Leonardo Da Vinci 1452-1519

LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519), the great Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mechanician, engineer and natural philosopher, was the natural son of a Florentine lawyer.

The place of his birth was Vinci, a castello or fortified hill village in the Florentine territory near Empoli, from which his father's family derived its name. To splendid beauty and activity of person Leonardo joined a winning charm of temper and manners, a tact for all societies, and an aptitude for all accomplishments. An inexhaustible intellectual energy and curiosity lay beneath this amiable surface.

Pupil of Verrocchio

1470-77.—Among the multifarious pursuits to which the young Leonardo set his hand, the favourites at first were music, drawing and modelling. His father showed some of his drawings to an acquaintance, Andrea del Verrocchio, who at once recognized the boy's artistic vocation, and was selected to be his master. Verrocchio, although hardly one of the great creative or inventive forces in the art of his age at Florence, was a first-rate craftsman alike as goldsmith, sculptor and painter and particularly distinguished as a teacher. In his studio Leonardo worked for several years (c. in the company of Lorenzo di Credi and other less celebrated pupils. He had soon learnt all that Verrocchio had to teach—more than all, if we are to believe the oft-told tale of the figure, or figures, executed by the pupil in the picture of Christ's Baptism designed by the master for the monks of Vallombrosa. The work in question is now in the Uffizi, at Florence. According to Vasari the angel kneeling on the left was put in by Leonardo. The picture, originally painted in tempera, has suffered much from later repaints in oil, rendering exact judgment difficult. The work was probably done in or about 1470, when Leonardo was 18 years old. By 1472 we find him enrolled in the lists of the painters' guild at Florence. Here he con tinued to live and work for ten or eleven years longer.

Up till 1477 he is still spoken of as a pupil or apprentice of Ver rocchio; but in that year he seems to have been taken into special favour by Lorenzo the Magnificent, and to have worked as an independent artist under his patronage until 1482-83.

In 1478 we find him receiving an important commission from the signory, and in 148o another from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto.

Student of Nature.

Leonardo was not one of those artists of the Renaissance who sought the means of reviving the ancient glories of art mainly in the imitation of ancient models. The antiques of the Medici gardens seem to have had little influence on him beyond that of generally stimulating his passion for per fection. By his own instincts he was an exclusive student of nature. From his earliest days he had flung himself upon that study with an unprecedented ardour of delight and curiosity. In drawing from life he had early found the way to unite precision with freedom and fire—the subtlest accuracy of expressive definition with vital movement and rhythm of line—as no draughtsman had been able to unite them before.

He was the first painter to recognize the play of light and shade as among the most significant and attractive of the world's ap pearances, the earlier schools having with one consent subordinated light and shade to colour and outline. Nor was he a student of the broad, usual, patent appearances only of the world; its fugitive, fantastic, unaccustomed appearances attracted him most of all. Strange shapes of hills and rocks, rare plants and animals, unusual faces and figures of men, questionable smiles and expressions, whether beautiful or grotesque, far-fetched objects and curiosities, were things he loved to pore upon and keep in memory. Neither did he stop at mere appearances of any kind, but, having stamped the image of things upon his brain, went on indefatigably to probe their hidden laws and causes. The laws of light and shade, the laws of "perspective," including optics and the physiology of the eye, the laws of human and animal anatomy and muscular movement, those of the growth and structure of plants and of the powers and properties of water, all these and much more fur nished food to his insatiable spirit of inquiry. Lastly, Leonardo is related to have begun work in sculpture about this time by modelling several heads of smiling women and children.