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"Luminous Art & Design :: Art & Artists"
Leonardo da Vinci :: Biography and Books"
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Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was an Italian artist and engineer mostly known for his paintings of Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and his journals with very advanced inventions of machines and drawings of human anatomy.
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Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452-1519) was an Italian scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, and writer. He is mostly known for the paintings of Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and the drawing of the Vitruvian Man.
Leonardo was born and raised near Vinci, the son of Ser Piero (a notary) and a peasant woman. Not much is known about his childhood. Leonardo started his education as a fourteen-year-old apprentice in the workshop of the most skilled artist of that time; Verrocchio. During his career Leonardo was employed by Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan (1482-1499), Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer in Florence (1500-1506) And François I of France (1515-1518) . It was at the manor house of royal Chateau Amboise that he spent the last three years of his life.
In his lifetime and during the next four hundred years, Leonardo was mostly known for his paintings, drawings and engineering of canal locks, cathedrals, and engines of war. Leonardo’s work used innovative techniques of painting and a detailed knowledge of anatomy, geology, light diffusion and botany.
His most famous drawing is the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body. As an artist he became master of anatomy and was given permission to dissect human corpses. This resulted in many drawings of the human skeleton and muscles, the heart and vascular systems, sex organs and more. He made one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in uterus.
Throughout Leonardo's life and travels, he made continual observations of the world around him and recorded everything in journals and notebooks (about 13,000 pages). Leonardo did not publish the contents of these notebooks and they were unknown until the 19th century. Most of the notebooks were written in mirror-image cursive. His notebooks consisted of things that were all well in advance of the recorded science. He made compositions for paintings, studies of faces and emotions, dissections, war machines and even helicopters, a hang glider, a calculator and the use of concentrated solar power. In 1496 he unsuccessfully tested a flying machine he had constructed. Unfortunately and because of the late discovery of the journals, his ideas were not of value to the development of science and technology.
In 1502, Leonardo made a drawing for a single span 240m long bridge that should span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus. Sultan Beyazid did not believe that this construction was possible and would not pursue the project. On 17 May 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.
Leonardo was already very famous during his lifetime, but the interest in him never decreased. People are still lining up to see his famous works, buying items which bear his drawings and speculating about his private life. A new interest in him was caused by the publishing of ‘The Da Vinci Code’, a book by Dan Brown in 2003.
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