The Universal Man
Leonardo characterises the spirit of the Renaissance: he spent his life in the pursuit of knowledge, and was as revered for his vast intellect as he was for his astonishing skill as an artist.
Leonardo da Vinci was not only one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, but also perhaps the most versatile genius who ever lived. His interests embraced virtually every field of study then known. Anatomy and geology were two of his passions, and his great dream was man-powered flight. But his perfectionism meant that he finished comparatively few Major paintings.
Leonardo was born near Florence, but the scene of his most ambitious undertakings was Milan. He spent his last years in France as the guest of King Francis I, revered as no previous artist had been. Although so many of his projects were unfulfilled, his marvellous drawings are eloquent testimony to the power of his incomparably inventive mind.
Vinci in Italy, birthplace of Leonardo
Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 in or near the little town of Vinci, nesting amongst the slopes of Monte Albano and a day’s journey from the glittering city of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of a rising Florentine legal official, Ser Piero da Vinci. Although little is known of Leonardo’s mother, Caterina, the bow was acknowledged cheerfully by Ser Piero and was brought up by him and Leonardo’s step-mother.
Virtually nothing is known of Leonardo’s childhood, though biographers have speculated on the theme of the young Leonardo in the green Tuscan countryside, acquiring his lifelong fascination with nature.
Tuscany, Italy
Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 in or near the little town of Vinci, nesting amongst the slopes of Monte Albano and a day’s journey from the glittering city of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of a rising Florentine legal official, Ser Piero da Vinci. Although little is known of Leonardo’s mother, Caterina, the bow was acknowledged cheerfully by Ser Piero and was brought up by him and Leonardo’s step-mother.
Virtually nothing is known of Leonardo’s childhood, though biographers have speculated on the theme of the young Leonardo in the green Tuscan countryside, acquiring his lifelong fascination with nature.
Certainly he began drawing and painting at an early age. According to the 16th century artist and art historian Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo’s work so impressed his father that he took samples into Florence to show his friend Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the leading artists of the day.
Verrocchio was also enthusiastic, and Ser Piero enrolled his teenage son in the master’s busy workshop. Verrocchio’s workshop, like that of other major artists, was something of a cross between an art school and a design studio. Apprentices such as Leonardo worked their way up from sweeping floors to mixing colours to helping out in the production of commissioned paintings. Leonardo had reached this stage by the age of 20, when Verrocchio gave him responsibility for painting one of the angels in The Baptism of Christ.
Verrocchio: The Baptism of Christ
Leonardo’s angel (on the left) radiated his youthful genius. Vasari wrote that Verrocchio ‘never touched colours again, he was so ashamed that the boy understood their use better than he did’. Whether the story is true or not, it is easy to see the superiority of the pupil’s work over that of the master.
Leonardo had ‘graduated’, and became a master of the painters’ Guild of St Luke, which allowed him to set up as an independent painter. But he remained based at Verrocchioi’s until the late 1470s.
Leonardo had learned much in the years he spent at his master’s studio, and not all of it from Verrocchio. Florence in the 15th century was one of the great cultural centres of the world, and Leonardo would have come into contact with many of the scholars whose new ideas and learning were shaping the intellectual climate of Renaissance Italy. Most importantly of all, he would have known the renowned mathematician, geographer and astronomer Paolo Toscanelli.
Paolo Toscanelli
The image is from a 19th century monument in the Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence. As Florence’s most celebrated scholar, Toscanelli was sure to include among his house guests the best and brightest that passed through the city.
Somewhere about this time, Leonardo became a vegetarian. It was one of many ways in which he seemed to distance himself from his contemporaries. Not that he was a recluse – according to Vesari, Leonardo’s disposition was so lovable that he commanded everyone’s affection’, and there are many other accounts of his good looks and charm, as well as his quirky sense of humour that gave him a lifelong taste for practical jokes. Yet he always had a deep distrust of human society: ‘Alone, you are all yourself,’ he wrote, ‘with a companion you are half yourself.’
The first years of Leonardo’s life as a fully-fledged artist coincided with the rise of supreme power in Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici - ‘il Magnifico’.
Lorenzo de’ Medici
He ruled the prosperous city-state with shrewd self-interest, and like many members of his family had cultivated tastes. Yet Leonardo received little of the lavish patronage which abounded in Florence at the time: though he sketched obsessively, in the years he remained in Florence after leaving Verrocchio’s studio, he executed – as far as is known – only a handful of paintings. The most important of these, The Adoration of the Magi, was left unfinished.
Leonardo: The Adoration of the Magi
Part of the reason for this surprising lack of official work was that Leonardo, talented though he was, had probably already gained a reputation for not delivering his commissions. Once he had solved the problem of composition, he tended to lose interest and was ready to move on to the next intellectual challenge.
But he also had more worldly things on his mind. In 1476, he was twice accused of the crime of sodomy, though both charges were dismissed through lack of evidence. It may well be that he was homosexual – he never married, and later in life usually contrived to have a young man or two about him – but it seems more likely that there was little room in his life for sexual relationships with either men or women. He distrusted passion of any sort other than intellectual.
And Leonardo's intellectual pursuits were widespread to say the least. Although he despised the violent politics of Medici’s Florence, he spent a fair amount of his time in the late 1470s designing a whole army of murderous engines, including a primitive machine gun.
Leonard da Vinci Machine Gun
He was soon to use his ingenuity in this field in an attempt to gain favour – and employment – from one of Medici’s rivals, Ludovico Storza, the ruthless Duke of Milan. Around 1482, Leonardo left Florence and travelled to this modern city in search of work.
His Milanese career got off to a slow start, but in 1483 he received an important commission from the Church of San Francesco Grande. The church’s prior may have heard of Leonardo’s reluctance to complete a piece of work for he drew up a lengthy contract which specified a seven-month deadline. He could have saved himself the trouble as the painting – The Virgin of the Rocks – was not delivered for another 25 years.
Leonardo: The Virgin of the Rocks
This is the earlier of two versions of the subject that Leonardo painted. The strange rocks that create the grotto setting are a common feature in Leonardo’s work. He was passionately interested in geology, which to him was part of the mystery of creation.
While work was beginning on The Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo was already thinking about another – as yet only imagined – work of art. He knew that Duke Ludovico intended to honour his brigand father with a massive equestrian statue, and was determined to gain the commission. He sent the Duke an extraordinary letter in which he outlined his prowess as a military inventor and engineer.
Among other startling claims, he declared that he could make bridges that were ‘indestructible’ by fire and battle’, and ‘chariots safe and unassailable’. Almost as an afterthought, he offered his services as an architect, a sculptor and a painter.
Many of these claims reached the drawing board:
Leonardo design for a bicycle
Revolving Transportable Platform
Flywheel
And many more.
Leonardo’s efforts had the desired effect. In 1483, he was allowed to begin work on the Great Horse. His projected statue was an immense undertaking. Innovative as always, Leonardo was unwilling to produce the usual static sculpture: he set himself the seemingly impossible task of creating a 26 foot high rearing horse. Such a feet had never been achieved before, and much time was needed to solve the problem.
Leonardo's drawing of Horse
But Ludovico Sforza was not a patient man, and by 1498 he was writing to Florence in search of another sculptor who could get the work done more quickly. Meanwhile Leonardo made himself a kind of Master of Revels at the Duke’s court, designing stage machinery and amusing mechanical toys. When no sculptor could be found to take on the Great Horse project, Leonardo was authorized to resume work on it. By November 1493, the full-sized clay model was complete. All that was needed was for Sforza to assemble the 90-odd tons of bronze required for its casting.
Leonardo's Great Horse
But Leonardo's Great Horse was never cast in bronze. This one was designed and built in America and dedicated in Milan on September 10 1999.
While he was waiting for the bronze, Leonardo began work on a huge mural of The Last Supper for the nearby monastery church of Santa Maria dell Grazie. Its brilliance was indisputable, and even before it was finished, it drew many admiring pilgrims to the monastery. But Leonardo had used a disastrously experimental technique and within a few years his masterpiece was peeling off the damp wall of the monastery’s refectory.
Leonardo: The Last Supper
The Painting Restored
But at the time neither Leonardo nor his contemporaries knew what lay in store. At 42, he was at the peak of his career, admired and respected by all. He had his own school of apprentices, and had never been busier. Perhaps he fretted when he heard that Ludovico had sent the bronze once destined for the Great Horse to his embattled brother-in-law to make cannons. But their were brighter things to think of.
He had acquired a protégé – a young boy - ‘with lovely hair and lovely curls and well-shaped eyes and mouth, known as Salai. And he was writing his Treatise on Painting, a huge work which was to influence artists for centuries to come.
Leonardo’s notebooks were filling rapidly, crammed with sketches and comments written in his precise, mirror-image hand. He could see nothing without wanting to study it: birds, plants, the movement of water. Above all he became passionately interested in human anatomy, and increasingly involved with the grim but fascinating business of dissection. And what did not exist to observe, he could imagine. During these years came the first flood of inventive design ideas – a submarine, a tank, even a helicopter.
Leonardo continued to shower his patron with grandiose proposals for great works of architecture and civil engineering. He took up town planning and produced a massive scheme for the rebuilding of all Milan, with airy boulevards and an impeccable sewage system. But Ludovico was rarely interested: by the end of the century, he was struggling to keep control of the city. In 1499, Milan fell to Louis XII of France.
Ludovico Sforza
With Ludovico and his court gone, there was nothing to keep Leonardo in Milan, and he left the city. But he had stayed just long enough to see the entry of Louis’ army, and the destruction of a personal dream. For during a weak of drunken plunder, the French archers had found his huge clay model, and used it for target practice. His Great Horse was in ruins.
Leonardo: Study of horse anatomy
Accompanied by Sali, now a young man of about 20, Leonardo travelled east to Venice. He stayed only a few months, and soon turned his steps southwards to Florence, the home he had not seen for 18 years. In the interim, his reputation had rocketed, and he was received with respect, but it seems that he was not ready to settle in Florence. In 1502 he left the city, enlisting in the service of the infamous Cesare Borgia.
For Borgia was engaged in conquests in central Italy, and he needed a military engineer. Leonardo was the perfect choice – for apart from being the best brain in Italy, his respectability and renown would lend some credibility to Cesare’s treacherous court. So for a few months in 1502-3, Leonardo wandered around Italy inspecting fortifications – and then suddenly shrugged off his connection with Borgia. He returned to Florence to live as an artist again.
It was a productive period for Leonardo. Around this time he produced the most celebrated of all his works - the Mona Lisa.
But the other major work of this period turned out to be another technical disaster. In 1504, the government of Florence commissioned Leonardo to paint an epic picture of The Battle of Anghiari, to glorify an encounter in a war with Milan some 60 years before.
Leonardo: The Battle of Anghiari
As with The Last Supper, Leonardo used an experimental technique, the ruinous effects of which soon became obvious. The Florentines demanded that he either repair the painting or refund the payments they had made.
Typically, Leonardo ignored the demands. He was living in his villa in nearby Fiesol, drawing and sketching industriously, and was only rescued from some sort of legal action by the arrival of a gracious summons from the French Viceroy in Milan, Charles d’Amboise.
D’Amboise had no authority in the Florentine Republic, but the city had enemies enough without making more. So the Florentines parted with their artist, who was rapturously received in Milan. Anatomy became Leonardo’s ruling passion once more: he was certain that his work be of lasting benefit to humanity, and pushed himself accordingly.
But his life was not all work. In 1508, he found himself another protégé, a handsome young man named Francesco Melzi, whom he went so far as to adopt as his son. Perhaps, if it had been up to Leonardo, he would have passed the remainder of his life in Milan. But in 1512 an improbable alliance between the Swiss, the Spaniards, the Venetians and the papacy contrived to expel the French from Milan and install as Duke the son of Ludovico Storza. Leonardo's comfortable world at the Viceroy's court had been shattered. At 61 years of age, he packed up his belongings, and – accompanied by Salai and Melzi – set off for Rome.
A new pope had just been elected – Leo X, the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Leonardo had some hopes of exiting new commissions, and appears to have been in good spirits at first. But the pope had little time for him: Leonardo was yesterday’s man now with a string of uncompleted works and grandiose failures behind him. So when Francis I, successor to Louis XII of France, offered him a gentler oblivion as an honoured pensioner in a manor house close to the royal palace at Amboise, Leonardo accepted and moved to France.
Palace (now the Château) d’Amboise
Ageing, frail, and with his left hand partially paralysed by a stroke, Leonardo fussed over his manuscripts, preparing them in a half-hearted way for publication. In one of his notebooks he had written: ‘As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well-used brings happy death.’ And quietly, on May 2 1519, a few weeks after his 67th birthday, Leonardo da Vinci died. The world had lost perhaps its most universal genius.
The bedroom where Leonardo da Vinci died
Leonardo: Arno Landscape
This pen drawing of the Arno valley is dated 1473. The artist’s first dated work, it was executed when he was 21 and working in Florence.
Although the fame of Andrea del Verrocchio has been overshadowed by that of his most brilliant pupil, Leonardo, he was a major artist in his own right. At the time when Leonardo entered his busy workshop, Verrocchio was the principle sculptor in Florence, and one of the most sought after artists in all Italy.
Trained as a goldsmith, Verrocchio’s work is marked by its exquisite craftsmanship. And although he practised mainly as a sculptor, he also excelled in engraving and painting. His reputation attracted some of the most promising young artists to his studio, including Piero Perugino who later became the master of the great painter Raphael.
Piero Perugino
The two sculptures by Verrocchio (see below) show the two different ‘types’ of men, which also appear in Leonardo’s art.
The Collioni Monument, Venice
Here, brute power and restrained energy emanate from the statue,
emphasised by the rider’s sneering face with its deep cut lines and furrowed brow.
Andrea del Verrocchio: David
Milan Cathedral
Leonardo spent over 20 years of his life in Milan. Although it boasted the largest cathedral in the country, the city lagged far behind Florence in both architecture and culture. But it was immensely rich, with thriving textile and arms industries.
Leonardo made hundreds of sheets of drawings that display the universal nature of his interests. He used them primarily as an aid to scientific research, although their preoccupations are often reflected in his paintings. They were usually accompanied by observations in his famous mirror writing.
Leonardo: Proportions of the Human Figure
This famous drawing illustrates a passage from a Roman treatise on architecture, in which man is shown to be ‘the measure of all things’.
Leonardo idea for a flying machine
Leonardo spent more than 20 years of his life trying to devise a way for man to fly. He studied the flight of birds, bats and even insects, and invented a variety of ingenious machines. One of his most incredible contributions was the ‘aerial screw’ - or helicopter – based on contemporary whirligig tows.
Leonardo made several drawings of ideal churches, none of which were ever built. He clearly delighted in playing elaborate games with geometric shapes.
Leonardo mortar bomb design
Leonardo designed a whole range of war machines for Ludovico Sforza, including these deadly mortar bombs. The holes in the mortars meant that they exploded into fragments – a horribly practical idea. Leonardo assured Ludovico that if bombardment should fail he could ‘contrive endless means of defence and offence’.
Leonardo: Anatomical studies
When he was in his last years, Leonardo claimed that he had dissected over 30 bodies of men and women of all ages. He recorded his findings with scientific accuracy and even planned a treatise on anatomy. His researches include an analysis of the human nervous system and a study of the position of the foetus in the womb.
Francesco Melzi
Francesco was a son of an aristocrat that met Leonardo when he was 15 and stayed with him almost his whole life. Upon Leonardo’s death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts and collections of Leonardo, and would henceforth faithfully administer the estate. Returning to Italy, Melzi married, and fathered a son, Orazio. When Orazio died, his heirs sold the collection of Leonardo’s works.
Clos-Lucé
Leonardo spent his final years in the manor house of Clos-Lucé in the Loire valley of France. The house is now a Leonardo museum.
The Death of Leonardo da Vinci
This imaginative reconstruction was painted by the 19th century master Ingres. It shows the artist dying in the arms of King Frances I of France – an indication of the status which Leonardo had achieved.
As a painter, Leonardo wanted to represent not only appearances but also feelings - ‘the motions of the Mind’. This approach changed the status of the great artist from craftsman to genius.
In his Lives of the Artists, first published in 1550, Giorgio Vasari wrote that Leonardo's 'name and fame will never be extinguished'. The claim has been born out by posterity, for Leonardo is one of the few artists whose reputation has never wavered from his own lifetime to the present day. His contemporaries thought his talent was little less than divine, and in the centuries since his death, painters, poets and philosophers have looked to him as a shining example of the heights to which the human mind and spirit can attain.
Leonardo: The Madonna of the Carnation
Leonardo’s surviving artistic output seems a remarkably thin platform for such a widespread and lustrous fame. Scarcely a dozen paintings are universally accepted as being from his own hand, and of these several are unfinished or damaged.
Leonardo’s achievement, then, is of an altogether exceptional kind, for although he began comparatively few major works, and finished even fewer, he has imposed himself on the consciousness of artists and critics (and even the general public) in a way that only a handful of other cultural giants can match.
This seeming paradox is explained not simply by the wonderful quality of the few paintings Leonardo did bring to fruition, but also by the revolution in attitudes towards art that he brought about. Virtually single-handed, Leonardo created the idea of the artist as genius. Earlier painters had achieved wealth, fame and position, but they were still regarded essentially as craftsmen, for in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance the visual arts were not considered to be on the same intellectual plane as literature or music.
Medieval Book
Leonardo: Portrait of a Musician
This unfinished picture is Leonardo’s only surviving male portrait. The attribution to Leonardo is disputed by some authorities, but the exquisitely curling hair, elegant fingers and air of intellectual intensity are worthy of the master. Leonardo himself was a skilful musician.
To Leonardo, the art of painting lay as much in the head as in the hands, and after him it was no longer possible to judge a painting by the costliness of its materials than it was to judge a piece of music by the number of notes it contained, or a poem by its number of words.
Leonardo believed that painting was superior to any other art, and he presented his case ingeniously; people make pilgrimages to see great paintings, he argued, but no-one travels miles to read a poem. And to him the clinching argument in favour of the visual arts was that anyone would rather lose his hearing than his sight. He thought that painting was superior to sculpture because sculpture involves hard, noisy and messy physical labour, while the painter could wear fine clothes and listen to music or poetry as he worked.
Although Leonardo spent much of his time working on sculptural projects, there is no surviving piece of sculpture that is unquestionably from his hand. The marvellously spirited bronze horse and rider (above) has the best claim to be considered an authentic work by him. It has an energy and a mastery of equine anatomy typical of Leonardo, and is related in style to his Battle of Anghiari mural.
Leonardo’s fascination with the intellectual problems of art is one reason why his drawings so outnumber his paintings. He believed that a painter should express two principle realities: man and ‘the motions of his mind’. The first part – the naturalistic representation of appearances – was, to Leonardo, straightforward; the second part – the revelation of character through gesture and expression – was more difficult.
Once Leonardo had solved the problem of composition and characterization in his drawings, completing the job – the mere exercise of technical skill – held little appeal. He infuriated his paymasters by putting things off, and his failure to complete The Virgin on the Rocks for the church in Milan that had commissioned it led to a law suit.
But when he could bring himself to finish a picture, Leonardo outshone even the greatest of his contemporaries. Oil painting was at that time a fairly new technique in Italy and Leonardo was one of the first great masters of it. To a profoundly thoughtful worker like him, slow-drying oil paints were the ideal medium, allowing him to make infinitely subtle gradations of tone and to paint details such as plants and rocks with an exquisite precision that would gladden the heart of a botanist or a geologist.
Leonardo wanted to attain the same beauty of finish when he painted murals, so he rejected the time-honoured fresco technique, which demanded rapid execution. His experiments to find a suitable alternative were disastrous; The Last Supper (see above), painted in a kind of tempera, began to peel off the wall in his lifetime, and The Battle of Anghiari ran down the wall when the paint failed to dry (he was trying to imitate a technique described by the Roman righter Pliny).
With the exception of The Battle of Anghiari, almost all Leonardo’s paintings were either religious subjects or portraits. But his drawings cover an astonishing range of subjects, for he used them not only as preparation for his paintings, but also as an essential tool in his scientific work. He was the most prolific draftsman of his time and used a wide variety of media, notably pen, chalk and silverpoint, in which the artist draws with a fine silver wire on specially prepared paper. The silver produces extraordinarily delicate lines, but the technique needs great sureness as erasure is impossible.
Leonardo: Head of a Young Woman
Leonardo was left-handed and the silverpoint drawing above shows his distinctive left-handed shading. A right-handed artist instinctively shades with lines going from right down to left, but a left-handed draftsman shades in reverse.
The sheer variety of Leonardo’s interests was the main reason why he finished so little in his primary vocation of painting. Apart from his manifold scientific pursuits, he was also a sculptor and an architect. No work that is indisputably his survives in either medium, but his ideas and expertise were important in both fields.
Leonardo Architectural Idea
Leonardo’s influence was spread significantly by his writings. His notes were gathered together and published as his Treatise on Painting in 1651, but they had wide circulation even before then. The few paintings that he left to posterity (or that survived long enough to be copied and recopied) had an unprecedented effect on succeeding artists. Indeed, Leonardo’s influence has been so great that it is harder to think of major painters who do not owe something to him than of those who do.
The Making of a Masterpiece
The Last Supper
The Last Supper was painted for the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria dell Grazie in Milan. Leonardo probably took about three years to complete the work. The time-honoured method for wall-painting was fresco, but Leonardo rejected that for a more flexible technique using paints that would normally be applied to a wooden panel. The process proved unstable and the painting soon began to peel off the wall.
A study for St James
Leonardo made several elegant drawings for individual heads in The Last Supper, and this red chalk study for St James the Greater (fifth from the right in the painting) is one of the finest. In the lower part of the sheet there is an architectural study – Leonardo’s mind was always wondering on.
One of Leonardo’s preliminary drawings for The Last Supper (above) shows that he originally thought of separating Judas from the other figures on the near side of the table, but then he rejected this as too crude.
Leonardo has arranged the twelve disciples into four groups of three. The composition is so skilful and fluent that it is rarely noticed that he has taken liberties with the spacing. The disciples are so tightly packed that they could not possibly all have been sitting down together.
‘That figure is most praiseworthy which by its action best conveys the passions of the soul.’
Leonardo da Vinci
The Last Supper was a highly appropriate theme for a dining-room and was often chosen for the refectory of a monastery. The refectory at Santa Maria dell Grazie was newly built when Leonardo painted his mural, which covers one of the end walls of the place.
Picture Exhibition
The Annunciation
There is no documentary evidence concerning this painting, but it is of such high quality that most authorities consider it one of Leonardo’s early masterpieces, probably painted soon after he became a master in the painters’ guild of Florence. The exquisite carpet of flowers reveals Leonardo’s love of botanical detail, and the angel’s wings are, with typical scientific curiosity, modelled on those of a bird.
Ginevra de’ Benci
Leonardo probably painted this picture to mark the wedding of Ginevra de’ Benci, the daughter of a friend. The foliage framing her head is that of a juniper tree (in Italian ‘ginepra’) - a punning reference to her name. The subject looks somewhat sullen, but Leonardo conveys great individuality of personality.
Lady with an Ermine
This wonderfully graceful portrait probably represents Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza. An ermine was one of Ludovico’s emblems, and the Greek word for the creature - ‘galen’ - is a pun on Cecilia’s surname. Her attentive gaze and the ermine’s predatory expression are painted with equal skill.
The Virgin and Child and St Anne and John the Baptist
For several years Leonardo was intrigued by this subject, which presented a great challenge to his skill in grouping figures. This wonderfully tender chalk drawing was a preparatory sketch for a painting that was never executed. He later did a similar painting (see below), but without the figure of St John.
The Virgin and Child with St Anne
This is Leonardo’s final version of a favourite them. Although unfinished, it has some breathtaking passages and shows Leonardo’s incomparable skill with sfumato – the blending of tones so subtly that they merge, in his own words, ‘without lines or borders in the manor of smoke’.
The Virgin on the Rocks
This is the second of two versions of the subject by Leonardo, but it is unclear why an artist who finished so little should repeat himself. He was still working on this picture in 1508, but it may have been started much earlier. Some parts may be by a studio assistant, but the finest passages are of superlative quality.
Mona Lisa
The portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine Merchant Francesco di Zanobi del Giocondo, is now so famous that it is hard to appreciate how original the pose and expression were in their naturalness and subtlety. Leonardo is said to have employed musicians and jesters to keep Mona Lisa amused as he worked.
1452-1519
Great pictures and interesting blog, it reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci saying: "Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail. For instance, experience shows us that the air must have darkness beyond it and yet it appears blue."
ReplyDeleteI tried to write a blog about him, hope you also like it: https://stenote.blogspot.com/2018/03/an-interview-with-leonardo.html