能のある画家たち(ミケランジェロやラファエロら)はローマへ行っていた時期である。つまりレオナルド は美術の中心地で仕事をすることができずに、辺境へ行かざるをえないほどの二番手の画家であったと、当時は評価されていたのが実態である。

現在でもレオナルドの有名な美術作品を観るために大衆が列をなし、Tシャツにはレオナルドの絵画がプリントされ、作家たちはレオナルドの驚くべき博学さとその私生活についての考察を書き続け、史上最高の知性を持った人物であるとみなされている。

ヴァザーリは『画家・彫刻家・建築家列伝』の1568年に出版された第2版の、レオナルドの列伝冒頭で次のように紹介している。

多くの人々がそれぞれに優れた才能を持ってこの世に生を受ける。しかし、ときに一人の人間に対して人知を遥かに超える、余人の遠く及ばない驚くばかりの美しさ、優雅さ、才能を天から与えられることがある。霊感とでもいうべきその言動は、人間の技能ではなく、まさしく神のみ技といえる。レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチがこのような人物であることは万人が認めるところで、素晴らしい肉体的な美しさを兼ね備えるこの芸術家は、言動のすべてが無限の優雅さに満ち、その洗練された才気はあらゆる問題を難なく解決してしまう輝かしいものだった。 — ジョルジョ・ヴァザーリ『画家・彫刻家・建築家列伝』

画家、批評家、歴史家たちからの尽きることのない高い評価は、さまざまな賛辞となって表現されている。『宮廷人』の著者バルダッサーレ・カスティリオーネは1528年に「ほかに世界最高の画家がいたとしても、彼（レオナルド）の懸絶した芸術の前では顔色を失うだろう」とし、レオナルドの伝記を書いた、通称アノニモ・ガッディアーノと呼ばれる詳細不明の伝記作家は1540年に「彼（レオナルド）の才能は極めて稀なあらゆる分野に通暁したもので、万物が彼に味方しているかのような奇跡といえるものである」と賞賛している。しかし17世紀から18世紀に至ってはその名声は埋もれっていった。ミケランジェロやラファエロ、ティツィアーノの圧倒的な影響力と比較すれば、レオナルドの存在感はほぼなかったと言ってもよいほどであった。

没地アンボワーズにある、レオナルドの銅像。

19世紀はレオナルドの才能に対する賞賛がとくに高まった時期となった。これはイギリスで活動したスイス人画家ヨハン・ハインリヒ・フュースリーが1801年に書いた「現代美術の夜明けといえる出来事だった。レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチが、それまでの優れているとはいえなかった芸術を光輝に満ちたものへと一変させた。ただ一人の天才がすべてのことを成し遂げたのである」という文章によるものだった。A. E. リオも1861年に「彼（レオナルド）は、その才能の偉大さ、高貴さにおいて、あらゆる芸術家から屹立した存在だった」とレオナルドを評価した。

19世紀にはレオナルドが残した膨大な手稿が、その絵画作品と同様に広く知られるようになった。イポリット・テーヌは1866年に「これほど多彩な才能を持つ人間はおそらく他に存在しない。飽きるということを知らず、その探究心は無限であり、生まれながらに洗練された、同時代はもちろん、その後何世紀にもわたって群を抜いている人物である」としている。美術史家バーナード・ベレンソンは1896年に「レオナルドは真の天才といえる唯一の芸術家である。彼（レオナルド）が触れたものは、すべてが永遠の美へと姿を変えた。頭蓋骨の断面、雑草の構造、筋肉の習作などあらゆるものが、彼が持つ描線と陰影の感性によって永久の生命を吹き込まれたのである」と記している。

レオナルドの類稀な知性への関心は、衰えるところを知らない。専門家によるレオナルドの文章の研究と解釈、絵画作品への最先端の科学技術を駆使した分析によってその業績が明らかにされ、さらには、記録には残っているものの現存しないとされる作品の探索も試みられている。リアナ・ボルトロンは1967年の著書で「あらゆることに関心を示す彼（レオナルド）の好奇心が、さまざまな分野に対する知識を追い求めさせた。レオナルドは間違いなく比類なき万能の天才である。……レオナルドが没して5世紀が過ぎたが、未だにレオナルドは我々の畏敬の対象となっている」と記している。

参考文献

• 池上英洋 『レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ: 生涯と芸術のすべて』 筑摩書房、2019年。 
• Daniel Arasse (1997). Leonardo da Vinci. Konecky & Konecky. ISBN 1-56852-198-7 
• Michael Baxandall (1974). Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-881329-5 
• Fred Bérence (1965). Léonard de Vinci, L'homme et son oeuvre. Somogy. Dépot légal 4° trimestre 1965 
• Luciano Berti (1971). The Uffizi. Scala 
• Liana Bortolon (1967). The Life and Times of Leonardo. Paul Hamlyn, London 
• Hugh Brigstoke (2001). The Oxford Companion the Western Art. U.S.: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-866203-3 
• Gene A. Brucker (1969). Renaissance Florence. Wiley and Sons. ISBN 0-471-11370-0 
• Fritjof Capra (2007). The Science of Leonardo. U.S.: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-51390-6 
• Cennino Cennini (2009). Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui. U.S.: BiblioBazaar. ISBN 978-1-103-39032-8 
• Angela Ottino della Chiesa (1967). The Complete Paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. Penguin Classics of World Art series. ISBN 0-14-008649-8 
• Simona Cremante (2005). Leonardo da Vinci: Artist, Scientist, Inventor. Giunti. ISBN 88-09-03891-6 (hardback) 
• Frederich Hartt (1970). A History of Italian Renaissance Art. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-23136-2 
• Michael H. Hart (1992). The 100. Carol Publishing Group. ISBN 0-8065-1350-0 (paperback) 
• Martin Kemp (2004). Leonardo. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280644-0 
• Leonardo da Vinci: anatomical drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (1983). ISBN 9780870993626 
• Mario Lucertini, Ana Millan Gasca, Fernando Nicolo (2004). Technological Concepts and Mathematical Models in the Evolution of Modern Engineering Systems. Birkhauser. ISBN 3-7643-6940-X 
• John N. Lupia. The Secret Revealed: How to Look at Italian Renaissance Painting. Medieval and Renaissance Times, Vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer, 1994): 6–17. ISSN 1075-2110 
• Andrew Martindale (1972). The Rise of the Artist. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-56006-4 
• Roger Masters (1996). Machiavelli, Leonardo and the Science of Power. University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN 0-268-01433-7 
• Roger Masters (1998). Fortune is a River: Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli's Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-452-28090-7 
• Charles D. O'Malley and J. B. de C. M. Sounders (1952). Leonardo on the Human Body: The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. With Translations, Emendations and a Biographical Introduction. Henry Schuman, New York 
• Charles Nicholl (2005). Leonardo da Vinci, The Flights of the Mind. Penguin. ISBN 0-14-029681-6 
• Sherwin B. Nuland (2001). Leonardo Da Vinci. Phoenix Press. ISBN 0-7538-1269-X 
• A.E. Popham (1946). The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-60462-7 
• Shana Priwer & Cynthia Phillips (2006). The Everything Da Vinci Book: Explore the Life and Times of the Ultimate Renaissance Man. Adams Media. ISBN 1-59869-101-5 
• Ilan Rachum (1979). The Renaissance, an Illustrated Encyclopedia. Octopus. ISBN 0-7064-0857-8 
• Jean Paul Richter (1970). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Dover. ISBN 0-486-22572-0  volume 2: ISBN 0-486-22573-9. A reprint of the original 1883 edition.
• Marco Rosci (1977). Leonardo. Bay Books Pty Ltd. ISBN 0-85835-176-5 
• Paolo Rossi (2001). The Birth of Modern Science. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-22711-3 
• Bruno Santi (1990). Leonardo da Vinci. Scala / Riverside 
• Theophilus (1963). On Divers Arts. U.S.: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-79482-2 
• Jack Wasserman (1975). Leonardo da Vinci. Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-0262-1 
• Giorgio Vasari (1568). Lives of the Artists. Penguin Classics, trans. George Bull 1965. ISBN 0-14-044164-6 
• Williamson, Hugh Ross (1974). Lorenzo the Magnificent. Michael Joseph. ISBN 0-7181-1204-0 
• Emanuel Winternitz (1982). Leonardo Da Vinci As a Musician. U.S.: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-02631-3 
• Alessandro Vezzosi (1997 (English translation)). Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Man. Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. ISBN 0-500-30081-X 
• Frank Zollner (2003). Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings. Taschen. ISBN 3-8228-1734-1 (hardback)  [The chapter "The Graphic Works" is by Frank Zollner & Johannes Nathan].

関連文献

• 『よみがえる最後の晩餐』片桐頼継、アメリア アレナス共著、日本放送出版協会、2000年 ISBN 4-14-080494-7
• 『レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチという神話』片桐頼継、角川選書、2003年 ISBN 4-04-703359-6
• 『レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ 伝説の虚実　創られた物語と西洋思想の系譜』 竹下節子　中央公論新社　2006年5月 ISBN 4-12-003733-9
• 『レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチの生涯　飛翔する精神の軌跡』　チャールズ・ニコル　越川倫明ほか訳、白水社　2009年
• 『レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ　芸術と科学』　カルロ・ペドレッティ、アンドレ・シャステル、パオロ・ガッルッツィ、ルカ・アントッチャ、マルコ・チャンキ共著、前田富士男・ラーン大原三恵・小林明子訳、イースト・プレス、2006年。
• 『下村寅太郎著作集5. レオナルド研究』　みすず書房　1992。
• 『兒島喜久雄　レオナルド研究寄與』澤柳大五郎編、座右宝刊行会　1973。
• レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ手稿
  • 『レオナルド素描集成』 レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチおよびその周辺画家の素描、L.C.アラーノ解説

    日本版は澤柳大五郎監修、三神弘彦訳、みすず書房.1984。

  • 『レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ解剖図集』　松井喜三編解説　みすず書房　1971、新版2001

関連項目

• ミケランジェロ・ブオナローティ
• ラファエロ・サンティ
• レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ手稿
• クリストフォロ・ディ・メッシスブーゴ - 宮廷料理人、"料理界のダヴィンチ"と呼ばれる。
• 美しき姫君
• ルネサンス期のイタリア絵画
• レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ国際空港
• 全日本空輸 - 設立当初のロゴに、ダ・ヴィンチのヘリコプターが図案として使われていた。
• 児島喜久雄 - 戦前日本におけるレオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ研究の泰斗。
• ジョコンダ夫人の肖像 - E・L・カニグズバーグによる児童文学。
• ダ・ヴィンチ・コード - レオナルドにまつわる謎を描いた小説。
• アサシン クリードシリーズ - 一部作品に登場する。

外部リンク

• "Leonardo da Vinci" in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia
• レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチの作品 - プロジェクト・グーテンベルク
• ダ・ヴィンチ レオナルド：作家別作品リスト - 青空文庫
• レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチのノート （Project Gutenberg)
• BBCのレオナルド特集ページ
• Leonardo da Vinci by Maurice Walter Brockwell' - プロジェクト・グーテンベルク
• Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
• Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings
• Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci
• Da Vinci Decoded Article from The Guardian
• The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
• Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism
• The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
• Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries High resolution images of works by and/or portraits of Leonardo da Vinci in .jpg and .tiff format.
• Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, Friday, 4 May 2012 to Sunday, 7 October 2012. High-resolution anatomical drawings.
• Yahoo news, Leonardo's Self-portrait in critical condition
• Yahoo news, EXCLUSIVE: 500-year-old Leonardo da Vinci sculpture ‘Horse and Rider’ unveiled
• The Codex Arundel 大英図書館所蔵 ダ・ヴィンチ手記
• レオナルド・ダ・ヴィンチ の高解像度オンライン展覧会
• Leonardo Da Vinci
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"Da Vinci" redirects here. For other uses, see Da Vinci (disambiguation) and Leonardo da Vinci (disambiguation).

In this Renaissance Florentine name, the name da Vinci is an indicator of birthplace, not a family name; the person is properly referred to by the given name, Leonardo.

Leonardo da Vinci
This portrait attributed to Francesco Melzi, c. 1515–18, is the only certain contemporary depiction of Leonardo.
Born	Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452-04-15)15 April 1452 (Anchiano?) Vinci, Republic of Florence (present-day Italy)
Died	2 May 1519(1519-05-02) (aged 67) Clos Lucé, Amboise, Kingdom of France
Education	Studio of Andrea del Verrocchio
Known for	Painting drawing engineering science sculpture architecture
Notable work	Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1483–1493) Lady with an Ermine (c. 1489–1491) The Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) The Last Supper (c. 1492–1498) Salvator Mundi (c. 1499–1510) Mona Lisa (c. 1503–1516)
Movement	High Renaissance
Signature

Leonardo da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he also became known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo's genius epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works compose a contribution to later generations of artists matched only by that of his younger contemporary, Michelangelo.

Born out of wedlock to a successful notary and a lower-class woman in, or near, Vinci, he was educated in Florence by the renowned Italian painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. He began his career in the city, but then spent much time in the service of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Later, he worked in Florence and Milan again, as well as briefly in Rome, all while attracting a large following of imitators and students. Upon the invitation of Francis I, he spent his last three years in France, where he died in 1519. Since his death, there has not been a time where his achievements, diverse interests, personal life, and empirical thinking have failed to incite interest and admiration, making him a frequent namesake and subject in culture.

Leonardo is among the greatest painters in the history of art and is often credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. Despite having many lost works and less than 25 attributed major works—including numerous unfinished works—he created some of the most influential paintings in Western art. His magnum opus, the Mona Lisa, is his best known work and often regarded as the world's most famous painting. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time and his Vitruvian Man drawing is also regarded as a cultural icon. In 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed in whole or part to Leonardo, was sold at auction for US$450.3 million, setting a new record for most expensive painting ever sold at public auction.

Revered for his technological ingenuity, he conceptualized flying machines, a type of armored fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. Some of his smaller inventions, however, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, geology, optics, tribology, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had little to no direct influence on subsequent science.

Biography

Early life (1452–1472)

Birth and background

The possible birthplace and childhood home of Leonardo in Anchiano, Vinci, Italy

Leonardo da Vinci, properly named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Leonardo, son of ser Piero from Vinci), was born on 15 April 1452 in, or close to, the Tuscan hill town of Vinci; Florence was 20 miles away. He was born out of wedlock to Ser Piero da Vinci (Ser Piero di Antonio di Ser Piero di Ser Guido da Vinci; 1426–1504), a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina (c. 1434 – 1494), from the lower-class. It remains uncertain where Leonardo was born; the traditional account, from a local oral tradition recorded by the historian Emanuele Repetti, is that he was born in Anchiano, a country hamlet that would have offered sufficient privacy for the illegitimate birth, though, it is still possible he was born in a house in Florence, which Ser Piero almost certainly had. Leonardo's parents both married separately the year after his birth. Caterina—who later appears in Leonardo's notes as only "Caterina" or "Catelina"—is usually identified as the Caterina Buti del Vacca who married the local artisan Antonio di Piero Buti del Vacca, nicknamed "L'Accattabriga" ("the quarrelsome one"). Other theories have been proposed, particularly that of art historian Martin Kemp, who suggested Caterina di Meo Lippi, an orphan that married supposably with aid from the Ser Piero and his family. Ser Piero married Albiera Amadori—having been betrothed to her the previous year—and after her death in 1462, went on to have three subsequent marriages. From all the marriages, Leonardo eventually had 12 half-siblings, who were much younger than he was (the last was born when Leonardo was 40 years old) and with whom he had very little contact.

Very little is known about Leonardo's childhood and much is shrouded in myth, partially because of his biography in Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) from the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari. Tax records indicate that by at least 1457 he lived in the household of his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci, but it is possible that he spent the years before then in the care of his mother in Vinci, either Anchiano or Campo Zeppi in the parish of San Pantaleone. He is thought to have been close with his uncle, Francesco da Vinci, but his father was likely in Florence most of the time. Ser Piero, who was the descendent of a long line of notaries, established an official residence in Florence by at least 1469 and led a successful career. Despite his family history, Leonardo only received a basic and informal education in (vernacular) writing, reading and math, possibly because his artistic talents were recognized early.

Later in life, Leonardo recorded his earliest memory, now in the in the Codex Atlanticus. While writing on the flight of birds, he recalled as an infant when a kite came to his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail; commentators still debate whether the anecdote was an actual memory or a fantasy.

Verrocchio's workshop

The Baptism of Christ (1472–1475) by Verrocchio and Leonardo, Uffizi Gallery

In the mid-1460s, Leonardo's family moved to Florence, which at the time was the centre of Christian Humanist thought and culture. Around the age of 14, he became a garzone (studio boy) in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who was the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his time. This was about the time of the death of Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello. Leonardo became an apprentice by the age of 17 and remained in training for seven years. Other famous painters apprenticed in the workshop or associated with it include Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo was exposed to both theoretical training and a wide range of technical skills, including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and wood-work, as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling.

Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio or at the Platonic Academy of the Medici. Florence was ornamented by the works of artists such as Donatello's contemporaries Masaccio, whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion, and Ghiberti, whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise De pictura were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.

Much of the painting in Verrocchio's workshop was done by his assistants. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his The Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus' robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again, although this is believed to be an apocryphal story. Close examination reveals areas of the work that have been painted or touched-up over the tempera, using the new technique of oil paint, including the landscape, the rocks seen through the brown mountain stream, and much of the figure of Jesus, bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. Leonardo may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio: the bronze statue of David in the Bargello, and the Archangel Raphael in Tobias and the Angel.

Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters, tells a story of Leonardo as a very young man: A local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo, inspired by the story of Medusa, responded with a painting of a monster spitting fire that was so terrifying that his father bought a different shield to give to the peasant and sold Leonardo's to a Florentine art dealer for 100 ducats, who in turn sold it to the Duke of Milan.

First Florentine period (1472–c. 1482)

Adoration of the Magi c. 1478–1482, Uffizi, Florence

By 1472, at the age of 20, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate and live with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a 1473 pen-and-ink drawing of the Arno valley, which has been cited as the first "pure" landscape in the Occident. According to Vasari, the young Leonardo was the first to suggest making the Arno river a navigable channel between Florence and Pisa.

In January 1478, Leonardo received an independent commission to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio, an indication of his independence from Verrocchio's studio. An anonymous early biographer, known as Anonimo Gaddiano, claims that in 1480 Leonardo was living with the Medici and often worked in the garden of the Piazza San Marco, Florence, where a Neoplatonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers organized by the Medici met. In March 1481, he received a commission from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto for The Adoration of the Magi. Neither of these initial commissions were completed, being abandoned when Leonardo went to offer his services to Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo wrote Sforza a letter which described the diverse things that he could achieve in the fields of engineering and weapon design, and mentioned that he could paint. He brought with him a silver string instrument—either a lute or lyre—in the form of a horse's head.

With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism; Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were the foremost. Also associated with the Platonic Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. In 1482, Leonardo was sent as an ambassador by Lorenzo de' Medici to Ludovico il Moro, who ruled Milan between 1479 and 1499.

• Madonna of the Carnation, c. 1472–1478, Alte Pinakothek, Munich

• Landscape of the Arno Valley (1473), probably the first true landscape in art

• Ginevra de' Benci, c. 1474–1480, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

• Benois Madonna, c. 1478–1481, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

• Sketch of the hanging of Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli, 1479

First Milanese period (c. 1482–1499)

Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1483–1493, Louvre version

Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In the spring of 1485, Leonardo travelled to Hungary on behalf of Sforza to meet king Matthias Corvinus, and was commissioned by him to paint a Madonna. Leonardo was employed on many other projects for Sforza, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, a drawing and wooden model for a competition to design the cupola for Milan Cathedral (which he withdrew), and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Ludovico's predecessor Francesco Sforza. This would have surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the Gran Cavallo. Leonardo completed a model for the horse and made detailed plans for its casting, but in November 1494, Ludovico gave the bronze to his brother-in-law to be used for a cannon to defend the city from Charles VIII of France.

Salaì, or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One," i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490 as an assistant. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton," after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions and spent a fortune on clothes. Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence, and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. Salaì executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salaì, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting," his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggiono and Boltraffio.

• Head of a Woman, c. 1483–1485, Royal Library of Turin

• Portrait of a Musician, c. 1483–1487, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan

• The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice

• Leonardo's horse in silverpoint, c. 1488

• La Belle Ferronnière, c. 1490–1498

Second Florentine period (1500–1508)

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, c. 1499–1508, National Gallery, London

When Ludovico Sforza was overthrown by France in 1500, Leonardo fled Milan for Venice, accompanied by his assistant Salaì and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli. In Venice, Leonardo was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack. On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival."

In Cesena in 1502, Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. Leonardo created a map of Cesare Borgia's stronghold, a town plan of Imola in order to win his patronage. Upon seeing it, Cesare hired Leonardo as his chief military engineer and architect. Later in the year, Leonardo produced another map for his patron, one of Chiana Valley, Tuscany, so as to give his patron a better overlay of the land and greater strategic position. He created this map in conjunction with his other project of constructing a dam from the sea to Florence, in order to allow a supply of water to sustain the canal during all seasons.

Leonardo had left Borgia's service and returned to Florence by early 1503, where he rejoined the Guild of Saint Luke on 18 October of that year. By this same month, Leonardo had begun working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the model for the Mona Lisa, which he would continue working on until his twilight years. In January 1504, he was part of a committee formed to recommend where Michelangelo's statue of David should be placed. He then spent two years in Florence designing and painting a mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina.

In 1506, Leonardo was summoned to Milan by Charles II d'Amboise, the acting French governor of the city. There, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. The Council of Florence wished Leonardo to return promptly to finish The Battle of Anghiari, but he was given leave at the behest of Louis XII, who considered commissioning the artist to make some portraits. Leonardo may have commenced a project for an equestrian figure of d'Amboise; a wax model survives and, if genuine, is the only extant example of Leonardo's sculpture. Leonardo was otherwise free to pursue his scientific interests. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, and Marco d'Oggiono. In 1507, Leonardo was in Florence sorting out a dispute with his brothers over the estate of his father, who had died in 1504.

• The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, c. 1501–1519, Louvre, Paris

• Leonardo's map of Imola, created for Cesare Borgia, 1502

• Study for The Battle of Anghiari (now lost), c. 1503, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

• La Scapigliata, c. 1506–8 (unfinished), Galleria Nazionale di Parma, Parma

• Study for Leda and the Swan (now lost), c. 1506-1508, Chatsworth House, England

Second Milanese period (1508–1513)

By 1508, Leonardo was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila.

In 1512, Leonardo was working on plans for an equestrian monument for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, but this was prevented by an invasion of a confederation of Swiss, Spanish and Venetian forces, which drove the French from Milan. Leonardo stayed in the city, spending several months in 1513 at the Medici's Vaprio d'Adda villa.

Rome and France (1513–1519)

In March of 1513, Lorenzo de' Medici's son Giovanni assumed the papacy (as Leo X); Leonardo went to Rome that September, where he was received by the pope's brother Giuliano. From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere Courtyard in the Apostolic Palace, where Michelangelo and Raphael were both active. Leonardo was given an allowance of 33 ducats a month, and according to Vasari, decorated a lizard with scales dipped in quicksilver. The pope gave him a painting commission of unknown subject matter, but cancelled it when the artist set about developing a new kind of varnish. Leonardo became ill, in what may have been the first of multiple strokes leading to his death. He practiced botany in the Gardens of Vatican City, and was commissioned to make plans for the pope's proposed draining of the Pontine Marshes. He also dissected cadavers, making notes for a treatise on vocal cords; these he gave to an official in hopes of regaining the pope's favor, but was unsuccessful.

In October 1515, King Francis I of France recaptured Milan. Leonardo was present at the 19 December meeting of Francis I and Leo X, which took place in Bologna. In 1516, Leonardo entered Francis' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé, near the king's residence at the royal Château d'Amboise. Being frequently visited by Francis, he drew plans for an immense castle town the king intended to erect at Romorantin, and made a mechanical lion, which during a pageant walked toward the king and—upon being struck by a wand—opened its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Leonardo was accompanied during this time by his friend and apprentice Francesco Melzi, and supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi. At some point, Melzi drew a portrait of Leonardo; the only others known from his lifetime were a sketch by an unknown assistant on the back of one of Leonardo's studies (c. 1517) and a drawing by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino depicting an elderly Leonardo with his right arm assuaged by cloth. The latter, in addition to the record of an October 1517 visit by Louis d'Aragon, confirms an account of Leonardo's right hand being paralytic at the age of 65, which may indicate why he left works such as the Mona Lisa unfinished. He continued to work at some capacity until eventually becoming ill and bedridden for several months.

Death

Drawing of the Château d'Amboise (c. 1518) attributed to Francesco Melzi

Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67, possibly of a stroke. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari describes Leonardo as lamenting on his deathbed, full of repentance, that "he had offended against God and men by failing to practice his art as he should have done." Vasari states that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari also records that the king held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story may be legend rather than fact. In accordance with his will, sixty beggars carrying tapers followed Leonardo's casket. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving, as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo's other long-time pupil and companion, Salaì, and his servant Baptista de Vilanis, each received half of Leonardo's vineyards. His brothers received land, and his serving woman received a fur-lined cloak. On 12 August 1519, Leonardo's remains were interred in the Collegiate Church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise.

Salaì owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1524, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait. Some 20 years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."

Personal life

Main article: Personal life of Leonardo da Vinci

Saint John the Baptist c. 1507–1516, Louvre. Leonardo is thought to have used Salaì as the model.

Despite the thousands of pages Leonardo left in notebooks and manuscripts, he scarcely made reference to his personal life.

Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty," "infinite grace," "great strength and generosity," "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind," as described by Vasari, as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect was his love for animals, likely including vegetarianism and according to Vasari, a habit of purchasing caged birds and releasing them.

Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on the book Divina proportione in the 1490s. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Cecilia Gallerani and the two Este sisters, Beatrice and Isabella. While on a journey that took him through Mantua, he drew a portrait of Isabella that appears to have been used to create a painted portrait, now lost.

Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud in his Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood. Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salaì and Melzi. Melzi, writing to inform Leonardo's brothers of his death, described Leonardo's feelings for his pupils as both loving and passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy in an incident involving a well-known male prostitute. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and there is speculation that since one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in Saint John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings.

Paintings

See also: List of works by Leonardo da Vinci

Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his fame rested on his achievements as a painter. A handful of works that are either authenticated or attributed to him have been regarded as among the great masterpieces. These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities that have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter.

Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are his innovative techniques for laying on the paint; his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology; his interest in physiognomy and the way humans register emotion in expression and gesture; his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition; and his use of subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and the Virgin of the Rocks.

Early works

Annunciation c. 1472–1476, Uffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work

Leonardo first gained attention for his work on the Baptism of Christ, painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at Verrocchio's workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, 59 centimetres (23 in) long and 14 centimetres (5.5 in) high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, 217 centimetres (85 in) long. In both Annunciations, Leonardo used a formal arrangement, like two well-known pictures by Fra Angelico of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with a rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now generally attributed to Leonardo.

In the smaller painting, Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. Mary is not submissive, however, in the larger piece. The girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God, not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting, the young Leonardo presents the humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.

Paintings of the 1480s

Unfinished painting of Saint Jerome in the Wilderness c. 1480–1490, Vatican

In the 1480s, Leonardo received two very important commissions and commenced another work that was of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Two of the three were never finished, and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment.

One of these paintings was Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, which Bortolon associates with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, as evidenced in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die." Although the painting is barely begun, the composition can be seen and is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.

The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a complex composition, of about 250 x 250 centimetres. Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture that forms part of the background. In 1482 Leonardo went to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo de' Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro, and the painting was abandoned.

Lady with an Ermine, c. 1489–1491, Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, Poland

The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks, commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece. Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water. While the painting is quite large, about 200×120 centimetres, it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished: one remained at the chapel of the Confraternity, while Leonardo took the other to France. The Brothers did not get their painting, however, nor the de Predis their payment, until the next century.

Leonardo's most remarkable portrait of this period is the Lady with an Ermine, presumed to be Cecilia Gallerani (c. 1483–1490), lover of Ludovico Sforza. The painting is characterised by the pose of the figure with the head turned at a very different angle to the torso, unusual at a date when many portraits were still rigidly in profile. The ermine plainly carries symbolic meaning, relating either to the sitter, or to Ludovico who belonged to the prestigious Order of the Ermine.

Paintings of the 1490s

The Last Supper, Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy (c. 1492–1498)

Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, commissioned for the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. It represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death, and shows the moment when Jesus has just said "one of you will betray me", and the consternation that this statement caused.

The writer Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat and then not paint for three or four days at a time. This was beyond the comprehension of the prior of the convent, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model.

When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterization, but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined." Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface subject to mould and to flaking. Despite this, the painting remains one of the most reproduced works of art; countless copies have been made in various mediums.

It is recorded that in 1492, Leonardo, with assistants painted the Sala delle Asse in the Sforza Castle in Milan, with a trompe-l'œil depicting trees, with an intricate labyrinth of leaves and knots on the ceiling.

Paintings of the 16th century

Mona Lisa or La Gioconda c. 1503–1516, Louvre, Paris

In 1505 Leonardo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred) in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Leonardo devised a dynamic composition depicting four men riding raging war horses engaged in a battle for possession of a standard, at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. Michelangelo was assigned the opposite wall to depict the Battle of Cascina. Leonardo's painting deteriorated rapidly and is now known from a copy by Rubens.

Among the works created by Leonardo in the 16th century is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or La Gioconda, the laughing one. In the present era, it is arguably the most famous painting in the world. Its fame rests, in particular, on the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality perhaps due to the subtly shadowed corners of the mouth and eyes such that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato," or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original."

Other characteristics of the painting are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details; the dramatic landscape background, in which the world seems to be in a state of flux; the subdued colouring; and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils laid on much like tempera, and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master...despair and lose heart." The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is rare in a panel painting of this date.

In the painting Virgin and Child with St. Anne, the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape, which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" and harkens back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, influenced Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.

Drawings

Presumed self-portrait of Leonardo (c. 1510) at the Royal Library of Turin, Italy.

Leonardo was a prolific draughtsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper. His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail. According to art historian Ludwig Heydenreich, this is "The first true landscape in art." Massimo Polidoro says that it was the first landscape "not to be the background of some religious scene or a portrait. It is the first [documented] time where a landscape was drawn just for the sake of it."

Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body; the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre; a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem; and a large drawing (160×100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre.

Antique warrior in profile, c. 1472

Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salaì, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile." These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salaì is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de' Medici, in the Pazzi conspiracy. In his notes, Leonardo recorded the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.

Like the two contemporary architects Donato Bramante (who designed the Belvedere Courtyard) and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised.

Journals and notes

See also: List of works by Leonardo da Vinci § Manuscripts

Renaissance humanism recognised no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are sometimes considered as impressive and innovative as his artistic work. These studies were recorded in 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). They were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him. Leonardo's notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirlpools, war machines, flying machines and architecture.

A page showing Leonardo's study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510), Royal Library, Windsor Castle

These notebooks—originally loose papers of different types and sizes, were largely entrusted to Leonardo's pupil and heir Francesco Melzi after the master's death. These were to be published, a task of overwhelming difficulty because of its scope and Leonardo's idiosyncratic writing. Some of Leonardo's drawings were copied by an anonymous Milanese artist for a planned treatise on art c. 1570. After Melzi's death in 1570, the collection passed to his son, the lawyer Orazio, who initially took little interest in the journals. In 1587, a Melzi household tutor named Lelio Gavardi took 13 of the manuscripts to Pisa; there, the architect Giovanni Magenta reproached Gavardi for having taken the manuscripts illicitly and returned them to Orazio. Having many more such works in his possession, Orazio gifted the volumes to Magenta. News spread of these lost works of Leonardo's, and Orazio retrieved seven of the 13 manuscripts, which he then gave to Pompeo Leoni for publication in two volumes; one of these was the Codex Atlanticus. The other six works had been distributed to a few others. After Orazio's death, his heirs sold the rest of Leonardo's possessions, and thus began their dispersal.

Some works have found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, which holds the 12-volume Codex Atlanticus, and the British Library in London, which has put a selection from the Codex Arundel (BL Arundel MS 263) online. Works have also been at Holkham Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the private hands of John Nicholas Brown I and Robert Lehman. The Codex Leicester is the only privately owned major scientific work of Leonardo; it is owned by Bill Gates and displayed once a year in different cities around the world.

Most of Leonardo's writings are in mirror-image cursive. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it was probably easier for him to write from right to left. Leonardo used a variety of shorthand and symbols, and states in his notes that he intended to prepare them for publication. In many cases a single topic is covered in detail in both words and pictures on a single sheet, together conveying information that would not be lost if the pages were published out of order. Why they were not published during Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.

Science and inventions

Main article: Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci

Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's Divina proportione (1509)

Leonardo's approach to science was observational: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail and did not emphasise experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book Divina proportione, published in 1509. While living in Milan, he studied light from the summit of Monte Rosa. Scientific writings in his notebook on fossils have been considered as influential on early palaeontology.

The content of his journals suggest that he was planning a series of treatises on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy is said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis d'Aragon's secretary in 1517. Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by Melzi and eventually published as A Treatise on Painting in France and Italy in 1651 and Germany in 1724, with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicolas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into 62 editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art."

While Leonardo's experimentation followed scientific methods, a recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as a scientist by Fritjof Capra argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him in that, as a "Renaissance Man", his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting.

Anatomy and physiology

Anatomical study of the arm (c. 1510)

Leonardo started his study in the anatomy of the human body under the apprenticeship of Verrocchio, who demanded that his students develop a deep knowledge of the subject. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.

As a successful artist, Leonardo was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre. Leonardo made over 240 detailed drawings and wrote about 13,000 words towards a treatise on anatomy. Only a small amount of the material on anatomy was published in Leonardo's Treatise on painting. During the time that Melzi was ordering the material into chapters for publication, they were examined by a number of anatomists and artists, including Vasari, Cellini and Albrecht Dürer, who made a number of drawings from them.

Leonardo's anatomical drawings include many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, and of muscles and sinews. He studied the mechanical functions of the skeleton and the muscular forces that are applied to it in a manner that prefigured the modern science of biomechanics. He drew the heart and vascular system, the sex organs and other internal organs, making one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. The drawings and notation are far ahead of their time, and if published would undoubtedly have made a major contribution to medical science.

Leonardo's physiological sketch of the human brain and skull (c. 1510)

Leonardo also closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness. Leonardo also studied and drew the anatomy of many animals, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.

Leonardo's dissections and documentation of muscles, nerves, and vessels helped to describe the physiology and mechanics of movement. He attempted to identify the source of 'emotions' and their expression. He found it difficult to incorporate the prevailing system and theories of bodily humours, but eventually he abandoned these physiological explanations of bodily functions. He made the observations that humours were not located in cerebral spaces or ventricles. He documented that the humours were not contained in the heart or the liver, and that it was the heart that defined the circulatory system. He was the first to define atherosclerosis and liver cirrhosis. He created models of the cerebral ventricles with the use of melted wax and constructed a glass aorta to observe the circulation of blood through the aortic valve by using water and grass seed to watch flow patterns. Vesalius published his work on anatomy and physiology in De humani corporis fabrica in 1543.

Engineering and inventions

A design for a flying machine (c. 1488), first presented in the Codex on the Flight of Birds.

An aerial screw (c. 1489), suggestive of a helicopter, from the Codex Atlanticus.

During his lifetime, Leonardo was also valued as an engineer. With the same rational and analytical approach that moved him to represent the human body and to investigate anatomy, Leonardo studied and designed many machines and devices. He drew their “anatomy” with unparalleled mastery, producing the first form of the modern technical drawing, including a perfected "exploded view" technique, to represent internal components. Those studies and projects collected in his codices fill more than 5,000 pages. In a letter of 1482 to the lord of Milan Ludovico il Moro, he wrote that he could create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled from Milan to Venice in 1499, he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. In 1502, he created a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno river, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. He continued to contemplate the canalization of Lombardy's plains while in Louis XII's company and of the Loire and its tributaries in the company of Francis I. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, a mechanical knight, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.

Leonardo's drawings of a scythed chariot and a fighting vehicle.

Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight for much of his life, producing many studies, including Codex on the Flight of Birds (c. 1505), as well as plans for several flying machines, such as a flapping ornithopter and a machine with a helical rotor. A 2003 documentary by British television station Channel Four, titled Leonardo's Dream Machines, various designs by Leonardo, such as a parachute and a giant crossbow, were interpreted and constructed. Some of those designs proved successful, whilst others fared less well when tested.

Research performed by Marc van den Broek revealed older prototypes for more than 100 inventions that are ascribed to Leonardo. Similarities between Leonardo's illustrations and drawings from the Middle Ages and from Ancient Greece and Rome, the Chinese and Persian Empires, and Egypt suggest that a large portion of Leonardo's inventions had been conceived before his lifetime. Leonardo's innovation was to combine different functions from existing drafts and set them into scenes that illustrated their utility. By reconstituting technical inventions he created something new.

In his notebooks, Leonardo first stated the ‘laws’ of sliding friction in 1493. His inspiration for investigating friction came about in part from his study of perpetual motion, which he correctly concluded was not possible. His results were never published and the friction laws were not rediscovered until 1699 by Guillaume Amontons, with whose name they are now usually associated. For this contribution, Leonardo was named as the first of the 23 "Men of Tribology" by Duncan Dowson.

Legacy

Further information: Cultural references to Leonardo da Vinci and List of things named after Leonardo da Vinci

Statue outside the Uffizi, Florence, by Luigi Pampaloni (1791–1847)

Leonardo's fame within his own lifetime was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. Interest in Leonardo and his work has never diminished. Crowds still queue to see his best-known artworks, T-shirts still bear his most famous drawing, and writers continue to hail him as a genius while speculating about his private life, as well as about what one so intelligent actually believed in.

The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano (The Courtier), wrote in 1528: "...Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled..." while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf..." Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists (1568) introduced his chapter on Leonardo with the following words:

In the normal course of events many men and women are born with remarkable talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty, who displayed infinite grace in everything that he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.

The Death of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818

The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius..." This is echoed by A.E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."

By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries." Art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."

The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found. Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge...Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."

Leonardo Museum in Vinci, which houses a large collection of models constructed on the basis of Leonardo's drawings.

Twenty-first-century author Walter Isaacson based much of his biography of Leonardo on thousands of notebook entries, studying the personal notes, sketches, budget notations, and musings of the man whom he considers the greatest of innovators. Isaacson was surprised to discover a "fun, joyous" side of Leonardo in addition to his limitless curiosity and creative genius.

On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death, the Louvre in Paris arranged for the largest ever single exhibit of his work, called Leonardo, between November 2019 and February 2020. The exhibit includes over 100 paintings, drawings and notebooks. Eleven of the paintings that Leonardo completed in his lifetime were included. Five of these are owned by the Louvre, but the Mona Lisa was not included because it is in such great demand among general visitors to the Louvre; it remains on display in its gallery. Vitruvian Man, however, is on display following a legal battle with its owner, the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. Salvator Mundi was also not included because its Saudi owner did not agree to lease the work.

The Mona Lisa, considered Leonardo's magnum opus, is often regarded as the most famous portrait ever made. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time, and Leonardo's Vitruvian Man drawing is also considered a cultural icon.

Location of remains

Tomb in the chapel of Saint Hubert at the Château d'Amboise where a plaque describes it as the presumed site of Leonardo's remains.

While Leonardo was certainly buried in the collegiate church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise in 12 August 1519, the current location of his remains is unclear. Much of Château d'Amboise was damaged during the French Revolution, leading to the church's demolition in 1802. Some of the graves were destroyed in the process, scattering the bones interred there and thereby leaving the whereabouts of Leonardo's remains subject to dispute; a gardener may have even buried some in the corner of the courtyard.

In 1863, fine-arts inspector general Arsène Houssaye received an imperial commission to excavate the site and discovered a partially complete skeleton with a bronze ring on one finger, white hair, and stone fragments bearing the inscriptions "EO", "AR", "DUS", and "VINC"—interpreted as forming "Leonardus Vinci". The skull's eight teeth corresponds to someone of approximately the appropriate age and a silver shield found near the bones depicts a beardless Francis I, corresponding to the king's appearance during Leonardo's time in France.

Houssaye postulated that the unusually large skull was an indicator of Leonardo's intelligence; author Charles Nicholl describes this as a "dubious phrenological deduction." At the same time, Houssaye noted some issues with his observations, including that the feet were turned towards the high altar, a practice generally reserved for laymen, and that the skeleton of 1.73 metres (5.7 ft) seemed too short. Art historian Mary Margaret Heaton wrote in 1874 that the height would be appropriate for Leonardo. The skull was allegedly presented to Napoleon III before being returned to the Château d'Amboise, where they were re-interred in the chapel of Saint Hubert in 1874. A plaque above the tomb states that its contents are only presumed to be those of Leonardo.

It has since been theorized that the folding of the skeleton's right arm over the head may correspond to the paralysis of Leonardo's right hand. In 2016, it was announced that DNA tests would be conducted to determine whether the attribution is correct. The DNA of the remains will be compared to that of samples collected from Leonardo's work and his half-brother Domenico's descendants; it may also be sequenced.

In 2019, documents were published revealing that Houssaye had kept the ring and a lock of hair. In 1925, his great-grandson sold these to an American collector. Sixty years later, another American acquired them, leading to their being displayed at the Leonardo Museum in Vinci beginning on 2 May 2019, the 500th anniversary of the artist's death.

References

Bibliography

Early

• Anonimo Gaddiano (c. 1530). "Leonardo da Vinci". Codice Magliabechiano. in Lives of Leonardo da Vinci (Lives of the Artists). Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. 2019. pp. 103–114. ISBN 978-1-60606-621-8.
• Giovio, Paolo (c. 1527). "The Life of Leonardo da Vinci". Elogia virorum illustrium. in Lives of Leonardo da Vinci (Lives of the Artists). Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. 2019. pp. 103–114. ISBN 978-1-60606-621-8.
• Vasari, Giorgio (1965) [1568]. "The Life of Leonardo da Vinci". Lives of the Artists. Translated by George Bull. Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0-14-044164-2.

Modern

Books

• Arasse, Daniel (1998). Leonardo da Vinci. Old Saybrook, Connecticut: Konecky & Konecky. ISBN 978-1-56852-198-5.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Bambach, Carmen C., ed. (2003). Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman. New York City, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-0-300-09878-5.
• Bambach, Carmen C. (2019). Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered. 1, The Making of an Artist: 1452–1500. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-19195-0.
• Bortolon, Liana (1967). The Life and Times of Leonardo. London: Paul Hamlyn.
• Brown, David Alan (1998). Leonardo Da Vinci: Origins of a Genius. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-07246-4.
• Capra, Fritjof (2007). The Science of Leonardo. US: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-51390-6.
• Ottino della Chiesa, Angela (1967). The Complete Paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. Penguin Classics of World Art. London, UK: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-008649-2.
• Clark, Kenneth (1961). Leonardo da Vinci. City of Westminster, London, England: Penguin Books. OCLC 187223.
• Da Vinci, Leonardo (1971). Taylor, Pamela (ed.). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. New American Library.
• Gasca, Ana Millàn; Nicolò, Fernando; Lucertini, Mario (2004). Technological Concepts and Mathematical Models in the Evolution of Modern Engineering Systems. Birkhauser. ISBN 978-3-7643-6940-8.
• Hartt, Frederich (1970). A History of Italian Renaissance Art. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-23136-4.
• Heaton, Mary Margaret (1874). Leonardo Da Vinci and His Works: Consisting of a Life of Leonardo Da Vinci. New York City, New York: Macmillan Publishers. OCLC 1706262.
• Isaacson, Walter (2017). Leonardo da Vinci. New York City, New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-5011-3915-4.
• Kemp, Martin (2006) [1981]. Leonardo Da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man. Oxford, England: Oxford, England. ISBN 978-0-19-920778-7.
• Kemp, Martin (2011) [2004]. Leonardo (Revised ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280644-4.
• Kemp, Martin; Pallanti, Giuseppe (2017). Mona Lisa: The People and the Painting. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-874990-5.
• Kemp, Martin (2019). Leonardo da Vinci: The 100 Milestones. New York City, New York: Sterling. ISBN 978-1-4549-304-26.
• Magnano, Milena (2007). Leonardo, collana I Geni dell'arte. Mondadori Arte. ISBN 978-88-370-6432-7.
• Marani, Pietro C. (2003) [2000]. Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings. New York City, New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 978-0-8109-3581-5.
• Martindale, Andrew (1972). The Rise of the Artist. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-56006-8.
• Nicholl, Charles (2005). Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind. London, England: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-029681-5.
• O'Malley, Charles D.; Sounders, J.B. de C.M. (1952). Leonardo on the Human Body: The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. With Translations, Emendations and a Biographical Introduction. New York City, New York: Henry Schuman.
• Pedretti, Carlo (1982). Leonardo, a study in chronology and style. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Johnson Reprint Corp. ISBN 978-0-3844-5281-7.
• Pedretti, Carlo (2006). Leonardo da Vinci. Surrey, England: Taj Books International. ISBN 978-1-8440-6036-8.
• Popham, A.E. (1946). The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-60462-8.
• Richter, Jean Paul (1970). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-22572-2. volume 2: ISBN 0-486-22573-9. A reprint of the original 1883 edition
• Rosci, Marco (1977). Leonardo. Bay Books Pty Ltd. ISBN 978-0-85835-176-9.
• Syson, Luke; Keith, Larry; Galansino, Arturo; Mazzotta, Antoni; Nethersole, Scott; Rumberg, Per (2011). Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan. London, England: National Gallery. ISBN 978-1-85709-491-6.
• Turner, A. Richard (1993). Invention Leonardo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-520-08938-9.
• Wallace, Robert (1972) [1966]. The World of Leonardo: 1452–1519. New York, New York: Time-Life Books.
• Wasserman, Jack (1975). Leonardo da Vinci. New York, New York: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 978-0-8109-0262-6.
• Williamson, Hugh Ross (1974). Lorenzo the Magnificent. Michael Joseph. ISBN 978-0-7181-1204-2.
• Vezzosi, Alessandro (1997). Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Man. 'New Horizons' series. Translated by Bonfante-Warren, Alexandra (English translation ed.). London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-30081-7.
• Zöllner, Frank (2015). Leonardo (2nd ed.). Cologne, Germany: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8365-0215-3.
• Zöllner, Frank (2019) [2003]. Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (Anniversary ed.). Cologne, Germany: Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8365-7625-3.

Journals and encyclopedia articles

• Brown, David Alan (1983). "Leonardo and the Idealized Portrait in Milan". Arte Lombarda. 64 (4): 102–116. JSTOR 43105426. (subscription required)
• Cremante, Simona (2005). Leonardo da Vinci: Artist, Scientist, Inventor. Giunti. ISBN 978-88-09-03891-2.
• Giacomelli, Raffaele (1936). Gli scritti di Leonardo da Vinci sul volo. Roma: G. Bardi.
• Heydenreich, Ludwig Heinrich (28 April 2020). "Leonardo da Vinci | Biography, Art & Facts | Britannica". Encyclopædia Britannica. Chicago, Illinois: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
• Kemp, Martin (2003). "Leonardo da Vinci". Grove Art Online. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T050401. ISBN 978-1-884446-05-4. (subscription or UK public library membership required)
• Lupia, John N. (Summer 1994). "The Secret Revealed: How to Look at Italian Renaissance Painting". Medieval and Renaissance Times. 1 (2): 6–17. ISSN 1075-2110.

Further reading

See Kemp (2003) and Bambach (2019, pp. 442–579) for extensive bibliographies

• Vanna, Arrighi; Bellinazzi, Anna; Villata, Edoardo, eds. (2005). Leonardo da Vinci: la vera immagine: documenti e testimonianze sulla vita e sull'opera [Leonardo da Vinci: the true image: documents and testimonies on life and work] (in Italian). Florence: Giunti Editore. ISBN 978-88-09-04519-4.
• Vecce, Carlo (2006). Leonardo (in Italian). Forward by Carlo Pedretti. Rome: Salerno. ISBN 978-88-8402-548-7. CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
• Winternitz, Emanuel (1982). Leonardo da Vinci As a Musician. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-02631-3.
• Leonardo da Vinci: anatomical drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. New York City, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1983. ISBN 978-0-87099-362-6.

External links

General

• Universal Leonardo, a database of Leonardo's life and works maintained by Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace
• Leonardo da Vinci on the National Gallery website

Works

• Biblioteca Leonardiana, online bibliography (in Italian)
• e-Leo: Archivio digitale di storia della tecnica e della scienza, archive of drawings, notes and manuscripts
• Works by Leonardo da Vinci at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Leonardo da Vinci at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Complete text and images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
• The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

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For other uses, see Leonardo da Vinci (disambiguation).

"Da Vinci" redirects here. For other uses with the name Da Vinci, see Da Vinci (disambiguation).

This is a Renaissance Florentine name. The name da Vinci is an indicator of birthplace, not a family name and the person is properly referred to by the given name Leonardo.

Leonardo da Vinci
Portrait by Francesco Melzi
Born	Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci 15 April 1452 Vinci, Republic of Florence (present-day Tuscany, Italy)
Died	2 May 1519(1519-05-02) (aged 67) Amboise, Kingdom of France
Nationality	Italian
Known for	Art, science
Works	Mona Lisa The Last Supper Salvator Mundi The Vitruvian Man Lady with an Ermine
Movement	High Renaissance
Signature

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Italian: [leoˈnardo di ˌsɛr ˈpjɛːro da (v)ˈvintʃi] ( listen); 15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519), more commonly Leonardo da Vinci or simply Leonardo, was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance, whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter and tank, he epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal.

Many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man", an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination", and he is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci notes that while there is much speculation regarding his life and personality, his view of the world was logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unorthodox 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 Andrea del 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 to him by Francis I of France.

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. 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.

A painting by Leonardo, Salvator Mundi, sold for a world record $450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York, 15 November 2017, the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings have survived. 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 type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. Some of his smaller inventions, however, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. A number of Leonardo's most practical inventions are nowadays displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, geology, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on later science.

Life

Childhood, 1452–1466

Leonardo's childhood home in Anchiano

Leonardo's earliest known drawing, the Arno Valley (1473), Uffizi

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 (Old Style) "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno river in the territory of the Medici-ruled Republic of Florence. He was the out-of-wedlock son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina, a peasant. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense – "da Vinci" simply meaning "of Vinci"; his full birth name was "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci". The inclusion of the title "ser" indicated that Leonardo's father was a gentleman.

Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano in the home of his mother, and from 1457 lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera Amadori, who loved Leonardo but died young in 1465 without children. When Leonardo was sixteen (1468), his father married again to twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini, who also died without children. Piero's legitimate heirs were born from his third wife Margherita di Guglielmo (who gave birth to six children: Antonio, Giulian, Maddalena, Lorenzo, Violante and Domenico) and his fourth and final wife, Lucrezia Cortigiani (who bore him another six children: Margherita, Benedetto, Pandolfo, Guglielmo, Bartolomeo and Giovanni).

In all, Leonardo had twelve half-siblings, who were much younger than he was (the last was born when Leonardo was forty years old) and with whom he had very few contacts, but they caused him difficulty after his father's death in the dispute over the inheritance.

Leonardo received an informal education in Latin, geometry and mathematics. In later life, Leonardo recorded only two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. The second occurred while he was exploring in the mountains: he discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.

Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters, tells a story of Leonardo as a very young man: A local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of a monster spitting fire that was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.

Verrocchio's workshop, 1466–1476

The Baptism of Christ (1472–75), Uffizi, by Verrocchio and Leonardo

In 1466, at the age of 14, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio, whose bottega (workshop) was "one of the finest in Florence". He apprenticed as a garzone (studio boy) to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day (and would do so for 7 years). Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills, including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling.

Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his The Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus' robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again, although this is believed to be apocryphal. Close examination reveals areas that have been painted or touched-up over the tempera, using the new technique of oil paint, including the landscape, the rocks seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. Leonardo may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio: the bronze statue of David in the Bargello and the Archangel Raphael in Tobias and the Angel.

By 1472, at the age of 20, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on 5 August 1473.

Professional life, 1476–1513

The Adoration of the Magi (1481), Uffizi

Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy but acquitted; homosexual acts were illegal in Renaissance Florence. From that date until 1478, there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts. In 1478, he left Verrocchio's studio and was no longer a resident at his father's house. One writer, called the Anonimo Gaddiano, claims that in 1480 Leonardo was living with the Medici and working in the Garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence, a Neo-Platonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers that the Medici had established. In January 1478, he received an independent commission to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio; in March 1481, he received a second independent commission for The Adoration of the Magi for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.

In 1482, Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo de' Medici sent Leonardo to Milan, bearing the lyre as a gift, to secure peace with Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. At this time, Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing Ludovico that he could also paint.

Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In the spring of 1485, Leonardo travelled to Hungary on behalf of Ludovico to meet Matthias Corvinus, for whom he is believed to have painted a Holy Family. Between 1493 and 1495, Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditures suggests that she was his mother.

Study of horse from Leonardo's journals, Royal Library, Windsor Castle

Leonardo was employed on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492, the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting; however, Michelangelo insulted Leonardo by implying that he was unable to cast it. In November 1494, Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannon to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.

At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the Gran Cavallo for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack. On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival".

Leonardo's very accurate map of Imola, created for Cesare Borgia

In Cesena in 1502, Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. Leonardo created a map of Cesare Borgia's stronghold, a town plan of Imola in order to win his patronage. Maps were extremely rare at the time and it would have seemed like a new concept. Upon seeing it, Cesare hired Leonardo as his chief military engineer and architect. Later in the year, Leonardo produced another map for his patron, one of Chiana Valley, Tuscany, so as to give his patron a better overlay of the land and greater strategic position. He created this map in conjunction with his other project of constructing a dam from the sea to Florence, in order to allow a supply of water to sustain the canal during all seasons.

Leonardo returned to Florence, where he rejoined the Guild of Saint Luke on 18 October 1503. He spent two years designing and painting a mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina. In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David.

In 1506, Leonardo returned to Milan. Many of his most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco d'Oggiono. At this time he may have commenced a project for an equestrian figure of Charles II d'Amboise, the acting French governor of Milan. A wax model survives and, if genuine, is the only extant example of Leonardo's sculpture.

Leonardo did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508, Leonardo was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila.

Burial site of Leonardo da Vinci in Amboise

Old age and death, 1513–1519

From September 1513 to 1516, under Pope Leo X, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, King Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On 19 December, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Leonardo was commissioned to make for Francis a mechanical lion that could walk forward then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. In 1516, he entered Francis' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé, now a public museum, near the king's residence at the royal Château d'Amboise. He spent the last three years of his life here, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, and supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.

Clos Lucé in France, where Leonardo died in 1519

Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67. The cause is generally stated to be recurrent stroke; this diagnosis is consistent with accounts of the state of Leonardo's alleged remains as described in 1863. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the king held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffman, may be legend rather than fact. Vasari states that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. In accordance with his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving, as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai, and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards. His brothers received land, and his serving woman received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge. Leonardo da Vinci was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in Château d'Amboise in France.

Some 20 years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."

Location of remains

Leonardo's remains were originally interred in the chapel of Saint-Florentin at the Chateau d'Amboise in the Loire Valley. However, following the chapel's destruction in 1802, the whereabouts of Leonardo's remains became subject to dispute. While excavating the site in 1863, the poet Arsène Houssaye found a partially-complete skeleton and stone fragments bearing the inscription 'EO [...] DUS VINC'. The unusually large skull led Houssaye to conclude he had located the remains of Leonardo, which were re-interred in their present location of the chapel of Saint-Hubert, also at the Chateau d'Amboise. Reflecting doubts about the attribution, a plaque above the tomb states that the remains are only "presumed" to be those of Leonardo. In 2016, it was announced that DNA tests were to be conducted to investigate the veracity of the attribution, with results expected in 2019.

Relationships and influences

Florence: Leonardo's artistic and social background

Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise (1425–1452) were a source of communal pride. Many artists assisted in their creation.

Florence at the time of Leonardo's youth was the centre of Christian Humanist thought and culture. Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello, whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, and the portrait sculptor Mino da Fiesole. The latter's lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.

Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio, whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion; and Ghiberti, whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's treatise De Pictura were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.

Massaccio's "Expulsion from the Garden of Eden" depicting the naked and distraught Adam and Eve created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade, which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The humanist influence of Donatello's "David" can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist.

Small devotional picture by Verrocchio, c. 1470

A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as The Madonna with a carnation and the Benois Madonna followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.

Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family, and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence.

The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family

These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.

In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing from Northern Europe new painterly techniques that were to profoundly affect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, travelled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.

Like the two contemporary architects Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised.

Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio

Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his younger brother Giuliano, who was slain in the Pazzi conspiracy in 1478. Leonardo was sent as an ambassador by the Medici court to Ludovico il Moro, who ruled Milan between 1479 and 1499.

With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism; Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were the foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal, "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo received his employment at the court of Milan, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.

Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael lived until the age of only 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo died, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.

Personal life

Main article: Personal life of Leonardo da Vinci

Study for a portrait of Isabella d'Este (1500) Louvre

Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind", as described by Vasari, as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect was his respect for life, evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, according to Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them.

Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on the book De divina proportione in the 1490s. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Cecilia Gallerani and the two Este sisters, Beatrice and Isabella. While on a journey that took him through Mantua, he drew a portrait of Isabella that appears to have been used to create a painted portrait, now lost.

Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi. Melzi, writing to inform Leonardo's brothers of his death, described Leonardo's feelings for his pupils as both loving and passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy in an incident involving a well-known male prostitute. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and there is speculation that since one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings.

Assistants and pupils

John the Baptist (c. 1513–16), Louvre. Leonardo is thought to have used Salai as the model.

Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed Salai or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions and spent a fortune on clothes. Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence, and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggiono and Boltraffio. In 1515, he painted a nude version of the Mona Lisa, known as Monna Vanna. Salai owned the Mona Lisa at the time of his death in 1524, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.

In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo and remained with him until Leonardo's death. Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo and administered the estate.

Painting

See also: List of works by Leonardo da Vinci

Annunciation (1475–1480), Uffizi, is thought to be Leonardo's earliest complete work

Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his fame rested on his achievements as a painter. A handful of works that are either authenticated or attributed to him have been regarded as among the great masterpieces. These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities that have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter.

Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are his innovative techniques for laying on the paint; his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology; his interest in physiognomy and the way humans register emotion in expression and gesture; his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition; and his use of subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and the Virgin of the Rocks.

Early works

Unfinished painting of Saint Jerome in the Wilderness (1480), Vatican

Leonardo first gained notoriety for his work on the Baptism of Christ, painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at Verrocchio's workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, 59 centimetres (23 in) long and 14 centimetres (5.5 in) high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, 217 centimetres (85 in) long. In both Annunciations, Leonardo used a formal arrangement, like two well-known pictures by Fra Angelico of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with a rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now generally attributed to Leonardo.

In the smaller painting, Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. Mary is not submissive, however, in the larger piece. The girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God, not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting, the young Leonardo presents the humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.

Paintings of the 1480s

Virgin of the Rocks, National Gallery, London, demonstrates Leonardo's interest in nature

In the 1480s, Leonardo received two very important commissions and commenced another work that was of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Two of the three were never finished, and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment.

One of these paintings was Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, which Bortolon associates with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, as evidenced in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die." Although the painting is barely begun, the composition can be seen and is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.

The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a complex composition, of about 250 x 250 centimetres. Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture that forms part of the background. In 1482 Leonardo went to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo de' Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro, and the painting was abandoned.

The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks, commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece. Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water. While the painting is quite large, about 200×120 centimetres, it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished: one remained at the chapel of the Confraternity, while Leonardo took the other to France. The Brothers did not get their painting, however, nor the de Predis their payment, until the next century.

Paintings of the 1490s

The Last Supper (1498), Convent of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy

Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, commissioned for the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. It represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death, and shows the moment when Jesus has just said "one of you will betray me", and the consternation that this statement caused.

The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat and then not paint for three or four days at a time. This was beyond the comprehension of the prior of the convent, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model.

When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface subject to mould and to flaking. Despite this, the painting remains one of the most reproduced works of art; countless copies have been made in every medium from carpets to cameos.

Paintings of the 16th century

Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (1503–05/07), Louvre, Paris, France

Among the works created by Leonardo in the 16th century is the small portrait known as the Mona Lisa or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. In the present era, it is arguably the most famous painting in the world. Its fame rests, in particular, on the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality perhaps due to the subtly shadowed corners of the mouth and eyes such that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato", or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original".

Other characteristics of the painting are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details; the dramatic landscape background, in which the world seems to be in a state of flux; the subdued colouring; and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils laid on much like tempera, and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is rare in a panel painting of this date.

In the painting Virgin and Child with St. Anne, the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape, which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" and harkens back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, influenced Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.

Murals

Leonardo's The Battle of Anghiara was a fresco commissioned in 1505 for the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred) in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Its central scene depicted four men riding raging war horses engaged in a battle for possession of a standard, at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. At the same time his rival Michelangelo, who had just finished his David, was assigned the opposite wall. All that remains of Leonardo's work is a copy by Rubens, but Maurizio Seracini is convinced it can still be found and has spent a lifetime searching for it. He was allowed to drill some pilot holes in a mural in the Salone dei Cinquecento, and his team did find evidence of an oil painting underneath. In the Sforza Castle in Milan, there is a room decorated with the fresco technique by Leonardo and his assistants: Sala delle Asse (in English 'room of the wooden boards'). The room was decorated with a trompe-l'œil depicting trees, with an intricate labyrinth of leaves and knots on the ceiling. The red fruits of mulberry ("moroni" in local dialect) were an allusion to the name of "Ludovico il Moro", duke of Milan at that time. The first document about the room and Leonardo's work dates back to 1498: on 21 April, the secretary confirms to the duke that "magistro Leonardo" will complete the decoration by September.

Two restorations were accomplished, in 1902 and 1956. Another restoration is currently under way, thanks to which beautiful preparatory drawings have been uncovered on the walls: roots of trees penetrating the stones of the foundations.

Drawings

The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (c. 1510), Louvre Museum

The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499–1500), National Gallery, London

Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper. His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.

Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body; the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre; a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem; and a large drawing (160×100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle sfumato technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with St. Anne in the Louvre.

Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de' Medici, in the Pazzi conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.

Observation and invention

Main article: Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci

Journals and notes

See also: List of works by Leonardo da Vinci § Manuscripts

The Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice

Renaissance humanism recognised no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are sometimes considered as impressive and innovative as his artistic work. These studies were recorded in 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). They were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.

Most of Leonardo's writings are in mirror-image cursive. While secrecy is often suggested as the reason for this style of writing, it may have been more of a practical expediency. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it was probably easier for him to write from right to left.

A page showing Leonardo's study of a foetus in the womb (c. 1510) Royal Library, Windsor Castle

Leonardo's notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirlpools, war machines, flying machines and architecture.

These notebooks—originally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his death—have found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London, which has put a selection from the Codex Arundel (BL Arundel MS 263) online. The Codex Leicester is the only major scientific work of Leonardo in private hands; it is owned by Bill Gates and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.

Leonardo's notes appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human fetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures on a single sheet. Why they were not published during Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.

Scientific studies

Rhombicuboctahedron as published in Pacioli's
De divina proportione

Leonardo's approach to science was observational: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail and did not emphasise experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book De divina proportione, published in 1509.

The content of his journals suggest that he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis 'D' Aragon's secretary in 1517. Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci in France and Italy in 1651 and Germany in 1724, with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicolas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into 62 editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".

While Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific methods, a recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as a scientist by Fritjof Capra argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him in that, as a Renaissance Man, his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting.

Anatomy and physiology

Anatomical study of the arm (1510)

Leonardo started his study in the anatomy of the human body under the apprenticeship of Andrea del Verrocchio, who demanded that his students develop a deep knowledge of the subject. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.

As a successful artist, Leonardo was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre. Leonardo made over 240 detailed drawings and wrote about 13,000 words towards a treatise on anatomy. These papers were left to his heir, Francesco Melzi, for publication, a task of overwhelming difficulty because of its scope and Leonardo's idiosyncratic writing. The project was left incomplete at the time of Melzi's death more than 50 years later, with only a small amount of the material on anatomy included in Leonardo's Treatise on painting, published in France in 1632. During the time that Melzi was ordering the material into chapters for publication, they were examined by a number of anatomists and artists, including Vasari, Cellini and Albrecht Dürer, who made a number of drawings from them.

Leonardo's physiological sketch of the human brain and skull (1510)

Leonardo's anatomical drawings include many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, and of muscles and sinews. He studied the mechanical functions of the skeleton and the muscular forces that are applied to it in a manner that prefigured the modern science of biomechanics. He drew the heart and vascular system, the sex organs and other internal organs, making one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. The drawings and notation are far ahead of their time, and if published would undoubtedly have made a major contribution to medical science.

Leonardo also closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness. Leonardo also studied and drew the anatomy of many animals, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.

Leonardo's dissections and documentation of muscles, nerves, and vessels helped to describe the physiology and mechanics of movement. He attempted to identify the source of 'emotions' and their expression. He found it difficult to incorporate the prevailing system and theories of bodily humours, but eventually he abandoned these physiological explanations of bodily functions. He made the observations that humours were not located in cerebral spaces or ventricles. He documented that the humours were not contained in the heart or the liver, and that it was the heart that defined the circulatory system. He was the first to define atherosclerosis and liver cirrhosis. He created models of the cerebral ventricles with the use of melted wax and constructed a glass aorta to observe the circulation of blood through the aortic valve by using water and grass seed to watch flow patterns. Vesalius published his work on anatomy and physiology in De humani corporis fabrica in 1543.

Engineering and inventions

A design for a flying machine (1488), Institut de France, Paris

During his lifetime, Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro, he wrote that he could create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499, he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno river, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, a mechanical knight, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.

In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (220 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Constantinople. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway.

Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight for much of his life, producing many studies, including Codex on the Flight of Birds (c. 1505), as well as plans for several flying machines such as a flapping ornithopter and a machine with a helical rotor. The British television station Channel Four commissioned a 2003 documentary, Leonardo's Dream Machines, in which various designs by Leonardo, such as a parachute and a giant crossbow, were interpreted, constructed and tested. Some of those designs proved successful, whilst others fared less well when practically tested.

Francis I of France receiving the last breath of Leonardo da Vinci, by Ingres, 1818

Fame and reputation

Main article: Cultural references to Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo's fame within his own lifetime was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. Interest in Leonardo and his work has never diminished. Crowds still queue to see his best-known artworks, T-shirts still bear his most famous drawing, and writers continue to hail him as a genius while speculating about his private life, as well as about what one so intelligent actually believed in.

Statue of Leonardo in Amboise

Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of Lives of the Artists, 1568, introduced his chapter on Leonardo with the following words:

In the normal course of events many men and women are born with remarkable talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty, who displayed infinite grace in everything that he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.

— Giorgio Vasari

The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..." while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...".

Statue outside the Uffizi, Florence, created by Luigi Pampaloni

The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..." This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."

By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."

Art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."

The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found. Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."

21st-century author Walter Isaacson in his biography of Leonardo based much of his book on the thousands of notebook entries, studying the personal notes, sketches, budget notations, and musings of the man whom he considers the greatest of innovators. Isaacson was surprised to discover a "fun, joyous" side of Leonardo in addition to his limitless curiosity and creative genius.

Leonardo da Vinci, c.1500, Salvator Mundi, oil on walnut

Art market

A painting by Leonardo, Salvator Mundi, depicting Jesus Christ holding an orb sold for a world record $450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York, 15 November 2017. The highest price previously paid for a work of art at auction was for Pablo Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger, which sold for $179.4 million in May 2015 at Christie's New York. The highest known sale price for any artwork was $300 million, for Willem de Kooning's Interchange, sold privately in September 2015 by the David Geffen Foundation to hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin.

See also

• Leonardo da Vinci portal
• Aerial perspective
• Italian Renaissance painting
• Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood
• Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport
• List of Italian painters
• List of vegetarians
• Medical Renaissance
• Museo della Scienza e della Tecnologia "Leonardo da Vinci"
• Renaissance technology

References

Footnotes

Citations

Bibliography

• Arasse, Daniel (1997). Leonardo da Vinci. Konecky & Konecky. ISBN 978-1-56852-198-5.
• Baxandall, Michael (1974). Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-881329-3.
• Bayer, Andrea (2004). Painters of reality: the legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-1-58839-116-2.
• Bérence, Fred (1965). Léonard de Vinci, L'homme et son oeuvre. Somogy. Dépot légal 4° trimestre 1965.
• Berti, Luciano (1971). The Uffizi. Scala.
• Bortolon, Liana (1967). The Life and Times of Leonardo. Paul Hamlyn, London.
• Brigstocke, Hugh (2001). The Oxford Companion the Western Art. U.S.: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-866203-7.
• Broek van den, Marc (2018). Leonardo da Vincis Erfindungsgeister. Eine Spurensuche. Germany: NA Verlag. ISBN 978-3-961760-45-9.
• Brucker, Gene A. (1969). Renaissance Florence. Wiley and Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-11370-6.
• Capra, Fritjof (2007). The Science of Leonardo. U.S.: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-51390-6.
• Cennini, Cennino (2009). Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui. U.S.: BiblioBazaar. ISBN 978-1-103-39032-8.
• Chiesa, Angela Ottino della (1967). The Complete Paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. Penguin Classics of World Art series. ISBN 978-0-14-008649-2.
• Cremante, Simona (2005). Leonardo da Vinci: Artist, Scientist, Inventor. Giunti. ISBN 978-88-09-03891-2.
• Giacomelli, Raffaele (1936). Gli scritti di Leonardo da Vinci sul volo. Roma: G. Bardi.
• Hartt, Frederich (1970). A History of Italian Renaissance Art. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-23136-4.
• Kemp, Martin (2004). Leonardo. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280644-4.
• Leonardo da Vinci: anatomical drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1983. ISBN 978-0-87099-362-6.
• Nicolo, Mario Lucertini, Ana Millan Gasca, Fernando (2004). Technological Concepts and Mathematical Models in the Evolution of Modern Engineering Systems. Birkhauser. ISBN 978-3-7643-6940-8.
• Lupia, John N. The Secret Revealed: How to Look at Italian Renaissance Painting. Medieval and Renaissance Times, Vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer, 1994): 6–17. ISSN 1075-2110.
• Magnano, Milena (2007). Leonardo, collana I Geni dell'arte. Mondadori Arte. ISBN 978-88-370-6432-7.
• Martindale, Andrew (1972). The Rise of the Artist. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-56006-8.
• Masters, Roger (1996). Machiavelli, Leonardo and the Science of Power. University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN 978-0-268-01433-9.
• Masters, Roger (1998). Fortune is a River: Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli's Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-452-28090-8.
• Müntz, Eugène (1898). Leonardo da Vinci. Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science. Volume 1. London: William Heinemann.
• Müntz, Eugène (1898). Leonardo da Vinci. Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science. Volume 2. London: William Heinemann.
• O'Malley, Charles D.; Sounders, J. B. de C. M. (1952). Leonardo on the Human Body: The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. With Translations, Emendations and a Biographical Introduction. Henry Schuman, New York.
• Nicholl, Charles (2005). Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-029681-5.
• Nuland, Sherwin B. (2001). Leonardo Da Vinci. Phoenix Press. ISBN 978-0-7538-1269-3.
• Popham, A.E. (1946). The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-60462-8.
• Priwer, Shana; Phillips, Cynthia (2006). The Everything Da Vinci Book: Explore the Life and Times of the Ultimate Renaissance Man. Adams Media. ISBN 978-1-59869-101-6.
• Rachum, Ilan (1979). The Renaissance, an Illustrated Encyclopedia. Octopus. ISBN 978-0-7064-0857-7.
• Richter, Jean Paul (1970). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-22572-2. volume 2: ISBN 0-486-22573-9. A reprint of the original 1883 edition.
• Rosci, Marco (1977). Leonardo. Bay Books Pty Ltd. ISBN 978-0-85835-176-9.
• Rossi, Paolo (2001). The Birth of Modern Science. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 978-0-631-22711-3.
• Santi, Bruno (1990). Leonardo da Vinci. Scala / Riverside.
• Theophilus (1963). On Divers Arts. U.S.: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-79482-2.
• Wasserman, Jack (1975). Leonardo da Vinci. Abrams. ISBN 978-0-8109-0262-6.
• Vasari, Giorgio (1568). Lives of the Artists. Penguin Classics, trans. George Bull 1965. ISBN 978-0-14-044164-2.
• Williamson, Hugh Ross (1974). Lorenzo the Magnificent. Michael Joseph. ISBN 978-0-7181-1204-2.
• Winternitz, Emanuel (1982). Leonardo Da Vinci As a Musician. U.S.: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-02631-3.
• Vezzosi, Alessandro (1997). Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Man (English translation ed.). Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. ISBN 978-0-500-30081-7.
• Zollner, Frank (2003). Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings. Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-1734-6. [The chapter "The Graphic Works" is by Frank Zollner & Johannes Nathan].

External links

• Leonardo da Vinci at Encyclopædia Britannica
•  Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Leonardo da Vinci". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
• Works by Leonardo da Vinci at Project Gutenberg
• Leonardo da Vinci by Maurice Walter Brockwell at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Leonardo da Vinci at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Works by or about Leonardo da Vinci at Internet Archive
• Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks
• The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
• Leonardo da Vinci at BBC Science
• Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomist The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, Friday, 4 May 2012 to Sunday, 7 October 2012. High-resolution anatomical drawings.
• Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman, Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 Jan. – 30 March 2003.

English Journal

• Dark production of hydroxyl radicals by aeration of anoxic lake water.

• Minella M1, De Laurentiis E1, Maurino V1, Minero C1, Vione D2.
• The Science of the total environment.Sci Total Environ.2015 Sep 15;527-528:322-7. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.04.123. Epub 2015 May 14.
• Lake circulation is an important phenomenon that ensures oxygenation of the water column. Here we report that aeration of anoxic hypolimnion water causes production of highly reactive hydroxyl radicals (OH), which are also produced photochemically in the epilimnion. Model calculations suggest that t
• PMID 25965046

• Effects of flooring on required coefficient of friction: Elderly adult vs. middle-aged adult barefoot gait.

• Rozin Kleiner AF1, Galli M2, Araujo do Carmo A3, Barros RM4.
• Applied ergonomics.Appl Ergon.2015 Sep;50:147-52. doi: 10.1016/j.apergo.2015.02.010. Epub 2015 Apr 1.
• The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of flooring on barefoot gait according to age and gender. Two groups of healthy subjects were analyzed: the elderly adult group (EA; 10 healthy subjects) and the middle-aged group (MA; 10 healthy subjects). Each participant was asked to walk at his
• PMID 25959329

• Biorefining of by-product streams from sunflower-based biodiesel production plants for integrated synthesis of microbial oil and value-added co-products.

• Leiva-Candia DE1, Tsakona S2, Kopsahelis N2, García IL1, Papanikolaou S2, Dorado MP1, Koutinas AA3.
• Bioresource technology.Bioresour Technol.2015 Aug;190:57-65. doi: 10.1016/j.biortech.2015.03.114. Epub 2015 Mar 31.
• This study focuses on the valorisation of crude glycerol and sunflower meal (SFM) from conventional biodiesel production plants for the separation of value-added co-products (antioxidant-rich extracts and protein isolate) and for enhancing biodiesel production through microbial oil synthesis. Microb
• PMID 25930941

Japanese Journal

• Does kinematics add meaningful information to clinical assessment in post-stroke upper limb rehabilitation? A case report

• Journal of Physical Therapy Science 28(8), 2408-2413, 2016
• NAID 130005261774

• 観察と描画表現との関係についての基礎研究(その1)レオナルドとヴェサリウスの人体解剖図からの一考察

• 研究集録 (162), 139-148, 2016
• NAID 120005825849

• New Developments in Neuroscience

• Journal of Integrated Creative Studies 2015, 1-23, 2015-12-25
• NAID 120005704227

Related Links

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★リンクテーブル★

国試過去問	「100E050」
関連記事	「DA」「dA」「Da」

「100E050」

　　[★]

• 「人体解剖図｣と｢人体図｣とを以下に示す。描いたのは誰か。

• a. Vincent van Gogh (ゴッホ)
• b. Leonardo da Vinci (ダヴィンチ)
• c. Michelagniolo Buonarroti (ミケランジエロ)
• d. Raffaello Santi (ラファエロ)
• e. Pierre-Auguste Renoir (ルノアール)

[正答]

B

※国試ナビ4※　［100E049］←［国試_100］→［100F001］

「DA」

　　[★]

• 解離性大動脈瘤 dissecting aneurysm of aorta
• デジタル血管撮影 digital angiography
• ドパミン dopamine

「dA」

　　[★]

• デオキシアデノシン

関

deoxyadenosine

「Da」

　　[★] ダルトン

関

Dalton