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Biography: Leonardo VinciLeonardo was born on Apr. 15, 1452, near the town of Vinci, not far from Florence.
He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary, Piero da Vinci, and a young woman
named Caterina. His artistic talent must have revealed itself early, for he was soon
apprenticed (c.1469) to Andrea Verrocchio, a leading Renaissance master. In this versatile
Florentine workshop, where he remained until at least 1476, Leonardo acquired a variety
of skills. He entered the painters' guild in 1472, and his earliest extant works date
from this time. In 1478 he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the Palazzo
Vecchio in Florence. Three years later he undertook to paint the Adoration of the
Magi for the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto. This project was interrupted
when Leonardo left Florence for Milan about 1482. Leonardo worked for Duke Lodovico
Sforza in Milan for nearly 18 years. Although active as court artist, painting portraits,
designing festivals, and projecting a colossal equestrian monument in sculpture to the
duke's father, Leonardo also became deeply interested in nonartistic matters during
this period. He applied his growing knowledge of mechanics to his duties as a civil
and military engineer; in addition, he took up scientific fields as diverse as anatomy,
biology, mathematics, and physics. These activities, however, did not prevent him from
completing his single most important painting, The Last Supper.
With the fall (1499) of Milan to the French, Leonardo left that city to seek employment
elsewhere: he went first to Mantua and Venice, but by April 1500 he was back in Florence.
His stay there was interrupted by time spent working in central Italy as a mapmaker and
military engineer for Cesare Borgia. Again in Florence in 1503, Leonardo undertook several
highly significant artistic projects, including the Battle of Anghiari mural for the
council chamber of the Town Hall, the portrait of Mona Lisa, and the lost Leda and
the Swan. At the same time his scientific interests deepened: his concern with anatomy
led him to perform dissections, and he undertook a systematic study of the flight of birds.
Leonardo returned to Milan in June 1506, called there to work for the new French
government. Except for a brief stay in Florence (1507-08), he remained in Milan for
7 years. The artistic project on which he focused at this time was the equestrian
monument to Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, which, like the Sforza monument earlier, was
never completed. Meanwhile, Leonardo's scientific research began to dominate his other
activities, so much so that his artistic gifts were directed toward scientific illustration;
through drawing, he sought to convey his understanding of the structure of things. In
1513 he accompanied Pope Leo X's brother, Giuliano de'Medici, to Rome, where he stayed
for 3 years, increasingly absorbed in theoretical research. In 1516-17, Leonardo left
Italy forever to become architectural advisor to King Francis I of France, who greatly
admired him. Leonardo died at the age of 67 on May 2, 1519, at Cloux, near Amboise, France.
From 1996 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia.
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