HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2023-10-06T13:28:41.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/people/leonardo-da-vinci/feed/atom Elinor Evans <![CDATA[Leonardo da Vinci’s private life]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/leonardo-da-vinci-private-life-relationships-podcast-catherine-fletcher/ 2023-10-06T13:28:41.000Z 2021-04-16T11:30:38.000Z Historian Catherine Fletcher discusses what is known about the private life and relationships of the Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci. She considers the gaps in the historical record, and the inspirations for the story in the new TV drama Leonardo, starring Aidan Turner.
Don't miss this bonus episode, in which Leonardo writers Frank Spotnitz and Steve Thompson discuss the new drama
Catherine Fletcher is the author of The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020)
]]> Elinor Evans <![CDATA[Leonardo: bringing Da Vinci to the screen]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/leonardo-drama-tv-podcast-frank-spotnitz-steve-thompson/ 2023-10-06T13:28:47.000Z 2021-04-16T10:44:01.000Z In this HistoryExtra bonus episode, Frank Spotnitz and Steve Thompson, creators of the new drama Leonardo starring Aidan Turner, talk about their inspirations for their series on the Renaissance polymath Leonardo Da Vinci, and how the crew brought the world of Renaissance Italy to life.
Read more
- Leonardo: the real history behind the new Renaissance drama
- What's known about Leonardo da Vinci's private life and relationships?
Leonardo is available on Amazon Prime Video from 16 April – you can sign up for Amazon Prime here with a 30-day free trial. Looking for something else to watch? Explore our full round-up of the best historical TV and film available to stream right now, or the new history TV and radio airing in the UK this month.
]]> Elinor Evans <![CDATA[Leonardo: the real history behind the new Renaissance drama]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-drama-real-history-historical-accuracy-true/ 2025-01-16T09:34:48.000Z 2021-04-16T06:40:36.000Z Leonardo da Vinci, as played by Aidan Turner in new period drama Leonardo, is a man out of his time. He imagines the world from above, sees pioneering cinematic compositions on blank walls, designs war machines that will not be fully realised by other minds until centuries later. Yet this Leonardo is also erratic, and hamstrung by his quest for perfection.
It is true that the painter often delayed and procrastinated, taking years to complete many of his famous works and leaving countless more unfinished. Bringing humanity to the universally accepted fact of Leonardo’s genius is a new drama, written by Frank Spotnitz and Steve Thompson. But how do you create a 21st-century drama that conveys the ground-breaking nature of Leonardo’s work?
“It was hugely exciting task, but also a very difficult one, because there's not just one Leonardo genius,” explains Leonardo writer Steve Thompson (also known as a writer on BBC One’s Sherlock). “There are many; he was an extraordinary artist ahead of his time, but also an inventor and an engineer, and an astronomer and a mathematician.” The greatest task for them was deciding which story to tell, he explains.
Eight pieces of art, they decided, would form the spine of the narrative, and the drama plays with many themes that in reality preoccupied Leonardo da Vinci throughout his career: the workings of light and vision; emotional interaction between figures; the careful observation of the natural world; and the depiction of ideal beauty.
“We were always looking for not just the important pieces of art, but the ones that had great stories attached to them,” says Spotnitz (whose previous writing includes The X Files and The Man in the High Castle). “If there's a great human story behind the attempt to create the art, then it makes it easier to attach the process to that human struggle that you're emotionally engaged with watching.”
Running alongside the origin stories of works such as the Last Supper and the portrait of *Ginevra de' Benci,*and of course Mona Lisa, is the human story of Leonardo’s life – albeit one woven with supposition and fiction. It’s a choice established from the opening moments of episode one as we find Leonardo in a jail cell, accused of murder – which never happened. The series flashes back to key moments in Leonardo’s life and significant work, relying – as much historical drama does – upon finding the gaps in stories that allow for imagination.
Leonardo is available on Amazon Prime Video now – you can sign up for Amazon Prime here with a 30-day free trial. Looking for something else to watch? Explore our full round-up of the best historical TV and film available to stream right now, or the new history TV and radio airing in the UK this month.
“All of the biographies we read about Leonardo are incomplete, and many of them choose at various points to speculate and say: ‘These are the facts’,” explains Thompson. “As dramatists, that's incredibly exciting because you're almost being invited to fill in the blanks.”
There are many enjoyable ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’ nuggets of real historical detail – when Turner’s Leonardo questions whether there is meat in a dish, some viewers may remember that there is some enticing evidence that suggests Leonardo was a vegetarian. In the artist’s first meeting with Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan (a man soon to become Leonardo’s patron), the duke mentions that the left-hand angel in Andrea del Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ was likely painted by someone who was left-handed, which Leonardo was. Many art historians agree that it was by Leonardo’s hand, and its great beauty prompted fierce jealousy in Verrocchio.
But the drama uses many historical elements in broader ways to explore facets of Leonardo as a character, from his unstable existence pitching work to patrons, to his reaction to personal tragedy. Below, we dig into the main questions that will help separate fact from fiction.
- Listen to the full interview on the HistoryExtra podcast
Warning, spoilers ahead
Was Leonardo ‘illegitimate’?
Yes, he was the illegitimate son of Florentine lawyer Ser Piero da Vinci and a young peasant. But his illegitimacy was not a serious hindrance, writes Maya Corry. “While the Church stridently condemned sex outside marriage, the realities of life, love and lust meant that many children were the result of such unions.”
Though Leonardo’s relationship with his father is portrayed as strained in the drama, Leonardo was welcomed into his father’s home and provided for alongside Ser Piero’s legitimate offspring. However, his illegitimate birth did mean that he could not follow his father and become a notary, so Leonardo was apprenticed to Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio.
Was Caterina de Cremona a real person?
The historical evidence for Caterina de Cremona (played by Matilda De Angelis) is slim. In the show, Caterina is a close friend and confidant of the artist, and her story forms a significant part of the drama; in the first episode, Caterina is found dead of alleged poisoning, and Leonardo is the main suspect. Theirs is a relationship that shapes the entire series.
Her character is a composite figure inspired by a sliver of factual evidence that does appear in the historical evidence of Leonardo’s life, surfaced in a 2004 biography by Charles Nicholl.
Scribbled in the corner of geometrical designs and anatomical studies at Windsor, writes Nicholl, is a list of six names – one of which is Chermonese – from which Nicholl concludes that in Leonardo’s retinue in 1509 was someone from Cremona. Nicholl writes: “We have here, I believe, a sighting of a mysterious woman called Cremona, with whom Leonardo was involved in some undefined way.” Nicholl goes on to speculate on the woman’s presence in Leonardo’s party – an artists’ model, a romantic partner? – and it is this note that inspired Thompson and Spotnitz. “Various biographers have speculated about who she might be,” says Thompson. “Could she be the model represented in perhaps one of his greatest works, Leda and the Swan?”
“We knew from this scrap of paper that this woman was important to Leonardo,” adds Spotnitz. “It’s an act of imagination to recover her from history and imagine who she might have been. And in so doing, we are able to shine a light on Leonardo's soul.
“We found that was a really powerful way to help the audience understand what it must have been like to have been Leonardo and what his art might have meant to him.”
- Listen: the big questions of women's history
Was Leonardo accused of sodomy?
Yes. On 9 April 1476, Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy in an anonymous report to the Florentine authorities. The nearly 24-year-old Leonardo was one of four men said to have had sex with the 17-year-old Jacopo Saltarelli, a well-known male sex worker in Florence – though the charges were later dropped.
“Only about 20 per cent of those accused of sodomy were actually convicted,” writes Catherine Fletcher, “and it was not until the fourth offence that jail became a possibility.”
Though it’s true there was religious hostility towards the charge of sodomy, a factor in the drama that leads to Leonardo’s dismissal from Verrocchio’s workshop.
Did Leonardo have a relationship with his apprentice Salaì?
“We believe that Leonardo was gay, and we depict him as a gay man in this series,” Frank Spotnitz told HistoryExtra. “He never has sex with Caterina. But there is still a love there and she's an inspiration to him.”
Leonardo’s most prominent romantic (and possibly sexual) attachment depicted in the show is with his apprentice, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as Salaì (a nickname, meaning ‘little devil’). In reality this is the relationship, writes Catherine Fletcher, that has prompted most speculation, though it’s not one sits comfortably with modern sensibilities. Salaì was 10 years old when he joined the then 38-year-old Leonardo’s workshop as an assistant in 1490. He remained in Leonardo’s household until almost Leonardo’s death.
Such relationships between older and younger men were common to Leonardo’s time – “this pederastic model was typical of same-sex relationships in Renaissance Florence,” says Fletcher, “with the younger man often aged between 12 and 18.” But even with that context, it’s not an easily palatable truth to convey in a 21st-century period drama, and so though Leonardo and Salaì (played by Carlos Cuevas) differ in sensibility and background, in the show they are portrayed as more equal in age.
- Read more about the relationship between Leonardo and Salaì
How did Leonardo da Vinci paint the Last Supper?
In the drama, we see Leonardo reject the prevalent 15th-century techniques of painting fresco, a method that meant that the work had to be completed rapidly and using pigment mixed with water and sometimes egg yolk on moist plaster. In reality, Leonardo did develop a new technique that allowed him to apply the pigment at his own pace, experimenting with other water and oil-based mediums.
The Last Supper, likely painted between 1495 and 1498 for the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, would become one of the artist’s most famous works and it gave Leonardo the opportunity to put his religious theories on display.
“It allowed him to explore visually his beliefs about how the body communicates inner states of being,” writes Maya Corry. “His notes are full of assertions that the painter ought to be constantly aware of how the motions of the mind are visible in bodily movements, gestures and facial expressions.”
Disciples’ characteristics are marked by their body language, with vivid depictions of their astonishment at Christ’s announcement that one of them would betray him.
The picture’s fame spread but, as the character of fellow artist Tomaso Massini foreshadows, Leonardo’s new technique did have implications for his work. The Last Supper soon began to degrade; paint had begun to flake off even during the artist’s lifetime. The painting underwent a significant restoration effort in the late 1990s, a project not without controversy – virtually none of the original paint remains. Today it can still be seen on the wall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie, though as the painting remains fragile, visitors are allotted 15 minutes to view the mural in groups of no more than 30 people.
Did Ludovico Sforza poison his nephew?
Leonardo gained commissions from a range of patrons of widely differing social statuses. Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, is one of a number of Leonardo’s patrons featured in the series, along with his wife, Beatrice d’Este, and later Cesare Borgia (though missing from Leonardo’s set of patrons in the drama is the influential Isabelle d’Este, sister of Beatrice).
- Read more about Leonardo da Vinci’s patrons
Leonardo always sought stable employment with patrons who would allow him the freedom to pursue his extraordinary range of artistic and scientific interests, and he was employed by Sforza and later patrons for his design of machinery as much as artistic talent. “For Sforza, da Vinci designed several bridges, including a revolving bridge for use by armies on the move. With wheels, a rope-and-pulley system and a counterweight tank for balance, it could be packed away and transported,” writes Marina Wallace.
Though he did gain the longed-for salary and stability from Sforza, in the drama, Caterina and later Leonardo are prompted to flee from the Milanese court when the duke’s young nephew is brutally poisoned.
Portrayed as ruthless and unpredictable, Ludovico Sforza (played by James D’Arcy) had gained power as the Duke of Milan in 1476 after the assassination of his elder brother Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who was stabbed by Milanese conspirators. Ludovico’s rule began by acting as regent on behalf of his brother’s eldest son, seven-year-old Gian Galeazzo, though he later sought to legitimise his rule through marriage to his niece, Bianca Maria.
However, Ludovico’s power was still contentious and there were calls for him to cede power to Gian Galeazzo, the rightful ruler of Milan. Gian Galeazzo left Milan to establish a court at Pavia. A struggle ensued as the various claims were supported, an episode which, as in the show, did end in the premature death of Gian Galeazzo in 1494. His death was viewed as suspicious; Renaissance historian Francesco Guicciardini suggested that he was poisoned at the order of his uncle.
But Gian Galeazzo was 25 when he died, rather than the isolated teenager portrayed in the show, and also had his own family; he had married his cousin Isabella of Naples and fathered four children.
Did Leonardo and Michelangelo have a rivalry?
The pair were a generation apart, and yet as two of the master artists of the Renaissance age they formed a rivalry, one which is widely accepted to have begun when Leonardo was appointed to a committee to determine where in Florence to place Michelangelo’s statue of David.
In October 1503, the Republican government of Florence commissioned Leonardo to paint a mural of the battle of Anghiari. This mural was to decorate part of one wall of the main council chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio – the seat of Florentine government. A year later, Michelangelo was commissioned in competition with Leonardo to fresco another section of this room. It’s amid this setting that the drama chooses to set the main stage of the artists’ clear divergence of principle.
“Leonardo believed the painter’s job was to remake nature through a profound study and understanding of it, just as the aspiring aeronautical engineer’s job was to understand the flight of birds and bats so as to fabricate a great artificial uccello (bird),” writes Martin Kemp. “Michelangelo, by contrast, adhered to a philosophy that was strongly Platonic in flavour. Instead, the focus was on the soul within the body, and the striving of human insight to transcend our mortal limits.”
As in the drama, payments from the time show how Leonardo prepared the wall in the Palazzo Vecchio for painting. The materials he purchased in April 1505 indicate that he proposed to paint not in the traditional fresco technique, but with oil-based pigments on dry plaster. This was a mistake: on 6 June, torrential rain caused his cartoon (a full-scale preparatory drawing for a fresco) to come unstuck, and – perhaps due to defective linseed oil – his paint dripped off the wall after he lit a fire to dry it out. In the drama, this adds fuel to the already tense relationship between Leonardo and Michelangelo.
But, as depicted in the series, there was a truce and even understanding of sorts that evolved. “Their art was in productive dialogue in Florence during the early years of the 16th century, and in Rome while Leonardo was in the holy city between 1513 and 1516,” writes Kemp. Leonardo’s art exercised obvious influence on Michelangelo. When he returned to Florence from Rome in his mid-thirties, “Michelangelo was demonstrably affected by what his rival Leonardo was doing.”
- Read more about Leonardo and Michelangelo' rivalry and mutual inspiration
For more of the real history behind the latest historical dramas, check out the realities of Victorian London that underpin Netflix's Sherlock Holmes-spinoff The Irregulars, and explore the real relationship between fossil hunter Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchison in Ammonite, now streaming on Amazon Prime.
Did Leonardo create an aerial map of Imola?
Yes, as the drama chooses to show, Leonardo did create a highly accurate, colour-coded map of the strategically important town of Imola, during a period in which his patron was warlord Cesare Borgia (played by Max Bennett), son of Pope Alexander VI. In 1502, Borgia directed Leonardo to serve as his consultant on military architecture, which led to Leonardo’s innovative map.
- Your guide to the Borgias
“Up until that point,” explains Steve Thompson, “most maps, like the famous map of London, had all been side views. But you can see all the buildings from the side and therefore some of them are obscured. Borgia asked him to draw a map of Imola in order to strengthen the defences for the coming war. Leonardo again had a vision, almost an artistic vision. How could you create a map with God's eyes?”
As depicted in the show, the Florentine republic also employed Leonardo to manage the diversion of the river Arno and fortify Piombino, a city on the coast.
Who was the woman who sat for Mona Lisa?
Contemporaries spoke with admiration of Leonardo’s ability to encapsulate an individual’s inner world in a single image, and he often employed symbolism to highlight the inner emotions of his sitter, as shown in the drama when he paints juniper in the background of Ginevra de' Benci’s portrait. Juniper was used to symbolise ‘virtue’ in Renaissance Italy, and also could also have been a play on Ginevra’s name.
Mona Lisa began as a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (maiden name Lisa Gherardini), who was the wife of a Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo. “He was quite upwardly mobile and evidently saw having a portrait of his wife by one of Florence’s star artists as quite an attractive thing,” says Catherine Fletcher. “The interesting thing about Mona Lisa is that Francesco del Giocondo never got his painting.”
Leonardo took the painting with him when he moved to France. One argument, Fletcher explains, is that though Mona Lisa was seemingly commissioned originally as a portrait, by the end of its existence it was not really a portrait of a real woman anymore, as the features had become so idealised. Either way, the work held significant meaning for Leonardo – it was one of three portraits he kept with him when he went to France, along with Saint John the Baptist and a Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
Did Leonardo have children?
No, Leonardo had no children, though one of the elements of the drama plays on this tantalising possibility.
How did Leonardo da Vinci die?
Legend has it that Leonardo da Vinci died in the arms of King Francis I of France, such was the king’s admiration and pride for the artist’s presence at his court. Leonardo had moved to live in France in 1516, at the invitation of the king. Leonardo died at the Château du Clos Lucé, in Amboise in France, on 2 May 1519, aged 67.
He was buried in the palace church of Saint-Florentin, but due its demolition during the French Revolution in the late 18th century, the exact location of his grave no longer remains. A skeleton, found with some inscriptions on a fragment of stone which contained letters of da Vinci’s name, was moved to the chapel of Saint-Hubert, and a tomb bearing Leonardo’s epitaph can be visited today.
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]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Leonardo da Vinci’s private relationships: what's known?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-da-vinci-relationship-salai-sexuality-evidence/ 2024-10-11T19:54:18.000Z 2021-04-15T06:55:19.000Z On 9 April 1476, Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy in an anonymous report to the Florentine authorities.
Leonardo, then just short of his 24th birthday, was one of four men said to have had sex with the 17-year-old Jacopo Saltarelli. The denouncer claimed that Saltarelli had been “a party to many wretched affairs and consents to please those persons who exact certain evil pleasures from him”.
Saltarelli had apparently “served several dozen people”, but just four were named: Leonardo da Vinci, then based at the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio; a goldsmith named Bartholomeo di Pasquino; a tailor named Baccino; and Leonardo Tornabuoni.
This last-named man was a member of a prominent Florentine family who were intermarried with the Medici rulers of the city. As an anonymous denunciation, however, the report was not accepted, and less than two months later the group was absolved on condition that they were not reported again.
- Read more about the real history behind Renaissance drama Leonardo
Although sodomy was illegal, it was very common for young men in Renaissance Florence to have sex with other men.
In his book Forbidden Friendships, historian Michael Rocke showed that in the later 15th century, an absolute majority of Florentine men appeared on magistrates’ lists of men suspected of the offence. This figure might seem astonishing today, but it reflects a very different set of sexual norms in the historical period.
Policing was relatively light. Only about 20 per cent of those accused of sodomy were actually convicted, and fines were not always collected in full. There was certainly religious hostility to sodomy: it was a prominent theme in the preaching of Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, who rose to power in Florence in the 1490s. Yet alongside that hostility was a degree of acceptance.
The list of Renaissance men who had sexual or romantic relationships with other men is a long one and also features Michelangelo and Machiavelli, to name two of the most famous. The former wrote love poems to Tommaso Cavalieri, a young nobleman, while the latter apparently had an ongoing arrangement with a rent-boy called Riccio. Francesco Guicciardini, a contemporary, speculated that Pope Leo X (r1513-21) had been “exceedingly devoted – and every day with less and less shame – to that kind of pleasure that for honour’s sake may not be named”.
Was Leonardo da Vinci gay or asexual?
So far as Leonardo da Vinci is concerned, the 1476 document is the only specific written evidence from his own lifetime that we have concerning the artist’s sexuality. Even that allegation, of course, may have been speculative or malicious.
Historians have disagreed on whether Leonardo had relationships with men, or whether he was celibate. This need not be a binary distinction: he may have been celibate during certain periods of his life and sexually active during others.
He may also have been what we would now call asexual. That Leonardo once wrote “intellectual passion drives out sensuality” is not conclusive evidence either way, nor is his documented observation that the genitals were “so ugly” that humanity would die out were it not for “pretty faces, adornment and unrestrained dispositions” on the part of those having sex.
There is no evidence at all that Leonardo ever slept with a woman, though that has not prevented people suggesting that he may have done. Renaissance society did not have the concept of firm sexual orientation that exists today and many men were in practice bisexual. (We know less about the women, because prosecutions, the main source of records, generally targeted men.)
Who was Salaì, and what was his relationship with Leonardo da Vinci?
The relationship that has prompted most speculation is that between Leonardo and Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as Salaì, a nickname meaning ‘little devil’. Salaì joined Leonardo’s household in 1490, at the age of 10, as an assistant and went on to train as a painter.
Leonardo – who was 28 years his senior – complained that Salaì stole from him and his guests, describing him as “thief, liar, obstinate, glutton”. Despite this inauspicious start, Salaì remained in Leonardo’s household until almost the end of the latter’s life. He was rewarded with a gift of land outside Milan (on which he had already built a house) in Leonardo’s will.
Described by Giorgio Vasari in The Lives of the Artists (1550) as “a graceful and beautiful youth with fine curly hair, in which Leonardo greatly delighted”, Salaì is thought to have been the model for a number of Leonardo’s works, including the painting of St John the Baptist at the Louvre and an associated drawing, The Angel in the Flesh, that shows a similar nude figure, this time with an erect penis.
A 16th-century dialogue by art theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538–92) firmly identified the relationship between Leonardo and Salaì as sexual. While Lomazzo was too young to have encountered either of the pair, he could have met people who had known them. Lomazzo’s fictional interlocutor asks his imaginary Leonardo whether the two have played “the game in the behind that the Florentines love so much”. Leonardo replies: “And how many times! Have in mind that he was a most beautiful young man, especially at about fifteen.”
A sexual relationship between a 43-year-old man and his 15-year-old employee would be considered reprehensible today, all the more so if, as in the case of Leonardo and Salaì, the younger person had joined the elder’s household at the age of 10.
This pederastic model was, however, typical of same-sex relationships in Renaissance Florence, with the younger man often aged between 12 and 18. The 17-year-old Saltarelli also fits the pattern. Lomazzo suggested that through such relationships “out of a tender age come, at a manly age, worthier and closer friends”.
Renaissance attitudes tended to echo those of the ancient world and, as recent research by historian Rachel Hope Cleves on British author Norman Douglas has shown, tolerance of pederasty persisted in Europe into the 20th century. Age-gaps were not exclusive to same-sex relationships: girls might also be married very young.
We will never know the truth of Leonardo da Vinci’s relationships: at best we can speculate about what would be more or less likely in his historic context. That context is not one that easily maps on to modern understandings, nor one that will seem comfortable in all its aspects today.
Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. Her latest book is The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020)
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Leonardo & Michelangelo: rivalry and inspiration]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-michelangelo-rivalry-inspiration-artists/ 2025-02-12T13:13:26.000Z 2021-04-13T16:32:28.000Z As Leonardo Da Vinci and his friend Giovanni di Gavina were passing the public benches at the Palazzo Spini Feroni, near Florence’s Church of Santa Trinita, some men were debating a passage in Dante. They called out to Leonardo, asking him to expound the passage for them. By chance, Michelangelo happened to be passing too, and one of them hailed him. At this, Leonardo declared, “Michelangelo will be able to expound it for you”. Michelangelo assumed this was said to entrap him, causing him to reply: “No, you explain – you who have undertaken the design of a horse to be cast in bronze but were unable to cast it, and were forced to give up in shame.” So saying, he turned his back on them and began to depart. Leonardo remained, blushing at these words. Finally, wishing to humiliate his rival further, Michelangelo called out again: “And to think you were believed by those castrated Milanese roosters!”
Di Gavina, Leonardo’s companion, was a painter, now little known. The grand Palazzo Spini Feroni, near the Ponte Santa Trinita, was stripped of its hospitable exterior benches some time ago and is now the home of a fashion museum dedicated to the shoemaker Salvatore Ferragamo. The above anecdote is recounted in an anonymous manuscript, apparently written in the 1540s. Its author is now recognised as Bernardo Vecchietti, an important patron and member of the Medici circle of literati. Recorded during Michelangelo’s lifetime, albeit well after Leonardo’s death in 1519, it may be taken as an accurate signal of how the relationship between the artistic giants was perceived by those in the know.
- Your guide to Leonardo da Vinci
The earliest encounters
The two great masters were not of the same generation. Leonardo was born in Vinci in 1452, the illegitimate son of a young lawyer and a peasant girl. By 1500, his career had embraced some youthful years in Florence, and a period in Milan from 1482–99, marked not least by The Last Supper. Michelangelo, born in 1475, was from a ‘good’ family, the son of Lodovico Buonarroti, who sometimes worked as a minor Florence official. The young Michelangelo had completed the Bacchus and Pietà in Rome, but there was no public evidence of his abilities in Florence. In 1501 he was commissioned to make something of a massive marble block in the cathedral workshop. This was to become his David.
The first encounter of the artists took place when Leonardo was appointed to a committee to determine where to place the David. After much discussion the huge sculpture was placed in the square outside the Palazzo della Signoria (now called Palazzo Vecchio), headquarters of the ruling body of the Republic of Florence.
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Inside this palace was a spacious hall, the Salone dei Cinquecento, for assemblies of franchised citizens. It was here that the two artists’ work first collided. Leonardo had been commissioned in 1503 to paint a very large mural (probably about 24 by 60 feet) depicting the battle of Anghiari, a victory over the Milanese in 1440. He was to be joined by Michelangelo, whose subject for an adjacent fresco was the battle of Cascina, fought against the Pisans in 1364. Surviving drawings for the project, a copy of Michelangelo’s lost cartoon and visual records of Leonardo’s unfinished mural demonstrate the divergence in their vision of what art should be.
Leonardo’s battle was to depict a bestial conflict of soldiers in elaborate and fantastical costumes, mounted on savage horses. In his account of how to paint a battle, he speaks of dust and smoke in the air, of raining fusillades of arrows, and of foot soldiers thrashing in water and dragged through slimy mud that was saturated with blood. A filmic vision. High drama and intense naturalism were to be mingled.
By contrast, Michelangelo’s approach to the battle was to portray a moment of human alarm, when bathing soldiers were alerted by an urgent cry that the enemy were about to attack. Naked men scramble out of the water, some dragging clothes on to damp limbs. As always with Michelangelo, the drama is narrated through the human body. We may imagine, as on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, that the landscape setting was cursory, even abstract.
In the event, the collision of contrasting visions was never to be realised on the walls of the council hall. Michelangelo was summoned to work for the pope in 1505, and the Florentine authorities reluctantly agreed with the French rulers of Milan that Leonardo should return to the Lombard city in 1506 to serve them. The republic fell to the returning Medici in 1512, and that was that.
Had the works come to fruition, what we would have witnessed on the walls of the council hall would not just have been a clash of styles. For Leonardo’s part, he saw the perfection of nature’s inventions, where nothing was lacking and nothing was superfluous, as proof of the presence of God. All was in accordance with the mathematical rules that the Creator had established for nature’s operations. Leonardo believed the painter’s job was to remake nature through a profound study and understanding of it, just as the aspiring aeronautical engineer’s job was to understand the flight of birds and bats so as to fabricate a great artificial uccello (bird). The necessary understanding was to be achieved by a heroic research of an empirical kind, guided by the mathematics that ruled at the heart of natural systems. In broad terms, this related to the tradition of Aristotle as understood in the Middle Ages, with a greater emphasis on mathematics than was apparent in Aristotle himself.
Michelangelo, by contrast, adhered to a philosophy that was strongly Platonic in flavour. Instead, the focus was on the soul within the body, and the striving of human insight to transcend our mortal limits. Divine purpose was to be discerned through a vision of beauty and truth realised through God’s supreme creation, the human body, which was the house or prison for the immortal soul. The mind, serving the soul, aspired to comprehend divine ideas, as far as this was possible.
When God infuses human life into the receptive Adam on the Sistine ceiling, he is granting the first man’s beautiful body a rational soul to accompany the animal and vegetative souls that it already possesses. The degradations of the fallen Adam on the ceiling are preceded by a metaphysical vision that transports us to the transcendental essence of creation, above all, the division of light from darkness. For Michelangelo, the study of nature was largely devoted to the human body. His mastery of anatomy enabled him to create a divine race of beings. For Leonardo, anatomy allowed him to tell us about the actions determined by human minds within the divinely designed mechanism of the body. And, beyond that, Leonardo insisted that nature as a whole – animal, vegetable and mineral – was to be studied and represented with comparable reverence.
The divergence of principle between Leonardo and Michelangelo was profound. It is doubtful whether they ever directly debated these matters, but they did not have to. The difference was readily apparent. Michelangelo was certainly aware of Leonardo’s opinions, about which the older artist does not seem to have been reticent. When Michelangelo was asked by Benedetto Varchi in 1549 about the paragone, the long-standing debate about the ranking of the various arts, he wrote acidly: “As to that man who wrote saying that painting was more noble than sculpture, if he had known as much about the other subjects on which he has written, why my serving maid could have written better!”
However, this is not the whole story. Their art was in productive dialogue in Florence during the early years of the 16th century, and in Rome while Leonardo was in the holy city between 1513 and 1516. As a result of his deliberations about where to place the younger artist’s David, Leonardo had made a small sketch of a more heavily muscled figure to which he added some horses galloping in the foam, converting David into Neptune – perhaps an implicit criticism. It is also possible that Leonardo’s warning in his notebook to an un-named “anatomical painter” about the dangers of emphasising musculature for its own sake, resulting in figures that look like bags of walnuts, was a reaction to the heroically defined bodies created by Michelangelo.
A discernible influence
The evidence is more plentiful about the effect Leonardo’s art exercised on Michelangelo. When he returned to Florence from Rome in his mid-twenties, Michelangelo was demonstrably affected by what his 50-year-old rival Leonardo was doing. This is most evident in their Virgin and Child compositions. In 1501, Leonardo was painting the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, in which a symbolic reference to Christ’s Passion (in this case a device for winding yarn, which resembled the cross on which he would be crucified) is built into the composition as an intense narrative. The child surges across his mother’s lap to embrace the cross, while she reacts with uncertainty.
Michelangelo picked up this novel narrative quality in his unfinished marble relief tondo, a type of circular composition, for the Florentine merchant Taddeo Taddei, in which the awakening Christ reacts with some alarm to the flapping bird (a goldfinch, symbolic of the Passion) proffered by the infant John the Baptist. By 1503, Leonardo had embarked on at least one of his compositions of the Virgin, Child and St Anne (with or without a lamb and St John), the formal and emotional complexities of which were translated into Michelangelo’s very different style in his painted Holy Family in the Doni Tondo.
Yet beyond such issues of influence, there was a deeper and surprising affinity that they are unlikely to have realised for their own parts. Both artists, in their later creations, were striving to capture the ineffable – the otherness and inaccessibility of the ultimate realm of the spirit. We do not generally think of Leonardo as a spiritual artist, but the Salvator Mundi and St John the Baptist somehow magically combine his late ideas about the optical uncertainties of vision with an implied sense of a world beyond our earth-bound perceptions. After 1500 – not least after becoming aware of Arabic optical science – he increasingly realised that seeing was a slippery business, and stated that the “eye does not know the edge of any body”. There are no rigidly defined edges in his paintings from the Mona Lisa onwards.
This optics of uncertainty was complemented by Leonardo’s conviction that there was a divine realm outside the finite cosmos, accessible only via faith and not amenable to his beloved reason. As he declared, he did not intend “to write or give information of those things of which the human mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by an instance of nature”. He considered that “the definition of the soul” should be left “to the minds of friars, fathers of the people, who by inspiration possess the secrets. I let be the sacred writings, for they are the supreme truth.” He goes on to lambast those who “want to encapsulate the mind of God, in which the universe is encompassed, weighing it and mincing it into infinite parts, as if they had to anatomise it”. To Leonardo, our only feasible job on earth is to discern God in the perfection of nature.
For his part, Michelangelo, towards the end of his life, was tortured by the inadequacy of his material media of marble, paint and drawing for realising the non-material essence of the holy spirit. As he wrote in one of his sonnets:
So that passionate fantasy, which made
Of art a monarch for me and an idol, was laden down with sin, now I know well.
Like what all men against their will desired...
There’s no painting or sculpture that now quiets
The soul that’s pointed toward that holy Love
that on the cross opened
Its arms to take us.
His late Crucifixion drawings somehow dematerialise the figures he sees and the medium in which he represents them. The tension between what is seen in the eye of the mind and our physical eye is extreme.
Leonardo and Michelangelo both confronted a key dilemma of the human condition for the Christian believer: how to deal with the finiteness of our flesh-and-blood existence and the limitations of our minds in the face of divine ineffability. How could we know the divine? Leonardo’s visual answer was to use the elusiveness of his own painterly technique to imply a realm beyond the picture to which our rational understanding has no direct access. Michelangelo’s desire was always to strive to transcend our manifest limitations and to reach out to a conceptual realm that is not circumscribed by our material existence. Towards the end of his life, he harboured a devastating sense that he was not succeeding.
Leonardo never lost faith in his art, but he must have been aware, as he neared death, how few were the examples of his having manifested his pictorial genius at its supreme level. Michelangelo seems radically to have doubted the power of any art to achieve his ultimate aim. I suspect that neither artist died with a sense of fulfilment.
Martin Kemp is emeritus professor of history of art at the University of Oxford and one of the world’s leading experts on Leonardo da Vinci. His latest book is Leonardo by Leonardo (Callaway Arts & Entertainment, 2019)
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Leonardo da Vinci's patrons: the people who paid for the masterpieces]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-da-vinci-art-patrons-supporters-ludovico-sforza-isabella-deste-borgias/ 2024-10-20T17:03:32.000Z 2021-04-09T06:05:46.000Z Artists today generally paint what they wish to paint, hoping to make a living by selling their work at exhibitions or through dealers. But early in the Italian Renaissance, painters were regarded still as craftsmen rather than artists. They were ruled by the conventions of their workshops, and for any major painting commission they were at the behest of a client or patron. The patron might sometimes be benign, allowing their painter some independence, but often they were considerably more demanding. Contracts usually outlined in detail exactly what the painter was to show in his work, and imposed clear conditions on the quality of materials to be used, the delivery date and how much the painter would be paid.
- Jump to: 5 patrons who supported Leonardo's career
Leonardo da Vinci worked at a time when painters were gaining more freedom to exercise their imagination and individual creativity. But early in his career, he was often constrained by the limitations set by painters’ conventional relationships with their patrons. Partly because he kicked against these conventions, he finished relatively few paintings in his lifetime, and left more unfinished than was usual for a painter of his era. For example, his portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, mistress to his patron Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, was still not complete when it was given to Cecilia by the duke.
More starkly, Leonardo continued for years to work on and off (more off than on, one guesses) at the portrait commissioned around 1503 by the wealthy Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo of his wife, Lisa Gherardini: the Mona Lisa. Leonardo took it with him as he moved to Milan, then to Rome, and finally in 1516 to France, where he went to work at the court of King Francis I. Perhaps he never felt this portrait was finished: it always possessed artistic problems that needed solving. Alternatively, once he had solved these problems in his mind, he lost interest in completing the painting. Either way, his patron never took delivery of the portrait.
Leonardo gained commissions from a range of patrons of widely differing social statuses. He worked for Florentine merchants and Milanese dukes; he painted altarpieces for monks and confraternities, and large-scale murals for aristocrats and republicans. He always sought stable employment with patrons who would allow him the freedom to pursue his extraordinary range of artistic and scientific interests.
Moving between cities
Leonardo’s first large-scale independent work was an altarpiece painting of the Adoration of the Magi, commissioned in March 1481 by the monks of the San Donato a Scopeto Monastery, just outside Florence. They stipulated that he must complete it in 24, or at most 30, months, and that he must himself provide all the pigments and gold leaf needed. But at some point the following year he left Florence, leaving the painting unfinished, and entered the service of the Duke of Milan. This was a near ideal relationship. The time he spent at the Duke of Milan’s court was perhaps the most productive phase of his career, both as a painter and as an experi- mental scientist and creative thinker.
This period of freedom for Leonardo to explore the natural world and to exercise his artistic imagination came to a crashing end with the fall of the duchy of Milan to the armies of the King of France in 1499. But during the politically unsettled years around the turn of the century, Leonardo moved fluently between major sources of patronage, striving to settle on the environment that would offer him the greatest license to work at whatever he wished to pursue.
Leonardo fled from Milan to Venice, where he acted briefly as a military consultant for the Venetian Republic, returning to republican Florence by the end of March 1501. Despite these frequent shifts in residence, this was a fertile phase in Leonardo’s creative life as a painter, although he brought no major commissions to completion. The last 15 years of his career were less productive as he moved restlessly back to Milan, to papal Rome, and finally to Amboise in France where, legend has it, he died in the arms of King Francis I.
Meeting an exceptional woman
En route from Milan to Venice at the end of 1499, Leonardo visited Mantua and there encountered the marchioness Isabella d’Este. An exceptional woman, Isabella was the major female art patron of the Renaissance, sometimes demanding but at other times unexpectedly patient and conciliatory. Isabella’s relations as an art patron with Leonardo are unusually well documented, in extensive correspondence held in the Mantuan archive, and tell us a lot about how patronage worked during the Renaissance.
Isabella was determined to be accepted as an equal to her husband in aristocratic authority. This was especially important when she was left in command of Mantua while the marquess was away at war. To this end she undertook traditionally male activities, notably furnishing for herself a private study and forming an important collection of works of art, including a series of small bronze replicas of celebrated classical statues, which she commissioned. Contemporaries such as Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and Isabella’s brother Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, also decorated their private studies with com- missioned paintings. However, Isabella outclassed them in the range and sophistica- tion of her patronage of celebrated artists of her time, and in her determination and acquisitiveness as a collector.
The connoisseur in Isabella also led her to relish making comparisons between classical and contemporary artworks. When a marble carving of a slumbering Cupid that Michelangelo had originally sold as classical was unmasked as his own work, she rapidly acquired it so as to be able to compare it with a classical Cupid Sleeping, perhaps by the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles, that was already in her collection. Leonardo assisted with one aspect of her collecting activity when, to guide her choice of purchases, he sent her a series of drawings of classical hard-stone vases previously in the collection of Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ de’ Medici.
Isabella was also anxious to decorate her study walls with paintings by major artists of her day. These works were to be of excep- tionally complex and elaborate allegorical subjects. The Mantuan court painter Andrea Mantegna completed two paintings in this series, both now in the Louvre, Paris: Parnassus (pictured above) and Triumph of the Virtues. He was presumably given oral instructions on the contents and meaning of these paintings, but conversely the Umbrian painter Pietro Perugino was sent a written ‘poetic invention’ for his Battle Between Love and Chastity. This required him to include numerous extraneous figures and secondary episodes around the main allegorical action. Correspondence about Perugino’s faltering progress, and the finished painting itself, suggest that he had difficulty in formulating a visually pleasing composition. When she finally received the painting, Isabella thanked him but grumbled: “If it had been more carefully finished, it would have been more to your honour and our satisfaction.”
Forewarned perhaps by his brother-in-law, Mantegna, the Venetian master Giovanni Bellini in 1501 refused Isabella’s commis- sion for a matching allegorical painting. She was told that “he knows your ladyship will judge it in comparison with the work of Master Andrea [Mantegna]” and that “in the story he cannot devise anything good out of the subject at all”. In 1506, Isabella tried again, only to be told that “he does not like to be given many written details which cramp his style; his way of working, as he says, is always to wander at will in his pictures”.
In March 1501, Isabella wrote to an agent in Florence asking him to “sound [Leonardo] out – as you know how – as to whether he would undertake to paint a picture for my studio. If he should consent, I will leave the invention and the timing to his judgment.”
Unsurprisingly Leonardo, like Bellini, did not respond well to her proposal, but the license she was prepared to allow him contrasts sharply with her peremptory manner in dealing with Perugino. This suggests that she accepted that Leonardo deserved gentler treatment. The letter continued “...if you find him reluctant, endeavour at least to induce him to carry out for me a small picture of the Virgin [Mary], devout and sweet as is his natural style”. Later on, Isabella appealed directly to Leonardo, writing to ask for “a young Christ of about 12 years old, which would have been the age he was when he disputed in the temple, done with that sweetness and gentleness of expression which is the particular excellence of your art”.
Patience and tolerance
Isabella’s subtle judgement on Leonardo’s style shows a sophisticated perception and an unusual skill in putting it into words. But in April 1501, Isabella heard back from her Florentine contact that “Leonardo’s life is changeable and greatly unsettled, because he seems to live from day to day... Since he has been in Florence he has only done one sketch, a cartoon... He gives pride of place to geometry, having entirely lost patience with the paintbrush”. Ten days later he wrote again, reiterating that “his mathematical experiments have so distracted him from painting that he cannot endure his brush”.
While briefly in Mantua, however, Leonardo had agreed to paint Isabella’s portrait. He made a full-scale drawing in preparation, and he had this with him when he moved to Venice. But he never painted the portrait, and indeed in 1504, Isabella conceded that now this would be “almost impossible, since you are unable to move here”. Almost miraculously, the finished portrait drawing survives in the Louvre in Paris. Its curious, hybrid composi- tion may be a clue as to why Leonardo failed to make the painted portrait. Courtly decorum required that Isabella’s head should be portrayed in profile, but Leonardo’s artistic instincts led him to draw her torso, arms and hands from the front. The result is an unreconciled contrast between the form and movement of her body and the detached expressionless profile face. It is difficult to imagine that Leonardo can have been content with this awkward compromise, which contrasts uncomfortably with the fluid movement and expression of his Cecilia Gallerani portrait. Isabella seems, however, to have been happy with it, reminding Leonardo in her letter of May 1504 that “when you were in these parts, and did my likeness in charcoal, you promised me you would portray me once more in colours”.
Isabella d’Este’s tolerant treatment of Leonardo is perhaps a signal of how his patrons came to realise that, if they were to receive finished paintings, they needed to provide him with exceptional freedom. Ludovico Sforza seems to have offered him similar license to pursue his scientific investigations alongside his artistic commissions. And King Francis welcomed Leonardo to France perhaps not so much as a famous painter, but as a celebrated personality who could bring lustre to life at his court.
Francis Ames-Lewis is emeritus professor of history of art at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of Isabella and Leonardo: The Artistic Relationship between Isabella d’Este and Leonardo da Vinci (Yale University Press, 2012)
5 other patrons who shaped Leonardo's career
Isabella d’Este was not the only figure who sought out the artist for his talents
Lorenzo de’ Medici
It is often imagined that early in his career, Leonardo da Vinci enjoyed the patronage of Lorenzo ‘il Magnifico’ de’ Medici. While he still worked as an assistant of Andrea del Verrocchio, Leonardo may well have worked on Verrocchio workshop projects commissioned by Lorenzo; and there is good reason to believe that in the mid-1470s Lorenzo invited Leonardo to make studies from the classical statuary in the Medici sculpture garden at San Marco in Florence. Further, a contemporary wrote that Leonardo travelled to Milan in 1482 on a diplomatic mission, bearing with him an unusual lute, shaped like a horse’s skull, for Ludovico Sforza. However, no record survives of any artistic commissions that Lorenzo de’ Medici assigned to Leonardo independently.
Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan
In the 1480s, Leonardo da Vinci joined the court of the Duke of Milan. He was able to take on artistic work outside the court, and appears to have had the freedom to pursue interests in scientific fields such as anatomy and military engineering. Leonardo also worked on ephemeral projects such as stage designs for theatrical performances and dynastic marriage celebrations. But Duke Ludovico also commissioned portraits, like that of Cecilia Gallerani, and large-scale artistic projects, notably the Last Supper mural in Santa Maria delle Grazie, and the equestrian monument to his father, Francesco. By the late 1490s, Leonardo had completed the clay model for the monument, but it was destroyed by invading French soldiers who used it for target practice.
Cesare Borgia
In 1502, Leonardo worked for the warlord Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, whose ambition was to gain and consolidate territory on his father’s behalf. On 18 August that year, Borgia directed Leonardo to serve as his consultant on military architecture by surveying his fortifications at cities in the Romagna region, such as Pesaro, Cesena and Rimini. As Borgia’s ‘architect and general engineer’, Leonardo had license to inspect all of Borgia’s military installations and to set in train necessary repairs and improvements. This commission included Leonardo’s preparation of a highly accurate, colour-coded map of the strategically important town of Imola. His work for Borgia occupied Leonardo at least until October that year, and possibly for a few months longer.
Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception
Soon after reaching Milan in c1482, Leonardo was commissioned by the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception to paint an altarpiece in the Church of San Francesco Grande. The contract, dated 25 April 1483, shows this was an intricate construction incorporating both panel paintings and polychromed sculptures. A list survives specifying the high-quality pigments and gold leaf that the painters had to provide. On the central panel, now at the Louvre, Leonardo and his assistants were to paint “Our Lady with her Son”, but the composition is actually more elaborate.
A few years later, an argument arose between patrons and painters over this panel’s cost. The painters valued it at four times the original estimate, and so another purchaser was found. This may explain why a second painting, started around 1492 to a closely similar composition, was eventually incorporated into the altarpiece.
Republic of Florence
In October 1503, the Republican government of Florence commissioned Leonardo to paint a mural of the battle of Anghiari. This mural was to decorate part of one wall of the main council chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio – the seat of Florentine government – in the Piazza della Signoria. A year later, Michelangelo was commissioned in competition with Leonardo to fresco another section of this room. Payments over the following months show Leonardo’sprogress in preparing the wall for painting. The materials he purchased in April 1505 indicate that he proposed to paint not in the traditional fresco technique, but with oil-based pigments on dry plaster. This was a mistake: on 6 June, torrential rain caused his cartoon to come unstuck, and – perhaps due to defective linseed oil – his paint dripped off the wall after he lit a fire to dry it out.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Leonardo da Vinci's paintings: a guide to 8 famous works]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-da-vinci-paintings-art-artwork-famous-guide/ 2024-10-18T08:47:25.000Z 2021-03-31T14:08:18.000Z The paintings of polymath Leonardo da Vinci display an extraordinary range of interests. In this gallery, we take a closer look at eight of his most famous works
The Annunciation
A painting from c1472, early in Leonardo’s career, when the young artist was still working at Verrocchio’s studio. The composition puts a traditional religious subject matter in the con- temporary setting of a Renaissance palace. The piece demonstrates themes Leonardo returned to throughout his career: the workings of light and vision; careful observation of the natural world; the emotional interaction between figures; and the depiction of ideal beauty.
Virgin of the Rocks (I)
Leonardo’s meeting of Jesus and John the Baptist is innovative, with its naturalistic poses, interaction between figures, evocative landscape and diffuse light. Intended for the church of San Francesco Grande, Milan, this 1483–86 work was instead sent to France, and is now displayed in the Louvre.
Virgin of the Rocks (II)
This second incarnation, begun c1492, did end up in the San Francesco Grande, but is today at the National Gallery, London. It is not as highly regarded as the Louvre version: parts may be by his assistants, and the faces are not so delicate.
The Last Supper
This wall painting in the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, allowed Leonardo to explore how the body communicates inner states of being. The disciples, devastated by Christ stating one of them would cause his death, convey their feelings dramatically through their body language. Commissioned in the 1490s by the Duke of Milan, the huge painting is 4.6m × 8.8m. It deteriorated quickly and has been damaged several times, leading to many restoration attempts.
The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne
Mary, her mother and child are arranged in a dynamic composition that shows both Christ’s lineage and his destiny – the lamb symbolises his Passion, the final days before his crucifixion. Leonardo worked on this painting from the early 1500s.
Salvator Mundi
Leonardo’s c1500 Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) was thought to be lost. Experts don’t agree on whether this recently discovered painting is entirely by Leonardo’s hand, but some say the orb is too skilfully painted to have been the work of anyone else.
Saint John the Baptist
Painted a few years before the artist’s death in 1519, this rejects the traditional depiction of the saint as a gaunt ascetic. Leonardo’s painting, sometimes interpreted as homoerotic, shows an androgynous youth with an enigmatic smile pointing to heaven.
Lady with an Ermine
A portrait of the Duke of Milan’s mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, c1490. It displays the court’s interest in ideal beauty, but Leonardo also introduces psychological realism and a more dynamic pose than the traditional profile format. The ermine symbolises both chastity and lust.
This gallery first appeared in BBC History Magazine's 2019 Leonardo da Vinci Special Edition
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Your guide to Leonardo da Vinci: his life, inventions and milestones in his career]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/leonardo-da-vincis-genius-visions-future-sketches/ 2024-10-17T20:54:24.000Z 2021-03-30T03:05:00.000Z More than five centuries after his death, Leonardo da Vinci’s legacy lives on in creations such as the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper – two of the most recognisable works of art in existence. As well as being a talented painter, however, Leonardo was also a skilled scientist and engineer with an incredible range of interests. In this comprehensive guide to Leonardo da Vinci, art historian Maya Corry explores eight of the most important chapters in Leonardo’s professional life – from his boyhood apprenticeship in Florence to his final years as a fêted figure in the court of the king of France. Also, Marina Wallace explores seven of Leonardo da Vinci's most forward-thinking ideas and inventions – from the telescope to the flying machine…
Follow the links below to jump to each section:
- Leonardo da Vinci: a brief biography
- Timeline: Leonardo da Vinci's rise to success
- 7 of Leonardo da Vinci's visions for the future
Leonardo da Vinci: a brief biography
Leonardo da Vinci was born in Vinci, Tuscany in 1452, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a young peasant. Little is known of his childhood, but his artistic talent must have been apparent at an early age for, at 14, he was apprenticed to one of the most well-known Florentine workshops of the day: that of painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio.
In 1482, now an artist in his own right, da Vinci moved from Florence to Milan in search of new work. There, he began working as a military engineer for Ludovico Sforza, future Duke of Milan, designing many of his famous war inventions. It was also during his time in the city that da Vinci created one of his most famous works, The Last Supper.
Da Vinci spent 17 years in Milan, painting, sculpting and recording new inventions and scientific and anatomical observations in a series of notebooks. But in 1499, the French invasion of the city brought his employment with Sforza to an end and da Vinci spent several years travelling around Italy working on a variety of projects. Among these was the Mona Lisa, a painting believed to have been started in 1503, and The Virgin and Child with St Anne (1510).
Da Vinci spent his final years at the Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, France, in the employment of the French king, Francis I. He died there, on 2 May 1519, at the age of 67.
After his death, da Vinci’s unpublished manuscripts, full of ideas and observations, were first neglected and later dispersed, with many pages disappearing forever. But in the 20th century, scholars and restorers began to recover and interpret what texts survived. Thanks to them, we can now appreciate the activity of one of the most extraordinary minds the world has ever known.
Da Vinci’s inquiring mind and relentless search for answers saw him make groundbreaking discoveries in engineering, science, anatomy and industry, often centuries before these ideas became widely accepted and put into practice.
Leonardo da Vinci’s rise to success: a timeline
What were the turning points in Leonardo da Vinci's long career? Art historian Maya Corry explores…
Leonardo moves to Florence – and an artist’s workshop
Around 1464, the young Leonardo went to Florence to live with his father. Although he did not have the full advantages of those born in wedlock, his illegitimacy was not a serious hindrance. While the church stridently condemned sex outside marriage, the realities of life, love and lust meant that many children were the result of such unions. Leonardo was welcomed into his father’s home, and Ser Piero provided for him just as he did for his legitimate offspring. The boy would have received a basic education, being taught to read, write and do sums.
At 12 years old, Leonardo reached the age when boys of his status started to learn a profession, but due to his illegitimacy he could not follow his father and become a notary. His artistic talent was perhaps already apparent by this time, for Ser Piero arranged for him to be apprenticed to the Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio. Apprenticeships lasted around six years and were often formalised with a contract. These listed the responsibilities of the master: to keep the lad fed, housed, clean and well-dressed, and to teach him all the skills necessary to succeed in his line of work. In return, the child promised to be diligent, honest and – in a sign of the unhappiness endured by some apprentices – not to run away.
Verrocchio was a prosperous painter and sculptor. He ran a busy workshop, a space for both living and working, in which he trained apprentices and employed assistants to help him produce the many works of art that his patrons commissioned. Initially, Leonardo would have risen early to light the fire, grind the pigments to make paint, prime panels and prepare all the materials needed for the day’s work. In time, he would have graduated to more skilled and important jobs, learning all that he needed to know along the way.
The apprentice blossoms into artistic maturity
Throughout the next years, Leonardo continued to work closely with Verrocchio, and by 1473 had likely graduated to the position of a paid collaborator. Successful Renaissance artists commonly employed assistants to help them complete large commissions, with several people often working on a single painting. Contracts sometimes specified how much of a picture was to be by the master’s own hand – the greater the proportion, the more expensive it was. He tended to be responsible for the most important parts, such as faces and main figures, with patrons happy to leave background details to assistants.
Verrocchio depended on this kind of arrangement to produce his Baptism of Christ altarpiece, on which at least three different artists worked. Giorgio Vasari, the great 16th-century writer on art, claimed that Leonardo contributed the left-hand angel in the painting, and that its great beauty prompted fierce jealousy in Verrocchio. Although Vasari wrote decades after the events and we have to take his words with a pinch of salt, many art historians nevertheless agree that the angel – and some parts of the landscape – were painted by the young artist.
By this point, Leonardo was also producing works of art that were entirely his own efforts, such as the Annunciation. This picture might have been his ‘masterpiece’: the work that proved he had mastered his profession and was eligible to join the painters’ guild. It shows the young Madonna interrupted in her reading by the arrival of Gabriel, winged like a bird of prey, who tells her she will give birth to the son of God. They appear in a beautiful garden, the ground strewn with flowers. In the background the vista fades away into misty mountains. Both the Virgin and angel are delicate beauties, in the same vein as the Baptism of Christ’s left-hand angel. In these early paintings, we can see themes that were to preoccupy Leonardo throughout his career: the workings of light and vision; emotional interaction between figures; the careful observation of the natural world; and the depiction of ideal beauty.
Leonardo proves his worth to the Duke of Milan
Around 1482, Leonardo left Tuscany and journeyed north to Milan, seeking the patronage of the city’s ruler, Ludovico Sforza. For ambitious artists, writers, scholars and musicians, there was nothing better than an official position at the court of a great lord or lady. It came with a salary, providing freedom from the usual pressure to hustle for commissions and stick to agreed deadlines.
- Read more about Leonardo da Vinci’s patrons
This was clearly an attractive prospect for Leonardo, and he presented himself to Ludovico with a hard sell. With a canny awareness of what would most appeal to the duke, he laid out his skills in a letter. First and foremost, he declared, he was a master of “instruments of war”, who could build ingenious weapons for Ludovico that would “cause terror to the enemy” (this was a time of almost constant conflict). Most of the letter is taken up with descriptions of these “secret” military inventions, but Leonardo also mentions the bronze equestrian monument Ludovico wished to erect in honour of his late father, Francesco, boasting that he would be able to make this “to the immortal glory and eternal honour… of the illustrious house of Sforza”.
Leonardo concluded by listing his other talents: in architecture, hydraulics, sculpture and, finally, painting. During the Renaissance, it was common for painters to have several strings to their bow. Many were also skilled in other fields, such as sculpture, metalwork, manuscript illumination or engineering. Some read classical texts and published learned treatises on these topics. Leonardo was not entirely unusual then, but the range of areas in which he claimed to be a master was broad, making him an attractive prospect to a ruler such as Ludovico.
Although the duke was rich he was not profligate and Leonardo did not secure the salary he coveted until 1489. In the meantime, he took on commissions such as the Virgin of the Rocks altarpiece. This shows the apocryphal meeting of the little cousins Christ and John the Baptist in a mysterious rocky landscape, watched over by the Virgin and an angel. The carefully arranged composition is suffused with a gentle light and sense of calm majesty, the figures united by gestures and gazes. The painting showcases his talents and was swiftly celebrated.
Leonardo's intimate court paintings break new ground
In July 1493, Leonardo noted that a woman named ‘Caterina’ had joined his household in Milan. This could have been a housekeeper, but it may be that after many years, he was finally reunited with his mother. This would have presumably brought additional happiness at a time of general prosperity and success for the artist, who had been given quarters in the Corte Vecchia, an old ducal palace. There he had a large workshop space, allowing him to build a huge model of the monument to Ludovico’s father. Included among the members of his workshop were young Milanese artists such as Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco d’Oggiono, as well as apprentices including Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, better known as Salaì. Under Leonardo’s influence, they produced numerous drawings and paintings of exquisite young men and women.
- Read more about the relationship between Leonardo and Salaì
Leonardo was fascinated by physical loveliness, but the activities of the workshop were also shaped by the tastes of the courtly circle that surrounded Ludovico. This included nobles, scholars, poets, musicians and physicians, many of whom were also interested in ideal beauty, and what it communicated about those who possessed it. Leonardo and Boltraffio (who was of noble blood) were welcomed into this world. Pleasurable time was passed debating the key intellectual questions of the day, and Leonardo was praised for his knowledge and verbal skill. During this period, he produced a number of portraits of members of the court: a musician who was probably his friend Atalante Migliorotti (Portrait of a Musician); the educated and erudite Cecilia Gallerani, Ludovico’s teenage mistress (Lady with an Ermine); and a self-possessed, dark-haired woman, possibly Lucrezia Crivelli (La Belle Ferronnière), pictured below.
In these paintings, Leonardo employed traditional methods of identifying a sitter – the musician, for example, holds a sheet of music – and potent symbolism. The ermine caressed by Cecilia represents both chastity and lust, and is a play on her name (the Greek word for ‘weasel’ is similar to Gallerani). But he also sought psychological realism, rejecting the more traditional profile format in favour of dynamic poses that highlight the life and movement of each sitter, and make viewing feel like a truly interactive experience. Contemporaries spoke with admiration of Leonardo’s ability to encapsulate an individual’s inner world in a single image. The court poet Bernardino Bellincioni wrote that the painted Cecilia “appears to be listening”, and that she would remain “alive and beautiful” for all eternity thanks to Leonardo’s skill.
A religious masterpiece is born
Relatively early in the 1490s, Leonardo received another major commission. He was asked to paint a mural of the Last Supper in the refectory of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where the ducal family often worshipped. The task of depicting Christ’s final meal with his disciples, when he revealed to them foreknowledge of his terrible betrayal and death, must have been exciting for Leonardo. It allowed him to explore visually his beliefs about how the body communicates inner states of being.
Fascination with this question drove both his artistic and scientific investigations, for it is impossible to clearly divide one from the other. Leonardo’s notes are full of assertions that the painter ought to be constantly aware of how the “motions of the mind” are visible in bodily movements, gestures and facial expressions. He even recorded the faces of passers-by that struck him as particularly interesting and animated. As ever, he wanted to comprehend the underlying mechanisms of these processes, and his skull studies also reveal a probing effort to understand how the intellect, or soul, is linked to the body’s physical apparatus.
The Last Supper gave Leonardo the opportunity to put his theories on display. Astonished and devastated by Christ’s announcement that one of them would cause his death, the disciples convey their feelings with fierce clarity through their body language. The Apostle James flings his arms out in shock, his face registering horror. John the Evangelist turns away from Jesus in pain, as St Peter grabs his knife and gestures in disbelief. Judas’s pose reveals his guilt: unlike the others, he does not gesture wildly or in sorrow, but simply turns to Christ in surprise and clutches to himself a bag of coins, the payment for his betrayal. Jesus is the calm centre of the composition, and our eyes are led inexorably to him by the spatial arrangement of the picture and its vanishing point.
While the subject of the picture was much to Leonardo’s liking, its size posed a challenge. He preferred to work slowly and delicately, but fresco painting had to be done quickly. To solve this problem, he developed a new method of applying the pigment, allowing him to move at his preferred pace. Over the years the duke became impatient with the slow progress of the painting, and Leonardo had to mollify him with promises that he was getting on with it. Ultimately, Ludovico was much pleased with the work, and he rewarded Leonardo with the gift of a vineyard near Porta Vercellina. The picture’s fame spread, although Leonardo’s experiments with the new way of applying the pigment soon caused it to begin to deteriorate.
From military architecture to the Mona Lisa
Having spent the previous year working as a military architect and engineer for Cesare Borgia, captain of the papal armies, in 1503 Leonardo sought a new patron. He wrote to the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II describing his prowess in hydraulics and engineering, and offering to build bridges: one “as high as a building, and even tall ships will be able to sail under it”; another “across the Bosporus to allow people to travel between Europe and Asia”. Nothing came of this overture and Leonardo, who was now 51, must have been frustrated by the loss of security and, above all, freedom that he had experienced since leaving Milan. He had to return to the world of the jobbing artist, bound by the terms of contracts, with his time spoken for.
Leonardo came to be employed by the Florentine republic to manage the diversion of the river Arno, and was commissioned to produce an enormous mural of the battle of Anghiari in the city’s Great Council Hall. The painting, in the seat of power where government was conducted, was to celebrate Florentine military prowess, and was intended to match another mural, of the battle of Cascina, by Michelangelo. The plan thus pitted the two great Tuscan artists against one another in direct competition. Leonardo’s surviving drawings for his mural reveal tangles of men and horses caught in the heat of battle. Faces contort with tension, rage and valour; as with The Last Supper, he wanted viewers to be immersed in the emotion of the scene. There is another similarity with The Last Supper: once more, Leonardo experimented with painting techniques, and once more he was not successful. The colours of the mural ran together, and parts were obscured.
- Read more about Leonardo and Michelangelo' rivalry and mutual inspiration
In the same year Leonardo began work on a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the merchant Francesco del Giocondo. He could not have known that this little painting, with its clever play on Lisa’s name – her smile indicating that she was giocondo (jocund) – would become the most famous work of art ever created.
Leonardo deepens his anatomical investigations
By 1510, Leonardo was settled in Milan and in receipt of a salary from the French king Louis XII, allowing him to focus his attentions on his own interests rather than a major commission. Probably working alongside Marcantonio della Torre, a professor of anatomy from the nearby University of Pavia, he had ready access to bodies for dissection. He started compiling a treatise on anatomy, beginning with the study of “a perfect man” and then discussing the bodies of an old man, an infant and a woman, taking in the development of the foetus in the womb. Leonardo also produced a series of drawings of the skeleton and musculature that remain breathtaking in their detail, clarity and beauty. They not only demonstrate his desire to reveal the body’s secrets, but also an extraordinary level of artistic innovation.
Partly thanks to his experience in architecture and engineering, Leonardo developed new methods of depicting the complexity of bodily systems and structures in two dimensions that communicate clearly with no loss of information. These included exploded and layered views, and sequential drawings in series. His anatomical work in this period was driven by empirical observation, but in his notes, we find references to the infinite wisdom of the twin creators, nature and God (“il maestro”), thanks to whom the internal workings of the body are organised so perfectly.
In these years the artist was accompanied by Francesco Melzi, a young Milanese nobleman who became a sort of adopted son to him (formal or informal adoptions were common in the Renaissance, often utilised by those who did not have a natural heir). When, in December 1511, warfare once again forced Leonardo to leave Milan, Melzi hosted him in his family’s villa at Vaprio d’Adda, Lombardy.
While staying in the Melzi villa, Leonardo reverted to his interest in the dissection of animals – a mainstay of anatomical investigation at a time when it was not always easy to access human bodies. His fervent desire to comprehend the workings of the heart are revealed in the copious notes and drawings he made of the heart of oxen, wherein he carefully observed the passage of blood through the valves.
Gathering a lifetime’s meditations
In 1516 Leonardo went to live in France, at the invitation of the new king Francis I. In 1517, he received a visit from Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona. The cardinal’s secretary recorded that, on a previous occasion, he had visited The Last Supper in Milan, which was “most excellent” but “beginning to deteriorate”. Now he encountered Leonardo, himself “an old man”, who showed them three paintings: a “Florentine woman done from life” (likely the Mona Lisa), Saint John the Baptist and a Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. All three were “most perfect”. It was unusual for an artist to keep paintings with him for such lengthy periods and not part with them, but the fact that Leonardo did so indicates the pictures’ importance to him. It was also convenient to have them ready to display to important guests of the king. Leonardo’s fame was well established by this point, and it would have been politically useful for Francis I to be able to bask in the reflected glory of being his patron.
Unfortunately Leonardo was no longer capable of painting owing to his age and infirmity. He still did some teaching, but mainly spent his working days organising his voluminous notes for publication. The cardinal’s secretary recalled being shown writings on machines and hydraulics and many anatomical drawings by Leonardo, who told them he had performed 30 dissections over his lifetime.
In peace and security, the artist concluded his final years, marshalling a lifetime’s work of meditation on the mysteries of life: the forces of nature; God’s movement in the universe; and the perfection of the human body and soul. His fascination with these weighty themes drove his activities in painting, sculpture, anatomy, natural science, architecture, optics and hydraulics.
Although today we consider the realms of art and science to be separate, this is not something that Leonardo and his Renaissance contemporaries would have acknowledged. Rather than seeking to compartmentalise his many spheres of activity, we come closer to Leonardo when we recognise the underlying interests that motivated and fuelled them all.
Maya Corry is an art historian at the University of Oxford, whose research is focused on early modern Italy. She is author of upcoming Beautiful Bodies: Spirituality, Sexuality and Gender in Leonardo’s Milan (OUP). This article first appeared in BBC History Magazine's Leonardo da Vinci Special Edition
7 of Leonardo da Vinci's visions for the future
Marina Wallace explores seven of Leonardo da Vinci's most forward-thinking ideas and inventions for BBC History Magazine – from the telescope to the flying machine…
Works of art
Drawing was, for da Vinci, primarily a learning exercise: a type of brainstorming on paper. Always keen to experiment with new techniques, da Vinci would make clay models, cover them with linen dipped in wet clay, and then draw from them. Black and white pigment was then applied with a brush as a way of executing studies in light and shade – known as chiaroscuro.
One of da Vinci’s most famous works, Mona Lisa, exemplifies the sfumato technique he is known for, where colours are blurred like smoke to produce softened outlines. In the words of da Vinci himself, “the eye does not know the edge of any body”.
Da Vinci was not afraid to adopt unorthodox methods in painting. In his c1498 work The Last Supper he rejected traditional fresco techniques of the day (pigment mixed with water and sometimes egg yolk on moist plaster). Instead, he experimented with other water and oil-based mediums in order to create his masterpiece.
Technical examination of panel paintings, such as his c1501 work Madonna of the Yarnwinder, has also revealed that da Vinci used strikingly complex underdrawings in his work. Spolvero marks (charcoal dust) have been discovered beneath several of his paintings, which confirms he used a cartoon – a full-size preparatory study for a painting transferred onto the panel via a method similar to tracing.
His use of hand- and fingerprints to blend shadows also distinguishes his paintings from those of his contemporaries, and his use of light influenced many artists after him. His unique way of viewing drawing as an investigative technique still influences artists, including Joseph Beuys who, in 1975, produced several conceptual works influenced by da Vinci’s manuscripts in the Codex Madrid (1490–1505).
Human Anatomy
Throughout his career da Vinci strove for accuracy in his anatomical drawings. Although most of these were based on studies of live subjects, they reveal his knowledge of the underlying structures observed by dissection. Da Vinci acquired a human skull in 1489, and his first documented human dissection was of a 100-year-old man, whose peaceful death he witnessed in a Florentine hospital in 1506.
Human dissection was tightly regulated by the church, which objected to what it saw as desecration of the dead. Nevertheless, da Vinci’s dissections were carried out openly in the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Among his drawings is an ink and chalk sketch of a baby in utero, probably made by dissecting a miscarried foetus and a woman who had died in childbirth.
Da Vinci perceived the workings of the human body to be a perfect reflection of engineering and vice versa. In 1508, his studies of hydrodynamics coincided with the study of the aortic valve and the flow of blood to the heart. He annotated instructions for wax casts and glass models of the aorta and recorded experiments with flowing water, using grass seeds to track the flow of ‘blood’. Through these experiments he observed that the orifice of a heart’s open valve is triangular and that the heart has four chambers.
Da Vinci’s anatomical discoveries weren’t widely disseminated, and it was another century before the rest of the world began to catch up: William Harvey didn’t publish his theories on the circulation of blood until 1628.
Study of Optics
A number of da Vinci’s manuscripts contain writings on vision, including important studies of optics as well as theories relating to shadow, light and colour. For da Vinci, the eye was the most important of the sense organs: “the window of the soul”, as he put it. We now know how the eye works, but in the artist’s time, sight was a mystery. To complicate matters further, the eye was a difficult organ to dissect. When cut in to, it collapses and the lens takes on a more spherical shape.
Da Vinci boiled his eye specimens, unknowingly distorting their lenses. After close examination he concluded that the eye was a geometrical body, comprising two concentric spheres: the outer “albugineous sphere”, and the inner “vitreous” or “crystalline sphere”. At the back of the eye, opposite the pupil, he observed, was an opening into the optic nerve by which images were sent to the imprensiva in the brain, where all sensory information was collated.
Leonardo da Vinci’s observations on the workings of the eye preceded Johannes Kepler’s fundamental studies in the 17th century on the inner working of human retina, convex and concave lenses, and other properties of light and astronomy.
And like Kepler a century later, da Vinci was also fascinated by his observations of celestial bodies. He stated: “The moon is not luminous in itself. It does not shine without the sun.” In his notes he includes a reminder to himself to construct glasses through which to see the moon magnified. Although da Vinci never built his telescope – the first example wasn’t created until 1608 – the initial idea was his.
Manned Flight
Da Vinci was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight. He felt that if he could arrive at a full understanding of how birds fly, he would be able to apply this knowledge to constructing a machine that allowed man to take to the skies. He attempted to combine the dynamic potential of the human body with an imitation of natural flight.
In his notes, da Vinci cites bats, kites and other birds as models to emulate, referring to his flying machine as the “great bird”. He made attempts at solving the problem of manned flight as early as 1478 and his many studies of the flight of birds and plans for flying machines are contained in his Codex on the Flight of Birds, 1505. He explored the mechanism of bird flight in detail, recording how they achieve balanced dynamism through the science of the motions of air.
One of the innovations da Vinci sketched out was an ornithopter, a bird-like system with a prone man operating two wings through foot pedals. For safety reasons he suggested that the machine should be tested over a lake and that a flotation device be placed under the structure to keep it from sinking if it fell into the water.
Da Vinci’s flight designs are not complete and most were impractical, like his sketch of an aerial screw design, which has been described as a predecessor of the helicopter. However, his hang glider has since been successfully constructed. After da Vinci, the 17th and 18th centuries witnessed several attempts at man-powered flight. The first rigorous study of the physics of flight was made in the 1840s by Sir George Cayley, who has been called the ‘father of aviation’.
Technical Drawing
Automation of industrial processes is often seen as a 19th-century concept, but da Vinci’s design for a file cutter shows the same idea. The operator turns a crank to raise a weight. After this the machine operates autonomously.
Some of da Vinci’s most modern-looking drawings are his studies of basic industrial machines. His best examples are designed to translate simple movement by the operator into a complex set of actions to automate a process. One particularly interesting device was for grinding convex mirrors, while his Codex Atlanticus shows a hoist that translates the backward and forward motion of a handle into the rotation of wheels to raise or lower weight. Next to simple drawings are exploded views (showing the order of assembly) to make the mechanism crystal clear.
The Codex Madrid, bound volumes with precise drawings concerning mainly the science of mechanisms, was rediscovered in 1966. Priority is given to the drawings, which are accompanied by a commentary or a caption. The care taken with the layout of each page and the finesse of the drawings indicates they are close to publishable form, either as a presentation manuscript or printed treatises. By showing component parts of machines in a clear fashion, da Vinci pioneered what was to come much later in the industrial age.
Almost all his industrial designs were proposals rather than inventions translated into concrete form. We might wonder how these could have revolutionised manufacturing had they been realised, but the real lesson da Vinci offers the world of science, mechanics, engineering and industry is less in his inventions and more in his highly innovative representational style and brilliantly drawn demonstrations.
Geology
Before da Vinci, very few scientists studied rocks trying to determine how they formed. The dominant belief about Earth science came from antiquity and Aristotle’s idea that rocks evolved over time, seeking to become perfect elements such as gold or mercury – a merging of geology with alchemy. Geological knowledge was based on the assumption that the Earth, surrounded by spheres of water, air and fire, was a divine creation. Deposits of fossils were thought to have been laid down by ‘the deluge’ (biblical flood) or to be of miraculous origin.
Da Vinci noted that fossils were too heavy to float: they could not have been carried to high ground by flood waters. Observing how in places there were several layers of fossils, he reasoned that such phenomena could not be the result of a single event. He observed layers of fossils in mountains high above sea level, concluding that the landscape was formed by repeated flooding and the erosive powers of water.
He wrote about his observations of rocks: “Drawn by my eager desire, wishing to see the great manifestation of the various strange shapes made by formative nature, I wandered some way among gloomy rocks, coming to the entrance of a great cavern, in front of which I stood for some time, stupefied and incomprehending such a thing.” In drawings such as A Deluge, and paintings such as the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks, da Vinci captures his sense of mystery and wonder, replacing the divine with observation and physical explanations.
It was not until the 1830s that scientists including Charles Lyell and then Charles Darwin became convinced that the surface of Earth changes over time only slowly and gradually, not by sudden catastrophic events such as the biblical flood.
Engineering
Da Vinci’s extraordinary inventiveness led him to attempt to solve complex technical problems, such as transmitting motion from one plane onto another using intricate arrays of gears, cams, axles and levers. He was the first to design separate components that could be deployed in a variety of devices, ranging from complex units such as the gears for barrel springs and ring bearings for axles to simple hinges. His mechanics included levers, cranes and ball bearings. As we’ve already noted, he drew such devices with great attention to reality, knowing that drawings needed to be amplified with designs of the individual parts.
Da Vinci’s genius as an engineer lay in seeing clearly how design must be informed by the mathematical laws of physics rather than just practice. He undertook military, civil, hydraulic, mechanical and architectural engineering, first applying his talents aged 30, when he was employed in Milan by Ludovico Sforza as a military engineer, an occupation he held for many years. Da Vinci designed instruments for war, including catapults and other weapons, and had ideas for submarines and machine guns.
For Sforza, da Vinci designed several bridges, including a revolving bridge for use by armies on the move. With wheels, a rope-and-pulley system and a counterweight tank for balance, it could be packed away and transported. Some of his famous designs, such as the ‘tank’, were not practical devices but technological musings aimed at a patron. His civil engineering projects, meanwhile, included geometry studies and designs of canals and churches with domes.
Da Vinci’s innovative attitude about how things work made him a pioneer in what later became the science of mechanics.
Marina Wallace was a director of the Universal Leonardo project, which aimed to deepen understanding of da Vinci. Her most recent book is 30-Second Leonardo da Vinci (Ivy Press, 2018)
This article was first published in the May 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Mona Lisa heist: how do you steal the world's most famous painting?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/mona-lisa-heist-steal-da-vinci-painting/ 2025-02-14T14:31:59.000Z 2020-08-21T03:05:00.000Z In 1911, the Mona Lisa shot to global stardom when she became the victim of one the most daring art heists in history. Overnight, the famed painting by Leonardo da Vinci seemingly disappeared into thin air – and the police were baffled.
Modernist enemies of traditional art were suspected of the crime, with the finger of blame pointed at avant-garde poet and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire (who was arrested and then released) as well as Pablo Picasso.
For two years the whereabouts of the painting remained a mystery. Then in November 1913, the thief – a petty criminal named Vincenzo Peruggia – contacted a Florentine art dealer and offered to bring him the painting for a reward of 500,000 lire.
Who stole the Mona Lisa in 1911?
Peruggia had moved to Paris in 1908 and had worked at the Louvre for some time. Dressed in a white smock worn by Louvre employees, he had hidden inside the gallery until it closed for the night. He then removed the painting from its frame and strolled out with it hidden under his smock when the museum opened as usual the following morning.
The theft was genius in its simplicity – Peruggia, in his regulation smock, had attracted no notice and was out of the area by the time the theft was realised. His reason for the theft? Peruggia believed that the painting had been stolen from Florence by Napoleon and that he was simply returning it to its true home in Italy.
- Read more | A beginner's guide to art history
He was arrested, but served just eight months in prison thanks to a sympathetic Italian tribunal and a psychiatrist who testified that he was “intellectually deficient”. Much rejoicing accompanied Mona Lisa’s return to Paris, while Peruggia became something of a hero to the Italian people, receiving love letters and cakes from female fans whilst in prison.
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This content first appeared in the Christmas 2018 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]> Emily Brand <![CDATA[Who was the Mona Lisa?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/who-was-mona-lisa-woman-in-leonardo-da-vinci-painting/ 2025-02-12T13:13:40.000Z 2019-08-01T09:45:00.000Z With Leonardo da Vinci himself making no mention of the work, a string of possible sitters for the Mona Lisa have since been identified – including, bizarrely, da Vinci himself in drag – but it seems likely to immortalise Lisa del Giocondo (nee Gherardini), the wife of a Florentine cloth merchant.
- Read more | A beginner's guide to art history
Although by no means conclusive, details about the family and the painting itself offer some clues. A middle-class couple with aspirations to wealth and status, at around the time it was commissioned they celebrated both the purchase of their own house and the arrival of a son – both events worth commemorating.
The painting’s alternative title, ‘La Gioconda’, may even allude to both to the model and her famous expression, being not only the feminine form of Lisa’s married name but translated roughly as ‘the happy one’.
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This article was taken from the May 2015 issue of BBC History Revealed
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