Leonardo da Vinci was born in the town of Vinci (or near it), located west of Florence, on April 15, 1452. He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a peasant girl, was brought up in his father's house and, being the son of an educated person, received a thorough primary education.
1467 - at the age of 15, Leonardo went as an apprentice to one of the leading masters of the Early Renaissance in Florence, Andrea del Verrocchio; 1472 - joined the guild of artists, studied the basics of drawing and other necessary disciplines; 1476 - so he worked in the workshop of Verrocchio, apparently in collaboration with the master himself.
By 1480, Leonardo already had large orders, but after 2 years he moved to Milan. In a letter to the ruler of Milan, Lodovico Sforza, he presented himself as an engineer, military expert and artist. The years he spent in Milan were filled with various pursuits. Leonardo da Vinci painted several paintings and the famous fresco "The Last Supper" and began to diligently and seriously keep his notes. The Leonardo whom we recognize from his notes is an architect-designer (the creator of innovative plans that were never carried out), an anatomist, a hydraulician, an inventor of mechanisms, a designer of scenery for court performances, a writer of riddles, rebuses and fables for the entertainment of the court, musician and art theorist.
1499 - after the expulsion of Lodovico Sforza from Milan by the French, Leonardo leaves for Venice, visits Mantua along the way, where he participates in the construction of defensive structures, then returns to Florence. In those days, he was so fascinated by mathematics that he did not want to think about picking up a brush. For 12 years, Leonardo constantly moved from city to city, working for the famous in Romagna, designing defensive structures (never built) for Piombino.
In Florence he enters into a rivalry with Michelangelo; this rivalry culminated in the huge battle compositions that the two artists painted for the Palazzo della Signoria (also Palazzo Vecchio). Then Leonardo conceived a second equestrian monument, which, like the first, was never created. Throughout all these years, he continues to fill out his notebooks. They reflect his ideas related to the most various subjects. This is the theory and practice of painting, anatomy, mathematics and even the flight of birds. 1513 - as in 1499, his patrons are expelled from Milan ...
Leonardo leaves for Rome, where he spends 3 years under the auspices of the Medici. Depressed and distressed by the lack of material for anatomical research, he engages in experiments that lead nowhere.
The kings of France, first Louis XII, then Francis I, admired the works Italian Renaissance especially Leonardo's The Last Supper. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that in 1516 Francis I, well aware of the versatile talents of Leonardo, invites him to the court, which was then located in the Amboise castle in the Loire Valley. As the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini wrote, despite the fact that the Florentine worked on hydraulic projects and plans for a new royal palace, his main occupation is the honorary position of court sage and adviser.
Fascinated by the idea of creating an aircraft, the Florentine initially developed the simplest apparatus (Dedalus and Icarus) based on wings. His new idea is an airplane with full control. But it was not possible to bring the idea to life due to the lack of a motor. Also, the famous idea of the scientist is a device with vertical takeoff and landing.
Studying the laws of fluids and hydraulics in general, Leonardo made a great contribution to the theory of locks, sewer ports, testing ideas in practice.
Famous paintings by Leonardo - "Gioconda", "Last Supper", "Madonna with an Ermine", and many others. Leonardo was demanding and precise in everything he did. Even before painting, he insisted on a complete study of the object before starting.
Leonardo's manuscripts are priceless. They were published in full only in XIX-XX centuries. In his notes, Leonardo da Vinci noted not just reflections, but supplemented them with drawings, drawings, and descriptions.
Leonardo da Vinci was talented in many areas, he made a significant contribution to the history of architecture, art, and physics.
Leonardo da Vinci died in Amboise on May 2, 1519; his paintings by this time were distributed, as a rule, in private collections, and the notes lay in different collections, almost in complete oblivion, for several more centuries.
Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci encrypted a lot so that his ideas would be revealed gradually, as humanity could “ripen” to them. He wrote with his left hand and in very small letters, from right to left, so that the text looked as if in a mirror image. He spoke in riddles, made metaphorical prophecies, and liked to compose puzzles. Leonardo da Vinci did not sign his works, but they have identification marks. For example, if you take a closer look at the paintings, you can find a symbolic bird taking off. Apparently, there are a lot of such signs, therefore one or another of his hidden "brainchildren" are unexpectedly found on famous canvases, through the centuries. So, for example, it was with the Benois Madonna, which for a long time, as a home icon, itinerant actors carried with them.
Leonard discovered the scattering principle (or sfumato). The objects on his canvases have no clear boundaries: everything, as in life, is blurry, penetrates one into another, which means it breathes, lives, awakens fantasy. To master this principle, he advised to practice: look at the stains on the walls that appear from dampness, ashes, clouds or dirt. He deliberately smoked the room where he worked in order to look for images in clubs.
Thanks to the sfumato effect, a flickering smile of the Gioconda appeared: depending on the focus of the gaze, it seems to the viewer that the Gioconda smiles either gently, or, as it were, ominously. The second miracle of the "Mona Lisa" is that she is "alive". Over the centuries, her smile changes, the corners of her lips rise higher. In the same way, the Master mixed the knowledge of various sciences, because his inventions find more and more applications over time. From the treatise on light and shadow come the beginnings of the sciences of penetrating power, oscillatory motion, and the propagation of waves. All of his 120 books have been distributed around the world and are gradually being revealed to mankind.
Leonardo da Vinci preferred the method of analogy to all others. Approximation of analogy is an advantage over the accuracy of a syllogism, when a third inevitably follows from two conclusions. But the more bizarre the analogy, the further the conclusions from it extend. Take, for example, the famous illustration of da Vinci, which proves the proportionality of the human body. A human figure with outstretched arms and spread legs fits into a circle, and with closed legs and raised arms - into a square. This "mill" gave impetus to various conclusions. Leonardo was the only one who created designs for churches in which the altar is placed in the middle (symbolizing the human navel), and the worshipers are evenly around. This church plan in the form of an octahedron served as another invention of genius - a ball bearing.
The Florentine liked to use contraposto, which creates the illusion of movement. Everyone who saw his sculpture of a giant horse in Corte Vecchio involuntarily changed their gait to a more relaxed one.
Leonardo was never in a hurry to finish a work, because unfinishedness is an essential quality of life. Finish means kill! The slowness of the Florentine was the talk of the town, he could make two or three strokes and retire for many days from the city, for example, to improve the valleys of Lombardy or was engaged in the creation of an apparatus for walking on water. Almost every one of his significant works is "work in progress". The master had a special composition, with the help of which he finished painting as if on purpose he made “windows of incompleteness”. Apparently, in this way he left a place where life itself could intervene and correct something ...
He masterfully played the lyre. When the case of Leonardo was heard in the court of Milan, he appeared there precisely as a musician, and not as an artist or inventor.
There is a version that Leonardo da Vinci was a homosexual. When the artist was studying in Verrocchio's workshop, he was accused of harassing a boy who posed for him. The court acquitted him.
According to one version, Gioconda smiles from the realization of her secret for all pregnancy.
According to another, Mona Lisa is entertained by musicians and clowns while she posed for the artist.
There is another assumption, according to which, "Mona Lisa" is a self-portrait of Leonardo.
Leonardo da Vinci, apparently, did not leave a single self-portrait that could be unambiguously attributed to him. Experts doubt that Leonardo's famous sanguine self-portrait (traditionally dated 1512-1515), showing him in his old age, is such. It is believed that this is probably only a study of the head of the apostle for the "Last Supper". Doubts that this is a self-portrait of the artist began to be expressed in the 19th century, the last of which was recently expressed by one of the largest experts on Leonardo da Vinci, Professor Pietro Marani.
Scientists at the University of Amsterdam and American researchers, having studied the mysterious smile of Mona Lisa using a new computer program, unraveled its composition: according to them, it contains 83 percent happiness, 9 percent neglect, 6 percent fear and 2 percent anger.
Leonardo loved water: he developed instructions for scuba diving, he invented and described a device for scuba diving, a breathing apparatus for scuba diving. All the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci formed the basis of modern underwater equipment.
Leonardo was the first painter to dissect corpses in order to understand the location and structure of muscles.
Observations of the Moon in the phase of the growing crescent led the researcher to one of the important scientific discoveries - Leonardo da Vinci established that sunlight is reflected from our planet and returns to the moon in the form of secondary illumination.
The Florentine was ambidexterous - he was equally good with his right and left hands. He suffered from dyslexia (impaired reading ability) - this ailment, called "word blindness", is associated with reduced brain activity in a certain area of \u200b\u200bthe left hemisphere. A well-known fact, Leonardo wrote in a mirror way.
Relatively recently, the Louvre spent 5.5 million dollars to outweigh the most famous masterpiece of the artist "La Gioconda" from the general room to a specially equipped room for it. Two-thirds of the State Hall, which occupies a total area of 840 sq. m. The huge room was rebuilt as a gallery, on the far wall of which now hangs the famous creation of the great Leonardo. The reconstruction, which was carried out according to the project of the Peruvian architect Lorenzo Piqueras, lasted about 4 years. The decision to move the Mona Lisa to a separate room was made by the administration of the Louvre due to the fact that in the same place, surrounded by other paintings Italian masters, this masterpiece was lost, and the public was forced to queue to see the famous painting.
2003, August - the canvas of the great Leonardo worth $ 50 million "Madonna with a spindle" was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland. The masterpiece was stolen from the home of one of Scotland's wealthiest landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch.
It is believed that Leonardo was a vegetarian (Andrea Corsali, in a letter to Giuliano di Lorenzo Medici, compares him with a Hindu who did not eat meat). The phrase often attributed to Leonardo “If a person strives for freedom, why does he keep birds and animals in cages? .. man is truly the king of animals, because he cruelly exterminates them. We live by killing others. We are walking graveyards! Also in early age I refused meat" is taken from the English translation of Dmitry Merezhkovsky's novel "The Resurrected Gods. Leonardo da Vinci".
Leonardo da Vinci designed the submarine, the propeller, the tank, the loom, the ball bearing, and the flying machines.
Building canals, Leonardo made an observation that later entered geology under his name as a theoretical principle for recognizing the time of formation of the earth's layers. He came to the conclusion that our planet is much older than indicated in the Bible.
Among da Vinci's hobbies were even cooking and serving art. In Milan for thirteen years he was the manager of court feasts. He invented several culinary devices that facilitate the work of cooks. The original dish "from Leonardo" - thinly sliced stew, with vegetables laid on top - was very popular at court feasts.
In the books of Terry Pratchett there is a character whose name is Leonard, the prototype of which was Leonardo da Vinci. Pratchett's Leonard writes from right to left, invents various machines, engages in alchemy, paints pictures (the most famous is the portrait of Mona Ogg)
A considerable number of Leonardo's manuscripts were first published by the curator of the Ambrosian Library, Carlo Amoretti.
Italian scientists have made a statement about the sensational discovery. According to them, discovered an early self-portrait of Leonardo. The discovery belongs to the journalist Piero Angela.
Leonardo da Vinci - Italian artist (painter, sculptor, architect) and scientist (anatomist, naturalist), inventor, writer and musician, one of major representatives art of the High Renaissance.
So in front of you biography of Leonardo da Vinci.
Biography of Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in small town Vinci, near Florence. He was born as a result of a love affair between the notary Piero and the peasant woman Katerina.
The official union of these two people was impossible due to the fact that the girl came from the lower class.
Features of Leonardo da Vinci Childhood and youth
Soon, da Vinci's father married a wealthy woman, as a result of which the first years of his life, Leonardo lived with his own mother.
However, when Piero and his wife did not have children for a long time, the father decided to adopt his first child, taking him from Katerina.
Leonardo's childhood attachment to his mother, which he lost at such an early age, was forever imprinted in his memory.
Subsequently, in many of his paintings, he tried to convey the maternal image that he carefully kept in his heart.
The house where Leonardo da Vinci lived as a child After 10 years, the first wife of the notary Piero died, after which he remarried.
In total, Leonardo da Vinci had 4 stepmothers, as well as 12 paternal sisters and brothers.
The work of Leonardo da Vinci
When Leonardo da Vinci grew up a little, his father sent him to study with the master Andrea Verrocchio, who taught him various crafts.
It became the first milestone biographies of Leonardo da Vinci. Already in childhood, he showed abilities in various fields of activity.
Supposed self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci He quickly learned to paint, create sculptures, dress leather, process metals and learn about various things. In the future, all this knowledge was useful to da Vinci.
When the young man was 20 years old, he continued to work with his teacher. Verrocchio, of course, saw how gifted his student was.
He often trusted Leonardo to finish any fragments on his canvases, for example, minor characters, or.
Interestingly, Leonardo da Vinci will have his own workshop in 4 years.
In 1482, Lorenzo de' Medici sent Leonardo da Vinci to Milan to Duke Lodovico Sforzo, who was in dire need of talented engineers.
He urgently needed high-quality defensive devices, as well as devices to amuse his yard.
Leonardo da Vinci did not let the duke down, having managed to build the necessary devices, which turned out to be much better than those offered by other inventors.
It is not surprising that Sforzo greatly valued an unusually talented artist and scientist. As a result, Leonardo da Vinci stayed at the court of Lodovico Sforzo for about 17 years.
During this period of his biography, he managed to create many ingenious paintings and sculptures, and complete a lot of anatomical sketches. Besides great Leonardo drew many drawings of various devices.
He wanted to design machines that could not only drive on land, but also swim under water and fly in the sky.
In 1499, Leonardo da Vinci returned to Florence, where he began working at the court of Cesare Borgia. The Duke was primarily interested in the creation of military equipment, with the help of which it was possible to wage an effective war with the enemy.
In the service of the Borgia, Leonardo da Vinci stayed for 7 years, after which he decided to return to Milan. By this point in his biography, he had already managed to write the famous La Gioconda, which is now in the French Louvre.
After arriving in Milan, he stayed in this city for 6 years, and then moved to Rome. During this period of his biography, he still continued to paint and invent various devices.
In 1516, 3 years before his death, Leonardo da Vinci went to France, where he stayed until the end of his life. On this trip, he was accompanied by one of his students and the main follower of his artistic style, Francesco Melzi.
Personal life
Not much is known about Leonardo da Vinci's personal life. Even though he led Personal diary He encrypted all his records.
However, even after they were able to decipher, the researchers received very little information about the true biography of the great scientist.
Some biographers have suggested that the reason for Leonardo da Vinci's secrecy could be his unconventional orientation.
Moreover, there are versions that the artist's lover could be his student Salai, who has an effeminate appearance. However, there is no evidence for such claims.
By the way, Salai posed for several paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. For example, he was the model for famous painting"John the Baptist". There is a version that the Mona Lisa was also painted with Salai, since many art historians see the obvious similarity of the characters depicted on both canvases.
However, as mentioned earlier, there are simply no facts about relationships with men or even women in the biography of Leonardo da Vinci.
A number of researchers reasonably argue that Leonardo never knew carnal intimacy at all, having lived a virgin all his life.
Death and grave
The great Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519 at the age of 67, in the castle of Clos Luce. He bequeathed to bury his body in the church of Saint-Florentin.
Researchers speculate that a stroke may have been the likely cause of his death. To this day, the memoirs of his contemporaries have survived who claimed that Leonardo da Vinci was partially paralyzed. For example, 2 years before his death, he could not move his right arm due to a stroke he suffered.
In the last years of his life, he continued to create with the help of his student Francesco Melzi. However, every day his health deteriorated, as a result of which he could no longer move without assistance.
The life path of the Florentine genius ended after a second stroke in 1519.
At the same time, it is worth emphasizing that all assumptions about how the last years of the biography of Leonardo da Vinci passed were not confirmed by reliable facts, but are only guesses.
Monument to Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, Italy At the height of the Huguenot wars, the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci was devastated. Only after three hundred years, scientists have made attempts to identify his remains.
Today, on the site of the ruined church in which he was buried, a granite monument with a bust of the great Leonardo has been erected.
Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci
The works of Leonardo da Vinci are seriously studied by scientists, art historians, and even religious figures. Many assume that when writing his paintings, the artist allegedly used some kind of graphic code.
For example, with the help of several mirrors, scientists were able to unravel the mystery of the views of the Gioconda and John the Baptist.
As it turns out, both characters are fixing their eyes on the mysterious masked creature. The secret code in da Vinci's diaries was also revealed through mirrors.
Drawings and sketches of some of the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci Simultaneously American writer Dan Brown wrote more than one book related to the work of the artist. In 2006, based on Brown's work, the film The Da Vinci Code was filmed, which gained immense popularity around the world.
Many religious leaders and believers have criticized the film, calling it blasphemous. An interesting fact is that both Christians and Muslims adhered to this opinion.
Despite this, the film was watched by a record number of viewers. This, in turn, led to the fact that a lot of people began to take a keen interest in the personality and biography of Leonardo da Vinci, as well as his brilliant works.
History of Leonardo da Vinci
An interesting fact is that today anyone can visit the museum in Rome, named after Leonardo, and see with his own eyes the devices built according to his drawings.
There are also copies of da Vinci's brilliant paintings and photographs of his original manuscripts. In other words, by visiting this museum you will be able to realistically imagine the life story of the great Florentine.
Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci gave great attention engineering and architectural art. He is the author of many inventions that were ahead of their time by several centuries.
A brief biography of Leonardo da Vinci does not allow a detailed description of all the inventions of this great genius. Here are just a few of them: the world's first tank, an aircraft and a catapult, a machine gun and scissors, a bicycle, etc., etc.
Just think, all these inventions were designed by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century, more than 500 years ago!
Moreover, the world's first parachute was also invented by the genius da Vinci. An interesting fact is that recently modern scientists were able to create an exact copy of such a parachute according to da Vinci's drawings. Tests have shown that he does his job quite well.
Monument to Leonardo da Vinci in Amboise It is important to note that today many drawings and sketches of Leonardo da Vinci are still incomprehensible to scientists.
Perhaps in the future we will be able to penetrate the mystery of the biography of Leonardo da Vinci, and solve all the mysteries that he left us.
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He seemed to know the evolutionary keys to the mysteries of the human psyche. So, one of the secrets of Leonardo da Vinci was a special sleep formula: he slept for 15 minutes every 4 hours, thus reducing his daily sleep from 8 to 1.5 hours. Thanks to this, the genius immediately saved 75 percent of his sleep time, which actually lengthened his life time from 70 to 100 years!
"The picture of the painter will be little perfect if he takes the pictures of others as an inspirer; if he learns from the objects of nature, then he will produce a good fruit ..."
Painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist, all this is Leonardo da Vinci. Wherever such a person turns, his every action is so divine that, leaving behind him all other people, he is something given to us by God, and not acquired by human art. Leonardo da Vinci. Great, mysterious, attractive. So distant and so modern. Like a rainbow, bright, mosaic, multi-colored fate of the master. His life is full of wanderings, meetings with amazing people and events. How much has been written about him, how much has been published, but it will never be enough. The mystery of Leonardo begins with his birth, in 1452 on April 15 in a town west of Florence. He was illegal born son a woman about whom almost nothing is known. We do not know her last name, age, or appearance, we do not know whether she was smart or stupid, whether she studied or not. Biographers call her a young peasant woman. Let it be so. Much more is known about Leonardo's father, Piero da Vinci, but also not enough. He was a notary and came from a family that settled in Vinci at least in the thirteenth century. Leonardo was brought up in his father's house. His education evidently was that of any boy from a good family who lives in a small town: reading, writing, beginning mathematics, Latin. His handwriting is amazing, He writes from right to left, the letters are reversed so that the text is easier to read with a mirror. In later years, he was fond of botany, geology, observing the flight of birds, playing sunlight and shadows, the movement of water. All this testifies to his curiosity and also to the fact that in his youth he spent a lot of time on fresh air walking around the neighborhood of the town. These neighborhoods, which have changed little over the past five hundred years, are now almost the most picturesque in Italy. The father noticed and taking into account the high flight of his son's talent in art, one fine day selected several of his drawings, took them to Andrea Verrocchio, who was his great friend, and urged him to say whether Leonardo would achieve any success by taking up drawing. . Struck by the huge inclinations that he saw in the drawings of the novice Leonardo, Andrea supported Ser Piero in his decision to devote him to this matter and immediately agreed with him that Leonardo enter his studio, which Leonardo did more than willingly and began to practice not only in one area, but in all those where the drawing enters.
Picture Madonna in the grotto. 1483-86
In nature, everything is wisely thought out and arranged, everyone should mind their own business, and in this wisdom is the highest justice of life. Leonardo da Vinci
Painting Mona Lisa (La Gioconda). 1503-04
By 1514 - 1515 refers to the creation of the masterpiece of the great master - the painting of the Mona Lisa. Until recently, it was thought that this portrait was written much earlier, in Florence, around 1503. They believed the story of Vasari, who wrote: “Leonardo undertook to complete for Francesco del Gioconde a portrait of Monna Lisa, his wife, and after working on it for four years, left it incomplete. This work is now with the French king in Fontainebleau. By the way, Leonardo resorted to the following trick: since the Madonna Lisa was very beautiful, while writing a portrait, he kept people who played the lyre or sang, and here constantly there were jesters who kept her cheerful and removed the melancholy that painting usually imparts to portraits.
Where the spirit does not guide the hand of the artist, there is no art.
Picture Madonna with a flower ( Madonna Benois). 1478
Thinking that I was learning to live, I learned to die.
Picture Madonna Litta. 1490
Painting "Madonna with pomegranate". 1469
Picture Madonna. 1510
Picture Lady with an ermine. 1483-90
Painting Portrait of Ginevra de Benci. 1474-76
Picture of the Annunciation. 1472-75
The Last Supper. 1498
Picture of John the Baptist. 1513-16
Woman's head. 1500?
"Vitruvian Man" 1487
Virgin Mary with child and St. Anna
Portrait of a musician
The greatest scientist of his time, Leonardo da Vinci enriched almost all areas of knowledge with insightful observations and conjectures. But how surprised a genius would be if he knew that many of his inventions were used even 555 years after his birth. Oddly enough, only one invention of da Vinci received recognition during his lifetime - a wheel lock for a pistol that was wound up with a key. At first, this mechanism was not very common, but by the middle of the 16th century it had gained popularity among the nobles, especially in the cavalry, which even affected the design of the armor: Maximilian armor for firing pistols began to be made with gloves instead of mittens. The wheel lock for a pistol, invented by Leonardo da Vinci, was so perfect that it continued to be found in the 19th century. But, as often happens, recognition of geniuses comes centuries later: many of his inventions were supplemented and modernized, and are now used in Everyday life. For example, Leonardo da Vinci created a device capable of compressing air and driving it through pipes. This invention has a very wide range of applications: from kindling stoves to ... ventilation of rooms. He received home education, masterfully played the lyre, was the first to explain why the sky is blue and the moon is so bright, was ambidexterous and suffered from dyslexia. He masters several drawing techniques: Italian pencil, silver pencil, sanguine, pen. In 1472, Leonardo was accepted into the guild of painters - the guild of St. Luke, but remained to live in Verrocchio's house. He opened his own workshop in Florence between 1476 and 1478. On April 8, 1476, Leonardo da Vinci was accused of being a sadome by a denunciation and arrested along with three friends. At that time in Florence sadomea was a crime, and the highest punishment was burning at a stake. Judging by the records of that time, many doubted the guilt of Leonardo, neither the accuser nor the witnesses were ever found. The fact that among those arrested was the son of one of the nobles of Florence probably helped to avoid a harsh sentence: there was a trial, but the guilty were released after a slight flogging. In 1482, having received an invitation to the court of the ruler of Milan, Lodovico Sforza, Leonardo da Vinci unexpectedly left Florence. Lodovico Sforza was considered the most hated tyrant in Italy, but Leonardo decided that Sforza would be a better patron for him than the Medici, who ruled in Florence and disliked Leonardo. Initially, the duke took him as the organizer of court holidays, for which Leonardo invented not only masks and costumes, but also mechanical "miracles". Magnificent holidays worked to increase the glory of Duke Lodovico. For a salary less than that of a court dwarf, in the Duke's castle, Leonardo acted as a military engineer, hydraulic engineer, court painter, and later - an architect and engineer. At the same time, Leonardo "worked for himself", doing several areas of science and technology at the same time, but he was not paid for most of the work, since Sforza did not pay any attention to his inventions. In 1484-1485, about 50 thousand inhabitants of Milan died from the plague. Leonardo da Vinci, who considered the reason for this the overcrowding of the city and the dirt that reigned in the narrow streets, suggested that the duke build new town. According to Leonardo's plan, the city was to consist of 10 districts of 30 thousand inhabitants, each district had to have its own sewage system, the width of the narrowest streets should have been equal to the average height of a horse (in a few centuries State Council London recognized the proportions proposed by Leonardo as ideal and gave the order to follow them when laying out new streets). The project for the organization of the city, like many others technical ideas Leonardo, the duke rejected. Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to found an academy of arts in Milan. For teaching, he compiled treatises on painting, light, shadows, movement, theory and practice, perspective, movements of the human body, proportions of the human body. In Milan, the Lombard school, consisting of students of Leonardo, arises. In 1495, at the request of Lodovico Sforza, Leonardo began to paint his "Last Supper" on the wall of the refectory of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. On July 22, 1490, Leonardo settled young Giacomo Caprotti in his house (later he began to call the boy Salai - "Demon"). Whatever the young man did, Leonardo forgave him everything. Relations with Salai were the most constant in the life of Leonardo da Vinci, who had no family (he did not want a wife or children), and after his death, Salai inherited many of Leonardo's paintings.
After the fall of Lodovik Sforza, Leonardo da Vinci left Milan. In different years he lived in Venice (1499, 1500), Florence (1500-1502, 1503-1506, 1507), Mantua (1500), Milan (1506, 1507-1513), Rome (1513-1516). In 1516 (1517) he accepted the invitation of Francis I and left for Paris. Leonardo da Vinci did not like to sleep for a long time, he was a vegetarian. According to some testimonies, Leonardo da Vinci was beautifully built, possessed great physical strength, had good knowledge in the arts of chivalry, horseback riding, dancing, fencing. In mathematics, he was attracted only by what can be seen, therefore, for him, it primarily consisted of geometry and the laws of proportion. Leonardo da Vinci tried to determine the coefficients of sliding friction, studied the resistance of materials, was engaged in hydraulics, modeling. The areas that Leonardo da Vinci was interested in were acoustics, anatomy, astronomy, aeronautics, botany, geology, hydraulics, cartography, mathematics, mechanics, optics, weapon design, civil and military construction, and city planning. Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519 at the Château de Cloux near Amboise (Touraine, France).
If you happened to fly, then henceforth you will walk the earth, turning your eyes to the sky, because there you were and you will always strive to go there.
Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci is a genius whose inventions belong undividedly to both the past, present and future of mankind. He lived ahead of his time, and if at least a small part of what he invented was brought to life, then the history of Europe, and possibly the world, would be different: already in the 15th century we would have been driving cars and crossing the seas on submarines. Leonardo da Vinci enriched almost all areas of knowledge with insightful observations and conjectures. But how surprised a genius would be if he knew that many of his inventions are used even centuries after his birth.
I present to your attention a couple of inventions of Leonard da Vinci: Military equipment, Aircraft, Hydraulics, Various mechanisms.
The most daring dream of Leonardo the inventor, without a doubt, was the flight of man. One of the very first (and most famous) sketches on this topic is a diagram of the device, which in our time is considered to be the prototype of a helicopter. Leonardo proposed to make a propeller with a diameter of 5 meters from thin flax soaked in starch. It was supposed to be driven by four people rotating levers in a circle. Modern experts argue that the muscular strength of four people would not be enough to lift this device into the air (especially since even if it were lifted, this structure would begin to rotate around its axis), but if, for example, a powerful spring were used as an "engine" , such a "helicopter" would be capable of flying - albeit a short one.
After a long and careful study of bird flight, which he began during his stay in Milan, Leonardo designed in 1490, and possibly built the first model of an aircraft. This model had wings like a bat, and with its help, using the muscular efforts of the arms and legs, a person had to fly. Now we know that in such a formulation the problem is unsolvable, because the muscular energy of a person is not enough for flight.
The drawing of the device turned out to be prophetic, which Leonardo himself described as follows: "If you have enough linen fabric sewn into a pyramid with a base of 12 yards (about 7 m 20 cm), then you can jump from any height without any harm to your body" .
The figure shows an underwater breathing apparatus with details of the air intake and exhaust valves.
Swimming webbed gloves. To speed up swimming, the scientist developed a scheme of webbed gloves, which eventually turned into well-known flippers.
Diving suit. The project of Leonardo's diving suit was connected with the problem of finding a person underwater. The suit was made from waterproof leather. It was supposed to have a large breast pocket that was filled with air to increase its volume, which made it easier for the diver to get to the surface. The diver at Leonardo was equipped with a flexible breathing tube.
Life buoy. One of the most necessary things for teaching a person to swim is a life buoy. This invention of Leonardo remained practically unchanged.
Water walking system Leonardo's water walking system included swimming boots and poles.
Optics was popular in Leonardo's time and even had a philosophical connotation. Here are several machines for making mirrors and lenses. The second one from the top is for creating concave mirrors, the third one is for polishing them, the fourth one is for production flat mirrors. The first and last machines make it possible to grind mirrors and lenses, making their surface smooth, at the same time converting rotational motion into alternating. Also known is the project (performed by Leonardo between 1513 and 1516 during his stay in Rome) of a large parabolic mirror with many facets. It was conceived to heat laundry boilers by concentrating solar energy.
It is better to be motionless than tired of being useful.
Leonardo da Vinci.
Milan's Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology is the largest in Europe. Leonardo da Vinci is famous for creating perfect image human and expressed the ideal of female beauty in his painting "Mona Lisa", painted in 1503. Leonardo da Vinci, more often known only as an artist, was a genius who made numerous discoveries, developed innovative projects, conducted research in the field of precise and natural sciences, including mathematics and mechanics. Leonardo handwritten more than 7 thousand sheets in the process of developing his projects. Leonardo da Vinci made discoveries and guesses in almost all areas of knowledge, and his notes and sketches are considered as sheets from a natural-philosophical encyclopedia. He became the founder of a new natural science, which made conclusions on the basis of experiments. Leonardo's favorite subject was mechanics, which he called "the paradise of the mathematical sciences." Leonardo believed that by unraveling the laws of mechanics, one can learn the secrets of the universe. Having devoted a lot of time to the study of bird flight, he became the designer and creator of some aircraft and parachutes. Once in the Leonardo da Vinci Museum, you will plunge into the world of interesting discoveries that will make you think about the infinity and ingenuity of the human mind.
What was Leonardo not fond of! Incredibly, even cooking and table setting were among his interests. In Milan for 13 years he was the manager of court feasts. Leonardo invented several culinary devices that make life easier for cooks. This is a device for chopping nuts, a bread slicer, a corkscrew for left-handers, as well as a mechanical garlic crusher "Leonardo", which Italian chefs still use to this day. In addition, he invented an automatic spit for frying meat, a kind of propeller was attached to the spit, which was supposed to rotate under the action of heated air streams going up from the fire. A rotor was attached to a number of drives with a long rope, the forces were transmitted to the skewer using belts or metal spokes. The hotter the oven heated, the faster the spit rotated, which protected the meat from burning. The original dish "from Leonardo" - thinly sliced meat stewed with vegetables laid on top - was very popular at court feasts.
Leonardo da Vinci is a brilliant artist, a wonderful experimenter and an outstanding scientist who embodied in his work all the most progressive trends of the Renaissance. Everything in him is amazing: the absolutely extraordinary versatility, and the power of thought, and scientific inquisitiveness, and the practical mindset, and technical ingenuity, and the richness of artistic imagination, and the outstanding skill of the painter, draftsman and sculptor. Having reflected in his work the most progressive aspects of the Renaissance, he became that great, truly people's artist, whose historical significance far outgrew the scope of his era. He looked not to the past, but to the future.
bright representative of the type of "universal man"
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Italian painter, sculptor, architect, scientist and engineer. The founder of the artistic culture of the High Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci developed as a master, studying with Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. The methods of work in the workshop of Verrocchio, where artistic practice was combined with technical experiments, as well as friendship with the astronomer P. Toscanelli, contributed to the emergence of the scientific interests of the young da Vinci. In his early works (the head of an angel in Verrocchio's Baptism, after 1470, the Annunciation, circa 1474, both in the Uffizi; the so-called Benois Madonna, circa 1478, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), the artist, developing the traditions of the art of the Early Renaissance, emphasized the smooth volume of forms with soft chiaroscuro, sometimes enlivened faces with a barely perceptible smile, achieving with its help the transfer of subtle states of mind.
Recording the results of countless observations in sketches, sketches and field studies performed in various techniques (Italian and silver pencils, sanguine, pen, etc.), Leonardo da Vinci achieved, sometimes resorting to an almost caricatured grotesque, sharpness in the transfer of facial expressions, and physical features and movement of the human body of young men and women brought into perfect harmony with the spiritual atmosphere of the composition.
In 1481 or 1482, Leonardo da Vinci entered the service of the ruler of Milan, Lodovico Moro, acting as a military engineer, hydraulic engineer, and organizer of court holidays. For over 10 years he worked on the equestrian monument of Francesco Sforza, the father of Lodovico Moro (a life-size clay model of the monument was destroyed when Milan was taken by the French in 1500).
In the Milan period, Leonardo da Vinci created the “Madonna in the Rocks” (1483-1494, Louvre, Paris; the second version - about 1497-1511, National Gallery, London), where the characters are presented surrounded by a bizarre rocky landscape, and the finest chiaroscuro plays the role of spiritual beginning, emphasizing the warmth of human relations. In the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, he completed the wall painting “The Last Supper” (1495-1497; due to the peculiarities of the technique used during the work of Leonardo da Vinci on the fresco - oil with tempera - it was preserved in a badly damaged form; restored in the 20th century ), which marks one of the peaks European painting; its high ethical and spiritual content is expressed in the mathematical regularity of the composition, which logically continues the real architectural space, in a clear, strictly developed system of gestures and facial expressions of the characters, in the harmonious balance of forms.
As an architect, Leonardo da Vinci designed various options of the “ideal” city and the projects of the central-domed temple, which had a great influence on the contemporary architecture of Italy. After the fall of Milan, the life of Leonardo da Vinci passed in incessant moving (1500-1502, 1503-1506, 1507 - Florence; 1500 - Mantua and Venice; 1506, 1507-1513 - Milan; 1513-1516 - Rome; 1517-1519 - France) . In his native Florence, he worked on the painting of the Great Council Hall in the Palazzo Vecchio “The Battle of Anghiari” (1503-1506, not finished, known from copies from cardboard), standing at the origins of the European battle genre of modern times. In the portrait of "Mona Lisa" or "La Gioconda" (circa 1503-1505, Louvre, Paris), he embodied the lofty ideal of eternal femininity and human charm; an important element of the composition was a cosmically vast landscape, melting into a cold blue haze.
The late works of Leonardo da Vinci include projects for the monument to Marshal Trivulzio (1508-1512), the altarpiece “Saint Anna and Mary with the Christ Child” (circa 1507-1510, Louvre, Paris), completing the search for a master in the field of light-air perspective and harmonic pyramidal construction compositions, and "John the Baptist" (circa 1513-1517, Louvre),
where the somewhat sugary ambiguity of the image testifies to the growing moments of crisis in the artist's work. In a series of drawings depicting a universal catastrophe (the so-called cycle with the “Flood”, Italian pencil, pen, circa 1514-1516, Royal Library, Windsor), reflections on the insignificance of man in front of the power of the elements are combined with rationalistic ideas about the cyclic nature of natural processes.
The most important source for studying the views of Leonardo da Vinci are his notebooks and manuscripts (about 7 thousand sheets), excerpts from which were included in the “Treatise on Painting”, compiled after the death of the master by his student F. Melzi and which had a huge impact on European theoretical thought and artistic practice. In the dispute between the arts, Leonardo da Vinci gave the first place to painting, understanding it as a universal language capable of embodying all the diverse manifestations of the rational principle in nature. The image of Leonardo da Vinci would be perceived by us one-sidedly, without taking into account the fact that his artistic activity turned out to be inextricably linked with scientific activity. In essence, Leonardo da Vinci represents in its way the only example of a great artist for whom art was not the main business of life.
If in his youth he paid primary attention to painting, then over time this ratio changed in favor of science. It is difficult to find such areas of knowledge and technology that would not have been enriched by his major discoveries and bold ideas. Nothing gives such a vivid idea of the extraordinary versatility of Leonardo da Vinci's genius as many thousands of pages of his manuscripts. The notes contained in them, combined with countless drawings that give Leonardo da Vinci's thoughts a plastic materialization, cover all being, all areas of knowledge, being, as it were, the clearest evidence of the discovery of the world that the Renaissance brought with it. In these results of his tireless spiritual work, the diversity of life itself is clearly felt, in the knowledge of which the artistic and rational principles appear in Leonardo da Vinci in an indissoluble unity.
As a scientist and engineer, he enriched almost all areas of science of that time. Bright representative new, based on the experiment of natural science, Leonardo da Vinci paid special attention to mechanics, seeing in it the main key to the secrets of the universe; his brilliant constructive guesses were far ahead of his contemporary era (projects of rolling mills, machines, submarines, aircraft). The observations he collected on the influence of transparent and translucent media on the coloring of objects led to the establishment of scientifically based principles of aerial perspective in the art of the High Renaissance. Studying the device of the eye, Leonardo da Vinci made the right guesses about the nature of binocular vision. In anatomical drawings, he laid the foundations of modern scientific illustration, and also studied botany and biology.
And as a contrast to this complete higher voltage creative activity - the life fate of Leonardo, his endless wanderings associated with the inability to find favorable conditions for work in Italy at that time. Therefore, when the French king Francis I offered him a position as a court painter, Leonardo da Vinci accepted the invitation and arrived in France in 1517. In France, during this period, especially actively joining the culture of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci was surrounded at court with universal reverence, which, however, was more of an external character. The artist's strength was running out, and two years later, on May 2, 1519, he died in the castle of Cloux (near Amboise, Touraine) in France.
The personality and work of Leonardo da Vinci has always aroused great interest. Leonardo was too extraordinary a figure for his time. Books and articles are printed, feature films and documentaries are released. Art critics turn to scientists and mystics in an attempt to find the key to the mystery of the genius of the great master. There is even a separate direction in science that explores the heritage of the painter. Museums are opened in honor of Leonardo da Vinci, thematic exhibitions are constantly held around the world, breaking all attendance records, and the Mona Lisa looks at the crowds of tourists all day because of the armored glass. Real historical facts and legends, scientific achievements and fiction closely intertwined around the name of one genius.
The fate of the great master
The future great artist and scientist was born on April 14, 1452 from the extramarital affair of a wealthy notary Sir Piero with either a peasant woman or a tavern owner from the town of Vinci. The boy was named Leonardo. Katerina, that was the name of the artist's mother, was engaged in raising her son for the first five years of his life, after which the father took the boy to his house.
Although Piero was legally married, he had no other children besides Leonardo. Therefore, the appearance of a child in the house was greeted warmly and cordially. The only thing that the artist remained deprived of, being fully supported by his father, is the right to inheritance. Leonardo's early years passed serenely, surrounded by the picturesque mountainous nature of Tuscany. admiration and love for native land he will carry through his whole life, perpetuating its beauty in his landscapes.
The peace and quiet of provincial life ended with the family moving to Florence. Life began to play, seething with all the colors of the real metropolis of that time. The city was ruled by representatives of the Medici family, patrons known for their generosity, who created ideal conditions for the development of arts in their patrimony.
During their reign, Florence became the cradle of culture and scientific revolution known as the Renaissance. Once here, young Leonardo found himself in the very center of events, when the city was approaching the apogee of its heyday and glory, the peak of greatness, of which the young artist became an integral part.
But greatness was ahead, but for now, the future genius simply needed to get an education. Being an illegitimate son, he could not continue the work of his father, as well as become, for example, a lawyer or a doctor. Which, in general, did not harm the fate of Leonardo in any way.
From the very early years the young man showed extraordinary artistic ability. Piero could not ignore this when he made a decision regarding the fate of his only son. Soon, the father sent the eighteen-year-old Leonardo to study at a very successful and advanced painting workshop. The artist's mentor was famous painter Andrea del Verrocchio.
A talented and open-minded sculptor and painter, Verrocchio did not preach medieval aesthetic views but tried to keep up with the times. He was keenly interested in samples ancient art, which he considered unsurpassed, in his work he sought to revive the traditions of Rome and Greece. Nevertheless, recognizing and respecting progress, Verrocchio made extensive use of the technical and scientific achievements of his time, thanks to which painting was increasingly approaching realism.
Flat, sketchy images of the Middle Ages retreated, giving way to the desire to completely and completely imitate nature in everything. And for this it was necessary to master the techniques of linear and aerial perspective, to understand the laws of light and shadow, which meant the need to master mathematics, geometry, drawing, chemistry, physics and optics. Leonardo studied with Verrocchio the basics of all the exact sciences, simultaneously mastering the technique of drawing, modeling and sculpture, acquiring skills in working with plaster, leather and metal. His talent was revealed so quickly and clearly that soon the young talent went far from his teacher in terms of skill and quality of painting.
Already at the age of twenty, in 1472, Leonardo became a member of the honorary Florentine Guild of Artists. And even the absence of his own workshop, which he acquired only a few years later, did not prevent him from starting his own path as an independent master. Despite the obvious engineering abilities and a remarkable talent for the exact sciences, society saw in the artist only a craftsman who did not yet have great prestige. The ideals of freedom and creativity were still far away.
The fate of the artist of the 15th century depended entirely on influential patrons. So Leonardo throughout his life had to look for a place of service with the powerful of this world, and the execution of individual secular and church orders was based on the principle of a simple trade agreement.
The first ten years of the artist's life were spent in creative pursuits and working on a few orders. Until, one day, Leonardo heard a rumor that the Duke of Sforza, the ruler of Milan, needed a court sculptor. The young man immediately decided to try his hand.
The fact is that Milan at that time was one of the largest centers weapons production, and Leonardo was immersed in his latest passion - the development of drawings of original and ingenious machines and mechanisms. Therefore, the possibility of moving to the capital of engineering was very inspiring to him. The artist wrote a letter of recommendation to the Duke of Sforza, in which he dared to offer himself not only as a sculptor, painter and architect, but also as an engineer, claiming that he could build ships, armored vehicles, catapults, cannons and other military equipment. The duke was impressed by Leonardo's self-confident letter, but only partially satisfied him: he likes the position of sculptor to the artist. The first task of the new court sculptor was to make a bronze statue of a horse, intended to decorate the Sforza family crypt. The funny thing is that, due to a variety of circumstances, during the seventeen years that Leonardo spent at the Milanese court, the horse was never cast. But the interest of the young talent in military affairs, mechanics and technology in weapons workshops only grew. Almost all of Leonardo's inventions date back to this period.
During his life, the brilliant da Vinci created numerous drawings of weaving, printing and rolling machines, metallurgical furnaces and woodworking machines. He was the first to come up with the idea of a helicopter propeller, ball bearings, a slewing crane, a piling mechanism, a hydraulic turbine, a wind speed gauge, a telescopic fire ladder, an adjustable wrench, a gearbox. Leonardo developed models of all kinds of military vehicles - a tank, a catapult, a submarine. In his sketches there are prototypes of a searchlight for a diving bell, an excavator, a bicycle, flippers. And also, his most famous designs, based on a painstaking study of the flight technique of birds and the structure of a bird's wing - an aircraft that is very reminiscent of a hang glider, and a parachute.
Unfortunately, Leonardo did not have a chance to see the embodiment of the vast majority of his ideas during his lifetime. The time for them had not yet come, there was no necessary raw materials and materials, the creation of which was also foreseen by the genius of the 15th century. Throughout his life, Leonardo da Vinci had to put up with the fact that his grandiose designs too far ahead of the era. Only at the end of the 19th century, many of them will receive their implementation. And, of course, the master did not suspect that both in the 20th and in the 21st century, millions of tourists would admire these inventions in special museums dedicated to his work.
In 1499 Leonardo left Milan. The reason was the capture of the city by French troops led by Louis XII, who lost power, the Duke of Sforza fled abroad. For the artist began not the best period in his life. For four years, he constantly moved from place to place, never staying anywhere for a long time. So far, in 1503, at the age of fifty, he again had to return to Florence - the city where he once worked as a simple apprentice, and now, being at the peak of his skill and fame, he worked on creating his ingenious "Mona Lisa".
True, da Vinci nevertheless returned to Milan, after several years of work in Florence. Now, he was there the court painter of Louis XII, who at that time controlled the entire Italian north. Periodically, the artist returned to Florence, fulfilling one or another order. Leonardo's ordeal ended in 1513, when he moved to Rome to the new patron Giuliano Medici, brother of Pope Leo X. For the next three years, da Vinci was mainly engaged in science, engineering commissions and technical experiments.
Already in a very old age, Leonardo da Vinci moved again, this time to France, at the invitation of Francis I, who replaced Louis XII on the throne. Rest of life master of genius was held in the royal residence, the castle of Lmboise, surrounded by the highest honor from the monarch. The artist himself, despite the numbness of his right hand and the constantly deteriorating state of health, continued to make sketches and engage in students who replaced his family, which the master never created during his lifetime.
The gift of the observer and scientist
From the early childhood Leonardo had the rare talent of an observer. From an early childhood and until the end of his life, the artist, fascinated by natural phenomena, could spend hours peering into the flame of a candle, follow the behavior of living beings, study the movement of water, the growth cycles of plants and the flight of birds. A lively interest in the world around him gave the master a lot of invaluable knowledge and the keys to many secrets of nature. “Nature arranged everything so perfectly that everywhere you find something that can give you new knowledge,” said the master.
During his life, Leonardo made transitions through the highest alpine passes to explore the nature of atmospheric phenomena, traveled through mountain lakes and rivers to study the properties of water. All his life Leonardo carried with him notebook, in which he entered everything that attracted his attention. Special meaning he attached to optics, believing that the painter's eye is a direct tool scientific knowledge.
Refusing to follow the road beaten by his contemporaries, Leonardo was looking for his own answers to the questions of harmony and proportionality of all things (the world around him and man himself) that worried him. The artist realized that if he wants to capture the person himself and the world around him in his works, without distorting their essence, he must study the nature of both as deeply as possible. Starting with the observation of visible phenomena and forms, he gradually delved into the processes and mechanisms that govern them.
Mathematical knowledge helped the painter to understand that any object or object is a whole, which inevitably consists of many parts, proportionality and correct location which gives rise to what is called harmony. The incredible discovery of the painter was that the concepts of "nature", "beauty" and "harmony" are inextricably linked with a specific law, following which absolutely all forms in nature are formed, starting from the most distant stars in the sky, and ending with flower petals. Leonardo realized that this law can be expressed in the language of numbers, and using it, create beautiful and harmonious works in painting, sculpture, architecture and any other field.
In fact, Leonardo managed to discover the principle by which the Creator of Being himself created this world. The artist called his discovery "Golden, or Divine Proportion". This law was already known to philosophers and creators ancient world, in Greece and Egypt, where it was widely used in the most different types art. The painter followed the path of practice, and preferred to acquire all his knowledge from his own experience of interaction with nature and the world.
Leonardo did not skimp on sharing his discoveries and achievements with the world. Even during his lifetime, he worked together with the mathematician Luca Pocioli on the creation of the book "Divine Proportion", and after the death of the master, the treatise "The Golden Section", completely based on his discoveries, saw the light. Both books are written about art in the language of mathematics, geometry and physics. In addition to these sciences, the artist at various times was seriously interested in the study of chemistry, astronomy, botany, geology, geodesy, optics and anatomy. And all in order, in the end, to solve the problems that he set himself in art. It was through painting, which Leonardo considered the most intellectual form of creativity, that he sought to express the harmony and beauty of the surrounding space.
Life on canvas
Looking at the creative heritage of the great painter, one can clearly see how the depth of penetration of Leonardo into the foundations of the foundations scientific knowledge about the world filled his paintings with life, making them more and more truthful. It seems that you can easily start a conversation with the people depicted by the master, turn the objects painted by him in your hands, and enter the landscape and get lost. In the images of Leonardo, mysterious and surprisingly realistic at the same time, depth and spirituality are obvious.
To understand what Leonardo considered a real, living creation, one can draw an analogy with photography. Photography, in fact, is only a mirror copy, a documentary evidence of life, a reflection of the created world, unable to achieve its perfection. From this point of view, the photographer is the modern incarnation of the one about whom Leonardo said: “The painter who sketches senselessly, guided only by practice and the judgment of the eye, is like an ordinary mirror that imitates all the objects opposed to it, knowing nothing about them.” A real artist, according to the master, studying nature and recreating it on the canvas, must surpass it, "inventing countless forms of herbs and animals, trees and landscapes."
The next stage of mastery and a unique gift of a person, according to Leonardo, is fantasy. “Where nature has already finished producing its species, man himself begins to create from natural things, with the help of this same nature, countless types of new things.” The development of the imagination is the first and most basic thing that an artist should do, according to da Vinci, this is what he writes about on the pages of his manuscripts. In the mouth of Leonardo, this sounds like Truth with a capital letter, because he himself has repeatedly proved this with his whole life and creative heritage, which includes so many brilliant conjectures and inventions.
The indefatigable desire for knowledge of Leonardo touched almost all areas of human activity. During his life, the master was able to prove himself as a musician, poet and writer, engineer and mechanic, sculptor, architect and urbanist, biologist, physicist and chemist, expert in anatomy and medicine, geologist and cartographer. Da Vinci's genius even found its way into creating recipes, designing clothes, compiling games for palace entertainment, and designing gardens.
Leonardo boasted not only an unusually versatile knowledge and a wide range of skills, but also almost perfect appearance. According to contemporaries, he was tall, handsome man, beautifully built and endowed with great physical strength. Leonardo sang excellently, was a brilliant and witty storyteller, danced and played the lyre, had refined manners, was courteous and simply charmed people with his mere presence.
Perhaps it was precisely this originality of his in almost all spheres of life that caused such a cautious attitude towards him of the conservative majority, who perceive innovative ideas with apprehension. for genius and out of the box thinking he was repeatedly branded as a heretic and even accused of serving the devil. Apparently this is the fate of all geniuses who come into our world to break the foundations and lead humanity forward.
In word and deed, denying the experience of past generations, great painter said that "the picture of the painter will not be perfect if he takes the pictures of others as an inspiration." This also applied to all other areas of knowledge. Leonardo paid great attention to experience as the main source of ideas about man and the world. “Wisdom is the daughter of experience”, said the artist, it cannot be acquired just by studying books, because those who write them are just intermediaries between people and nature.
Each person is a child of nature and the crown of creation. Countless possibilities of knowing the world are open to him, inextricably linked with every cell of his body. Through the study of the world, Leonardo knew himself. The question that torments many art historians is what interested da Vinci more - painting or knowledge? Who was he in the end - an artist, a scientist or a philosopher? The answer, in fact, is simple, like a true creator, Leonardo da Vinci harmoniously combined all these concepts in one. After all, you can learn to draw, be able to use a brush and paints, but this will not make you an artist, because real creativity is a special state of feelings and attitude to the world. Our world will reciprocate, become a muse, reveal its secrets and allow only those who truly love it to penetrate into the very essence of things and phenomena. From the way Leonardo lived, from everything he did, it is obvious that he was a man passionately in love.
Images of the Madonna
The work "The Annunciation" (1472-1475, Louvre, Paris) was written by a young painter at the very beginning of his creative way. The painting depicting the Annunciation was intended for one of the monasteries not far from Florence. It gave rise to much controversy among researchers of the great Leonardo. Doubts relate in particular to the fact that the work is completely independent work artist. It must be said that such disputes over authorship are not uncommon for many of Leonardo's works.
Executed on a wooden panel of impressive dimensions - 98 x 217 cm, the work shows the moment when the archangel Gabriel, who descended from heaven, tells Mary that she will give birth to a son whom Jesus will name. It is traditionally believed that Mary at this time is just reading the very passage of the prophecies of Isaiah, which mentions the future fulfillment. It is no coincidence that the scene is depicted against the backdrop of a spring garden - the flowers in the archangel's hand and under his feet symbolize the purity of the Virgin Mary. And the garden itself, surrounded by a low wall, traditionally refers us to the sinless image of the Mother of God, fenced off by her purity from the outside world.
An interesting fact is connected with the wings of Gabriel. It is clearly visible in the picture that they were completed later - Unknown artist lengthened them in a very crude pictorial manner. The original wings that Leonardo depicted remained distinguishable - they are much shorter and were probably copied by the artist from the wings of a real bird.
In this work, if you look closely, you can find several mistakes made by the still inexperienced Leonardo in building perspective. The most obvious of which is Mary's right hand, visually located closer to the viewer than her entire figure. There is no softness in the draperies of the clothes yet, they look too heavy and frozen, as if made of stone. Here we must take into account that this is how Leonardo was taught by his mentor Verrocchio. This angularity and sharpness is characteristic of almost all the works of artists of that time. But in the future, on the way to finding his own pictorial realism, Leonardo will develop himself and lead all other artists.
In the painting "Madonna Litta" (circa 1480, the Hermitage, St. Petersburg), Leonardo managed to create an incredibly expressive female image with almost a single gesture. On the canvas, we see a thoughtful, tender and peaceful mother, admiring her child, concentrating in this look all the fullness of feelings. Without such a special tilt of the head, so characteristic of many works of the master, which he studied for hours creating dozens of preparatory drawings, much of the impression of boundless maternal love would be lost. Only the shadows in the corners of Maria's lips seem to hint at the possibility of a smile, but how much tenderness this gives to the whole face. The work is quite small in size, only 42 x 33 cm, it is most likely that it was intended for domestic worship. Indeed, in Italy of the 15th century, picturesque images of the Madonna and Child were quite popular; wealthy citizens often ordered them from artists. Presumably, the "Madonna Litta" was originally written by a master for the rulers of Milan. Then, having changed several owners, she moved into a private family collection. The modern title of the work comes from the name of Count Litt, who owned the family art gallery in Milan. In 1865, it was he who sold it to the Hermitage along with several other paintings.
In the right hand of the baby Jesus, a chick, invisible at first sight, is almost hidden, serving in Christian tradition a symbol of the Son of God and His childhood. There are disputes around the canvas, caused by too clear contours of the drawing and some unnatural posture of the child, which leads many researchers to assume that one of Leonardo's students took an active part in creating the picture.
The first painting, in which the revealed talent of the master is visible, was the canvas “Madonna in the Grotto” (circa 1483, Louvre, Paris). The composition was commissioned for the altar of the chapel in the Milanese church of St. Francis and was supposed to be the central part of the triptych. The order was divided among three masters. One of them created the side panels with the image of angels for the altarpiece, the other - a carved frame of the finished piece of wood.
The churchmen entered into a very detailed contract with Leonardo. It stipulated the smallest details of the picture, down to the style and technique of execution of all elements and even the color of the clothes, from which the artist should not deviate a single step. So, a work was born that tells about the meeting of the baby Jesus and John the Baptist. The action takes place in the depths of the grotto, in which the mother and son are hiding from the persecutors sent by King Herod, who saw in the Son of God a direct threat to his power. The Baptist rushes to Jesus, folding his palms in prayer, he, in turn, blesses him with a gesture of his hand. The silent witness of the sacrament is the angel Uriel, looking towards the viewer. From now on, he will be called to protect John. All four figures are so skillfully arranged in the picture that they seem to form a single whole. I would like to call the whole composition “musical”, there is so much tenderness, harmony and smoothness in its characters, united by gestures and glances.
This work was given to the artist is very difficult. The time frame was strictly stipulated in the contract, but, as often happened with the painter, he failed to meet them, which led to litigation. After much litigation, Leonardo had to write another version of this composition, now stored in National Gallery London, we know her as the "Madonna of the Rocks".
The famous fresco of the Milanese monastery
Within the walls of the Milanese monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie, or rather in its refectory, one of the greatest masterpieces of painting and the main national treasure of Italy is stored. The legendary fresco "The Last Supper" (1495-1498) occupies a space of 4.6 x 8.8 m, and describes the dramatic moment when, surrounded by disciples, Christ utters the sad prophecy "One of you will betray me."
The painter, who was always attracted by the study of human passions, wanted to capture ordinary people in the images of the apostles, and not historical characters. Each of them responds to the event in its own way. Leonardo made it his task to convey the psychological atmosphere of the evening with maximum realism, to convey to us the various characters of its participants, exposing their spiritual world and conflicting experiences with the accuracy of a psychologist. In the variety of faces of the characters in the picture and their gestures, there is a place for almost all emotions from surprise to furious anger, from confusion to sadness, from simple disbelief to deep shock. The future traitor Judas, whom traditionally all artists had previously separated from the general group, in this work sits with the rest, clearly distinguished by a gloomy expression on his face and a shadow that seems to have enveloped his entire figure. Given the principle of the golden ratio discovered by him, Leonardo verified the location of each of the students with mathematical accuracy. All twelve apostles are divided into four practically symmetrical groups highlighting the figure of Christ in the center. Other details of the picture are designed not to distract attention from the characters. So, the table is deliberately made excessively small, and the room itself, in which the meal takes place, is strict and simple.
While working on The Last Supper, Leonardo experimented with paints. But, unfortunately, the composition of primer and paint he invented, for which he combined oil and tempera, turned out to be completely unstable. The consequence of this was that just twenty years after writing, the work began to deteriorate rapidly and irreversibly. The stable that Napoleon's army set up in the room where the fresco was located exacerbated an already existing problem. As a result, almost from the beginning of its history to the present day, restoration work has been carried out on this monumental canvas, only thanks to which it still manages to be preserved.
Head Xu own long life, Leonardo da Vinci created no more than twenty paintings, some of which remained unfinished. Such surprising for that time not fecundity alerted customers, but the slowness with which the master used to work on his paintings became a byword. The memories of the monk of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, who watched the work of the painter on the famous fresco " Last Supper". This is how he described Leonardo's working day: early in the morning, the artist climbed onto the scaffolding erected around the picture, and could not part with the brush until late at night, completely forgetting about food and rest. But another time, he spent hours, days on end, intently examining his creation, without applying a single stroke. Unfortunately, despite all the efforts of the master, due to an unsuccessful experiment and materials, the fresco from the Milan monastery has become one of the most strong disappointments artist.
Mysterious Mona Lisa
But the painting "Mona Lisa" took a huge place in his life. From the moment of writing famous canvas and until the end of his life, Leonardo will be inseparable from him, as from his most priceless treasure. What is the secret of the grandiose impression that this small picture (only 77x53 cm) makes, has been wondering for centuries by millions of viewers who have seen it at least once.
It is extremely surprising that in the records of Leonardo da Vinci there is not a single mention of this portrait. There is no information about who commissioned him to work on the canvas, or who served as a model for him, or how the process of its creation went. The artist, who spent his whole life making records of everything in the world, never once mentioned the owl's greatest creation.
There is absolutely no documentary evidence, but the inquisitive minds of specialists have advanced unusually far in their conjectures. At different times, the Duchess Matui Isabella d'Este, whose portraits Leonardo worked at that time, then a certain Florentine lady named Pacifica Brandano, who was the mistress of the noble philanthropist Giuliano Medici, became candidates for the heroine of the canvas. A number of researchers assure that no model at all and was not, and Leonardo created the perfect collective image women. Others believe that he recreated the features of his mother from memory. Still others prove that this is a young man in women's attire, who was a student, and possibly a lover of the painter himself - Gnan Giacomo Caproti, who was next to Leonardo for the last 26 years (by the way, it was to him that the artist bequeathed the painting). Well, the last, of the most popular versions, tells us that the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci himself.
Absolutely all guesses, have no real evidence. There is also official version. It claims that the painting depicts the wife of the wealthy Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, Lisa Gherardini. The exact date of the creation of the painting is also not known, it is believed that the work on the Gioconda took place between 1503 and 1513. Presumably, the future Mona Lisa, and then just Lisa Gherardini, began to pose when she was about twenty-four years old. The prefix "mona", again, presumably, is nothing more than an abbreviation of the word "madonna", which in Italian means "lady, madam."
revived image
The entire Renaissance was characterized by the proclamation of man as the crown of nature, its most perfect creation. As a result, in painting, which sought to imitate nature in everything, the true indicator of the artist's skill is precisely the ability to depict a person. Moreover, it was important to convey not only the characteristic features of the external appearance of the model. The most important was the ability to reveal the personality of the person being portrayed. This is where questions and searches begin, how to show the invisible, how to convey in the picture the temperament and hidden spiritual qualities inherent in the characters?
Leonardo, of course, had his own answer to these questions. The artist advised to write characters with such gestures that would reflect their state of mind. “If the figures do not make certain gestures, moreover, such that the members of the body would express the representation of their soul, then these figures are doubly dead: mostly dead because painting itself does not live, but is only an expression of living objects without life, if they are not joined by the vitality of the movement (gesture), then they turn out to be dead one more time, ”the master considered.
At the same time, it is not necessary to resort to complex angles and intricate movements, the painter himself never did this. Leonardo managed to achieve the heights of skill in creating saturation and depth of the image with the almost complete absence of external movement. The Mona Lisa's face is illuminated by a barely perceptible smile, which gives it some special expression. In a woman looking from a portrait, everything is simple, natural and at the same time very mysterious. She either thinks about something, or remembers something. Leonardo created, without exaggeration, absolutely living face living person. He managed not to copy, but to recreate his model on canvas, showing such a lively and spiritual image that it is almost frightening. One gets the feeling that it is not the viewer who is looking at the Mona Lisa, but she herself is looking at him with a deep, meaningful look. Many argue that, being in the same room with the painting, it seems that the gaze of the Mona Lisa is always directed at the viewer, no matter where he moves. Some also argue that the face of the Gioconda changes, depending on which angle you look at it from. It turns out that this is not a picture, but the real presence of the heroine, created by the greatest genius of Leonardo da Vinci.
Unrivaled craftsmanship
How did the painter manage to create such an amazing effect? How to make live own life a layer of paint on a flat surface of a wood panel? What kind of magic did Leonardo apply, using only a brush and a palette, so that millions of viewers would believe in the Gioconda as a real one?!
Art critics carefully studied the picture. If we talk about the technique of its execution, then it should be noted here that the work is made with almost transparent, unusually thin layers of applied color, covering the original drawing. When the previous coating dried up, the master applied the next, and so, many, many times, showing enviable patience and virtuosity.
The result of such painstaking work, this unusually multi-layered painting, was such a smooth transition of some colors to others that the original contour lines the drawings seem to be dissolved. And it is precisely this lack of boundaries between light and shadow, softly merging with each other, that creates a feeling of living volume. Another incredible achievement of Leonardo was the image of the thickness of the air, unprecedented for the painting of that time. The artist fills the space of the picture with a barely noticeable haze, thanks to which depth appears in the work.
This effect of haze, diffused soft light, Leonardo called Italian term"sfumato". The artist's brush strokes were so small that neither an X-ray nor a microscope can detect any traces of his work, nor determine the number of layers of paint applied. Many artists for hundreds of years have tried to repeat Leonardo's technique, but none of them succeeded. Until now, "Mona Lisa" is considered unsurpassed in terms of painting technique.
And all this even despite the fact that we have the opportunity to see a rather changed picture. The masterpiece of the great Leonardo has been around for many years, during which time there have been some changes, in particular in the color palette of the canvas. The first biographer of the painter, Giorgio Vasari, who lived in the 16th century, in his descriptions of the work, mentions with admiration the crimson shades in the color scheme of the palette used to paint the face of Lisa Gherardini. Today, nothing like this can be seen in the picture.
The ratio of colors in the painting was also influenced by the lacquer coatings that, after Leonardo, were applied to the surface of the masterpiece in order to ensure its better preservation, they also created a blurred effect. Now we are looking at the image of a lady, which seems to shine through the thickness of the sea water. The composition of the painting has also undergone changes - two columns that were previously located on the sides of the main figure were completely lost. But these architectural elements completely changed the perception of the composition, because thanks to them it was immediately clear that the heroine of the picture was sitting on the balcony of the track, and not at all suspended in space, as it sometimes seems.
Laws of harmony
When creating a masterpiece, Leonardo naturally used the law of the “golden proportion” discovered by him. All elements of the picture are arranged in a strictly defined way. They follow the law of divine, harmonious proportion. The figure of Gioconda corresponds to the rule of the "golden triangle" with mathematical precision, ideally corresponding to all parts of the regular star pentagon. From the point of view of the viewer, who distinguishes the surrounding objects by shape, this is very important, although it is not realized by the person himself.
Very often, intuitively, we consider attractive and are drawn to precisely those forms that obey the law of proportion. The ancient sages and masters knew this, and modern scientists have proven it experimentally. This law applies not only to painting, but also to psychology, industrial design. The creation of forms and images for modern advertising is based on the law of harmony, we just do not know about it and do not think about it.
The magic of true art
You can write a lot about the magic and improbability of Leonardo's masterpiece, but words are just words to understand what Mona Lisa is, you need to see it. Only by looking into her eyes, you can feel everything that art critics, critics and ordinary people write about her.
Unfortunately, photographs and reproductions erase the life from the face of the Mona Lisa, and the magic of her image disappears without a trace. Photography gives only a general idea of the work, it is only a hindrance for those who dream of enjoying communication with living creations. Photography is only an intermediary, like any reasoning about the masterpiece of numerous art critics. Not a single book will tell you what the motionless Mona Lisa will tell you personally. As the great creator of the picture himself said: "Who can go to the source, should not go to the jug." No amount of knowledge will help to feel; in dealing with true, living works of art, only one's own spiritual sensitivity is needed. In a meeting with the "Mona Lisa" everyone will have to independently look for the solution to her secrets. It has been proven that different people it evokes a variety of feelings and associations, in some it revives personal memories, in others it leads to reflection. Some are sure that it is sad, others that it is thoughtful, third it seems crafty, and some even sinister. Well, someone will decide that she does not smile at all, and all her mystical mystery is fiction.
Reflection of the great Leonardo
The popular fact that when Leonardo's self-portrait is superimposed on the image of the Mona Lisa, the upper part of the face almost completely coincides can be explained from a scientific point of view. Art critics say that just as the Creator put a soul into a person, a painter puts a piece of himself into his creation. Feeling how incredibly strongly he is connected to literally everyone own work, Leonardo da Vinci repeatedly argued that “created figures very often resemble their masters. This happens because our judgment is what moves our hand when creating all the outlines of this figure.
Looking at a work of art, the observer not only sees what is depicted on it. The most important thing that happens - it comes into contact with inner world painter and recognizes him. Perhaps that is why the restrained, almost ephemeral smile of the Mona Lisa excites the hearts and minds of people with its incomprehensibility for so long? It feels all the wisdom of knowing the true nature of the surrounding objects, accumulated by Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps, through his favorite brainchild, the artist himself looks at us with a slight grin. It seems that the whole experience of the world, embodied in the form of a woman, is collected in this small portrait. To penetrate the secret of the Gioconda is the same as to comprehend the genius who created it.
And in Rome, and in Milan, and in his last refuge, the French Amboise, Leonardo never parted with this canvas. And after his death, he bequeathed the "Mona Lisa" to his assistant and student, who soon sold the painting to an ardent admirer and last patron of the master, the French king Francis I.
Entire generations of monarchs admired the painting in Versailles, until Louis XV ordered it to be moved to the palace vault. After the French Revolution, Napoleon moved the masterpiece to his private bedroom in the Tuileries Palace. Later, the Mona Lisa ended up in the Napoleon Museums in the Louvre. From where she was abducted on August 21, 1911. The thief was an Italian, who immensely revered the works of the great master, named Vincenzo. He dreamed of returning the canvas to the artist's homeland and for almost three years hid the masterpiece in his own house. All this time, until her return to the Louvre, Mona Lisa did not leave the covers of magazines and newspapers around the world. So, already at the beginning of the 20th century, the Mona Lisa became the most recognizable work in the history of world art, and disputes and talk about it continue to this day.
Looking at yourself
Renaissance artists used to place an image of themselves somewhere in the back of the paintings they were working on. Perhaps Leonardo was no exception and portrayed himself as a young shepherd on preparatory drawing to the canvas "The Adoration of the Magi". Among other things, there is an opinion that he often captured his features in order to study the proportions of the human face. However, all this is just speculation with no indisputable evidence. The only portrait of the artist, whose authenticity is not in doubt - "Self-Portrait" (Royal Library, Turin), written around 1515, 33 x 21 cm in size, which is now printed in every illustrated edition dedicated to the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci.
One of the 16th-century artists, Giovanni Lomazzo, described him as follows: “His head was covered with such long hair, and his eyebrows were so thick and his beard so impressive that he seemed to be a true personification of the noblest learning, which the ancient Prometheus and the druid Hermes used to be.”
The master created his "Self-portrait" when he was already about sixty years old. Leonardo spent his whole life studying the world around him, nature and people, and now, when his creative and life path was drawing to a close, the moment had come to look at himself. The artist did this not just like looking in a mirror, but looked at himself from the position of an artist who is able to penetrate into the deep essence of things and capture what he saw and learned on the flat surface of the sheet with confident hand movements.
This self-portrait, better than anything else, exposes the master not only in front of others, but, first of all, in front of himself. Only a few lines were sketched by Leonardo with a piece of red sanguine, but it seems he could not be more honest. Only youth is the time for narcissism, maturity is useless. Before us appears a man with the look of a sage, his features are severe and at the same time calm. His image does not look like a weary old man, but rather like a genius with incredible inner strength whose soul is still full of passion. Leonardo is serious, focused and as if full of determination. This quick drawing I was able to transfer the finished image to which there is nothing more to add. The fate of the drawing was not known for a long time. It was discovered only towards the end of the 19th century, when the Italian monarch Charles Albert of Savoy bought it from an unknown collector and transferred it to the Royal Library of Turin for preservation.
The great Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519. Centuries later, the master remains a symbol of the boundless aspirations of the human mind, a creator, genius and visionary, endowed with almost superhuman abilities. All attempts to penetrate the secrets that the artist left as a legacy to people are akin to the desire to understand the essence of art itself, as the highest manifestation of man.
Zhuravleva Tatiana
