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 Leonardo
da Vinci was the natural son of Piero da Vinci, an advocate of
Florence, and was born at Castello da Vinci, near Florence, in
1452. As a child he showed precocious genius in music, mathematics,
mechanics, and every form of art. He was placed in the study
of Andrea Verrocchio, who was sculptor, engraver, and painter.
His youth was passed in an extraordinary range of studies, and
his endowments border on the miraculous. With great beauty and
strength of person, he united every accomplishment and learning
of his age. He was mathematician, engineer, architect, musician,
poet, sculptor, painter, anatomist, botanist, and physicist.
At the age of 25 Leonardo was already a man of mark, with
commissions from the government and from Lorenzo the Magnificent.
The whole range of Nature in its most fantastic as in its most
obscure forms became the subject of this universal genius. And
we now know that, at about the age of 30, he visited the East,
Constantinople, Asia Minor, and became engineer to the Sultan
of Cairo.
It was as engineer, architect, mathematician, sculptor, artist,
and general director of artistic, scientific, and mechanical
works that about 1484 Leonardo was invited to Milan by Lodovico
Sforza. There he worked on a multiplicity of undertakings for
15 years. His great works of art were the bronze statue of the
Prince, never completed, and the fresco of the Last Supper (the
Cenacolo), long a ruin. On the occupation of Milan by
the French, in 1500, Leonardo returned to Florence, where he
entered on his famous rivalry with Michelangelo. After 12 years
in Florence and the neighborhood he went to Rome in 1514, where
Raphael was in the height of his glory. Being slighted by the
Pope (Leo X) and overshadowed by the reputation of his younger
rival, Leonardo returned with Francis I to France in 1516, where
he settled, dying near Amboise, on the Loire, in 1519, at the
age of 67.
Leonardo, besides being one of the greatest painters, was
one of the earliest, the most wonderful, and the most versatile
of all the great men of the 15th century Revival. A large part
of his life was devoted to the applied sciences and to inventions
in every department of human knowledge. Hallam declares him to
be the first name of the 15th century, and to have anticipated
many of the discoveries of modern science. He has left works
on mathematics, engineering, hydraulics, anatomy, botany, and
also an immense collection of sketches, studies, grotesques,
and caricatures. His Treatise
on Painting
has been translated into all European languages, and is the foundation
of all that has been written on the art. As a man, Leonardo was
intensely ambitious, haughty, capricious, dreamy, and restless.
With gigantic conceptions, unattainable ideals of perfection,
and an insatiable thirst after new achievements, Leonardo was
continually correcting and refining, abandoning old work for
new, until he made little complete, and leaves a life which is
a long catalogue of abortive undertakings, and three or four
works of supreme beauty and perfection.
It is a melancholy reflection that the greatest natural genius
of his age has left nothing but some wonderful theories and suggestions,
and that of this consummate master few works survive which do
justice to his powers. Very few indeed of the easel pictures
attributed to Leonardo are certainly known to be his own work;
amongst these few are the Mona Lisa portrait, and at least
the heads and composition, if not the whole, of the Madonna.
His greatest work--the Cenacolo, 1498--has recently been
renovated, when it was almost a ruin, and has recovered much
of its power. It was the earliest example of a composite scheme
of figures on a grand scale and it was amongst the finest ever
produced. Leonardo was, by more than 20 years, the senior of
Michelangelo and Titian, and by more than 30 years the senior
of Raphael and Correggio. As Vasari truly says, he was the earliest
great master of the Modern manner. He was unquestionably the
founder of the Italian process of oil-painting; and his infinite
labour and continual experiments vastly increased the technical
resources of the art. He is also the first who united sublime
conceptions with perfect beauty. This mighty genius, ruined by
ambition, pride, and egoism, has at least left to us the tradition
of consummate perfection as the ideal of the artist.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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