Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci :(April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519,
Old Style) was an
Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist,
cartographer,
botanist, and writer. His
genius,
perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance
humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of
the
Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination".
He is widely considered to be one of the
greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.
According to art historian
Helen Gardner,
the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his
mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious
and remote".
Marco Rosci states that while there is much speculation about Leonardo,
his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious,
and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time
.
Born
out of wedlock to a
notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at
Vinci in the region of
Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter,
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 him by
Francis I.
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, with their fame approached only by
Michelangelo's
The Creation of Adam.
Leonardo's drawing of the
Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a
cultural icon,
being reproduced on items as varied as the euro, textbooks, and
T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number
because of his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with
new techniques, and his chronic procrastination.
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 revere
for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a
helicopter, a
tank, concentrated
solar power, a calculator
and the
double hull, and he outlined a rudimentary theory of
plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime,
but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated
bobbin winder and a machine for testing the
tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded.
He made important discoveries in
anatomy,
civil engineering,
optics, and
hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on later science.