Discoveries of Leonardo da Vinci in the field of science and technology. Leonardo da Vinci - Italian genius

COURSE WORK

in the discipline "Culturology"

Subject: Leonardo Da Vinci

1. The life path of Leonardo da Vinci

2.2.1 "La Gioconda"

2.2.2 "Last Supper"

Literature

Application

Introduction

The Renaissance was rich in outstanding personalities. But Leonardo, who was born in the town of Vinci near Florence on April 15, 1452, stands out even against the general background of other famous people of the Renaissance.

This supergenius of the beginning of the Italian Renaissance is so strange that it causes scientists not just amazement, but almost awe, mixed with confusion. Even a general overview of its capabilities shocks researchers: well, a person, even if he has at least seven spans in his forehead, cannot immediately be a brilliant engineer, artist, sculptor, inventor, mechanic, chemist, philologist, scientist, seer, one of the best in his time singer, swimmer, musical instrument maker, cantata, equestrian, swordsman, architect, fashion designer, etc. His external data are also striking: Leonardo is tall, slender and so beautiful in face that he was called an "angel", while being superhumanly strong (with his right hand - being left-handed! - he could crush a horseshoe).

About Leonardo da Vinci wrote repeatedly. But the theme of his life and work, both as a scientist and a person of art, is still relevant today. The purpose of this work is to tell in detail about Leonardo da Vinci. This goal is realized by solving the following tasks:

review the biography of Leonardo da Vinci;

analyze the main periods of his work;

describe his most famous works;

talk about his activities as a scientist and inventor;

give examples of Leonardo da Vinci's predictions.

The structure of the work is as follows. The work consists of three chapters or five paragraphs, introduction, conclusion, bibliography and illustrations in the appendix.

The first chapter is devoted to the biography of the great Florentine.

The second chapter discusses the main periods of his work - early, mature and late. It tells in detail about such masterpieces of Leonardo as "La Gioconda (Mona Lisa)" and "The Last Supper".

The third chapter fully describes the scientific activities of Leonardo da Vinci. Particular attention is paid to the work of da Vinci in the field of mechanics, as well as his aircraft.

In conclusion, conclusions are drawn on the topic of the work.

1. The life path of Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 and died in 1519. The father of the future genius, Piero da Vinci, a wealthy notary and landowner, was the most famous person in Florence, but his mother Katerina was a simple peasant girl, a fleeting whim of an influential lord. There were no children in the official family of Pierrot, so from the age of 4-5 the boy was brought up with his father and stepmother, while his own mother, as was customary, was hastened to give out with a dowry to a peasant. The handsome boy, who at the same time was distinguished by his extraordinary mind and affable character, immediately became a common darling and favorite in his father's house. This was partly facilitated by the fact that Leonardo's first two stepmothers were childless. Piero's third wife, Margherita, entered the home of Leonardo's father when her famous stepson was already 24 years old. From his third wife, Senor Piero had nine sons and two daughters, but none of them shone "neither intellect nor sword."

Possessing broad knowledge and mastering the basics of science, Leonardo da Vinci would have achieved great advantages if he had not been so changeable and inconstant. In fact, he took up the study of many subjects, but, having begun, then abandoned them. So, in mathematics, in the few months that he studied it, he made such progress that, constantly putting forward all sorts of doubts and difficulties before the teacher with whom he studied, he more than once puzzled him. He also spent some efforts on the knowledge of musical science, but soon decided to learn only how to play the lyre. As a man endowed by nature with a sublime and charming spirit, he sang divinely, improvising to her accompaniment. Yet, in spite of his various occupations, he never gave up drawing and modeling, as the things that attracted his imagination more than any other.

In 1466, at the age of 14, Leonardo da Vinci entered the studio of Verrocchio as an apprentice. It happened in this way: Ser Piero, Leonardo's father, 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. At this time, he also distinguished himself in sculpture, sculpting several heads of laughing women from clay, and in architecture, drawing many plans and other types of different buildings. He was also the first who, while still a youth, discussed the question of how to divert the Arno River through a canal connecting Pisa with Florence. He also made drawings of mills, fullers, and other machines that could be set in motion by the power of water.

In the painting by Verrocchio: "The Baptism of the Lord", one of the angels is painted by Leonardo da Vinci; according to the legend transmitted by Vasari, the old master, seeing himself surpassed by the work of a student, allegedly abandoned painting. Be that as it may, but around 1472, Leonardo, who was then twenty years old, left the workshop of Verrocchio and began to work independently.

Leonardo da Vinci was handsome, well-built, possessed of great physical strength, was well-versed in the arts of chivalry, horseback riding, dancing, fencing, etc. Leonardo's contemporaries note that he was so pleasant in communication that he attracted the souls of people. He was very fond of animals - especially horses. Passing through the places where the birds were traded, he took them out of the cage with his own hands and, having paid the seller the price he demanded, set them free, restoring their lost freedom.

There are many legends and legends about Leonardo da Vinci. It is said that one day, when Ser Piero of Vinci was on his estate, one of his peasants, who carved a round shield with his own hands from a fig tree he had cut down on his master's land, simply asked him to have this shield painted for him in Florence, to which he very willingly agreed, since this peasant was a very experienced birder and knew the places where fish were caught, and Ser Piero widely used his services in hunting and fishing. And so, having transported the shield to Florence, but without telling Leonardo where it came from, Ser Piero asked him to write something on it. But Leonardo, when one fine day this shield fell into his hands and when he saw that the shield was crooked, poorly worked and clumsy, straightened it on fire and, giving it to the turner, made it smooth and even from warped and clumsy, and then, having gone through and processed it in his own way, he began to think about what to write on it that would frighten everyone who stumbles upon it, producing the same impression that Medusa's head had once produced. And for this purpose, Leonardo let into one of the rooms, into which no one except him entered, various lizards, crickets, snakes, butterflies, grasshoppers, bats and other strange species of similar creatures, from a variety of which, combining them in in different ways, he created a very disgusting and terrible monster, which poisoned with its breath and ignited the air. He depicted him crawling out of a dark cleft of the rock and emitting poison from his open mouth, flame from his eyes and smoke from his nostrils, and so unusually that it actually seemed to be something monstrous and frightening. And he worked on it for so long that in the room from dead animals there was a cruel and unbearable stench, which, however, Leonardo did not notice because of the great love he had for art. Having finished this work, about which neither the peasant nor the father asked any more, Leonardo told the latter that he could, when he wanted, send for a shield, since he, for his part, had done his job. And when one morning Ser Piero entered his room behind a shield and knocked on the door, Leonardo opened it, but asked him to wait and, returning to the room, put the shield on the lectern and in the light, but adjusted the window so that it gave a muffled lighting. Ser Piero, who did not think about it, shuddered at the first glance from surprise, not believing that this was the same shield, and even more so that the image he saw was a painting, and when he stepped back, Leonardo, supporting him, said: "This is The work serves the purpose for which it was made. So take it and give it away, for such is the effect that is expected from works of art. "This thing seemed to Ser Piero more than wonderful, and he honored Leonardo's bold words with the greatest praise. And then, slowly buying from the shopkeeper another shield on which was written he gave his heart, pierced by an arrow, to a peasant who remained grateful to him for this for life. Later, in Florence, Ser Piero secretly sold a shield painted by Leonardo to some merchants for a hundred ducats, and soon this shield fell into the hands of a Milanese to the duke, to whom the same merchants resold it for three hundred ducats.

Around 1480, Leonardo was called to Milan to the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza, as a musician and improviser. He was, however, instructed to establish an academy of arts in Milan. For teaching at this academy, Leonardo da Vinci compiled treatises on painting, on light, on shadows, on movement, on theory and practice, on the movements of the human body, on the proportions of the human body.

As an architect, Leonardo built buildings, especially in Milan, and composed many architectural projects and drawings, specially studied anatomy, mathematics, perspective, mechanics; he abandoned extensive projects, such as the project of connecting Florence and Pisa by means of a canal; extremely bold was his plan to raise the ancient baptistery of S. Giovanni in Florence in order to raise the foundation under it and thus give this building a more magnificent appearance. For the sake of studying the expressions of feelings and passions in man. He visited the most populous places where human activity was in full swing, and entered into the album everything that came across to him; he accompanied the criminals to the place of execution, imprinting in his memory the expression of torment and extreme despair; he invited peasants to his house, to whom he told the most amusing things, wanting to study their comic expression on their faces. With such realism, Leonardo was at the same time endowed in the highest degree with a deep subjective feeling, tender, partly sentimental daydreaming. In some of his works, one or the other element predominates, but in the main, best, works, both elements are balanced by beautiful harmony, so that, thanks to a brilliant idea and a sense of beauty, they occupy that high step, which undoubtedly secures one of the first places for him. among the great masters of modern art.

Leonardo started a lot, but never finished anything, because it seemed to him that in those things that he had conceived, the hand was not capable of achieving artistic perfection, since in his plan he created various difficulties for himself, so subtle and amazing that they even the most skilful hands could under no circumstances have expressed.

Of the enterprises performed by da Vinci on behalf of Ludovico Sforza, the colossal equestrian statue in memory of Francesca Sforza, cast in bronze, is especially remarkable. The first model of this monument was accidentally broken. Leonardo da Vinci sculpted another, but the statue was not cast due to lack of money. When the French captured Milan in 1499, the model served as a target for the Gascon archers. In Milan, Leonardo also created the famous "Last Supper".

After the expulsion of Lodovico Sforza from Milan by the French in 1499, Leonardo left for Venice, visiting Mantua on the way, where he participated in the construction of defensive structures, and then returned to Florence; it is reported that he was so absorbed in mathematics that he did not want to think about picking up a brush. For twelve years, Leonardo constantly moved from city to city, working for the famous Cesare Borgia in Romagna, designing defenses (never built) for Piombino. In Florence he entered into a rivalry with Michelangelo; this rivalry culminated in the enormous battle compositions that the two artists painted for Palazzo della Signoria (also Palazzo Vecchio). Then Leonardo conceived a second equestrian monument, which, like the first, was never created. All these years, he continued to fill his notebooks with a variety of ideas on subjects as diverse as the theory and practice of painting, anatomy, mathematics, and the flight of birds. But in 1513, as in 1499, his patrons were expelled from Milan.

Leonardo went to Rome, where he spent three years under the auspices of the Medici. Depressed and distressed by the lack of material for anatomical research, Leonardo fiddled with experiments and ideas that led nowhere.

The French, first Louis XII and then Francis I, admired the works of the Italian Renaissance, especially Leonardo's Last Supper. Therefore, it is not surprising that in 1516, Francis I, well aware of the various talents of Leonardo, invited him to the court, which was then located in the castle of Amboise in the Loire Valley. Although Leonardo worked on hydraulic projects and plans for a new royal palace, it is clear from the writings of the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini that his main occupation was the honorary position of court sage and adviser. On May 2, 1519, Leonardo dies in the arms of King Francis I, asking for forgiveness from God and people that he "did not do everything for art that he could do." Thus, we examined a brief biography of the great Italian Renaissance painter - Leonard da Vinci. The next chapter will explore the work of Leonard da Vinci as a painter.

2. Creativity of Leonardo da Vinci

2.1 The main periods in the painting of Leonardo da Vinci

The work of the great Italian painter can be divided into early, mature and late periods.

The first dated work (1473, Uffizi) is a small sketch of the river valley seen from the gorge; on one side is a castle, on the other - a wooded hillside. This sketch, made with quick strokes of the pen, testifies to the artist's constant interest in atmospheric phenomena, about which he later wrote extensively in his notes. The landscape depicted from a high vantage point overlooking the floodplain was a common device for Florentine art of the 1460s (although it always served only as a backdrop for paintings). A silver pencil drawing of an ancient warrior in profile (mid-1470s, British Museum) shows Leonardo's full maturity as a draftsman; it skillfully combines weak, flaccid and tense, elastic lines and attention to surfaces gradually modeled by light and shadow, creating a lively, quivering image.

The undated painting The Annunciation (mid-1470s, Uffizi) was only attributed to Leonardo in the 19th century; perhaps it would be more correct to consider it as the result of a collaboration between Leonardo and Verrocchio. There are several weak points in it, for example, a too sharp perspective reduction of the building on the left or a poorly developed scale ratio of the figure of the Mother of God and the music stand. Otherwise, however, especially in the subtle and soft modeling, as well as in the interpretation of a foggy landscape with a mountain looming in the background, the picture belongs to the hand of Leonardo; this can be inferred from a study of his later work. The question of whether the compositional idea belongs to him remains open. Muted in comparison with the works of his contemporaries, the colors anticipate the color of the artist's later works.

Verrocchio's Baptism (Uffizi) is also undated, although it could presumably be placed in the first half of the 1470s. As already noted in the first chapter, Giorgio Vasari, one of the first biographers of Leonardo, claims that he painted the figure of the left of two angels, turned in profile. The angel's head is delicately modeled with light and shadow, with a soft and careful rendering of the surface texture, different from the more linear treatment of the angel on the right. It seems that Leonardo's involvement in this painting extended to the foggy river landscape and some parts of the figure of Christ, which are painted in oils, although tempera is used in other parts of the picture. Such a difference in technique suggests that Leonardo most likely completed a painting that Verrocchio did not finish; it is unlikely that the artists worked on it at the same time.

Portrait of Ginevra dei Benci (circa 1478, Washington, National Gallery) is possibly Leonardo's first self-painted painting. The board has been cut about 20 cm from the bottom, so that the crossed arms of the young woman have disappeared (this is known from a comparison with surviving imitations of this painting). In this portrait, Leonardo does not seek to penetrate the inner world of the model, however, as a demonstration of the excellent command of soft, almost monochrome black and white modeling, this picture is unparalleled. Behind you can see the branches of juniper (in Italian - ginevra) and a landscape shrouded in a damp haze.

The Portrait of Ginevra dei Benci and the Benois Madonna (St. Petersburg, Hermitage), which was preceded by a series of tiny sketches of the Madonna and Child, are probably the last paintings completed in Florence. The unfinished St. Jerome, very similar in style to the Adoration of the Magi, can also be dated to about 1480. These paintings are contemporaneous with the first surviving sketches of military mechanisms. Educated as an artist, but striving to be a military engineer, Leonardo abandoned work on the Adoration of the Magi and rushed to Milan in search of new tasks and a new life, where the mature period of his work began.

Despite the fact that Leonardo went to Milan in the hope of a career as an engineer, the first commission he received in 1483 was the manufacture of part of the altarpiece for the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception - Madonna in the Grotto (Louvre; attribution to Leonardo of a later version from the London National Gallery is disputed). The kneeling Mary looks at the Christ Child and the little John the Baptist, while the angel pointing at John looks at the viewer. The figures are arranged in a triangle, in the foreground. It seems that the figures are separated from the viewer by a light haze, the so-called sfumato (vague and fuzzy contours, soft shadow), which now becomes a characteristic feature of Leonardo's painting. . Behind them, in the semi-darkness of the cave, stalactites and stalagmites and slowly flowing waters shrouded in mist are visible. The landscape seems fantastic, but Leonardo's statement that painting is a science should be remembered. As can be seen from the drawings, simultaneous with the picture, he was based on careful observations of geological phenomena. This also applies to the depiction of plants: one can not only identify them with a certain species, but also see that Leonardo knew about the property of plants to turn towards the sun.

In the mid-1480s, Leonardo painted "Lady with an Ermine" (Krakow Museum), which may be a portrait of Lodovico Sforza's favorite, Cecilia Gallerani. The contours of the figure of a woman with an animal are outlined by curves of lines that are repeated throughout the composition, and this, combined with muted colors and delicate skin tones, creates the impression of perfect grace and beauty. The beauty of the Lady with the Ermine contrasts strikingly with the grotesque sketches of freaks in which Leonardo explored the extreme degrees of anomalies in the structure of the face.

In Milan, Leonardo began making recordings; around 1490 he focused on two disciplines: architecture and anatomy. He sketched several options for the design of the central-domed temple (an equilateral cross, the central part of which is covered by a dome) - a type of architectural structure that Alberti had previously recommended for the reason that it reflects one of the ancient types of temples and is based on the most perfect form - circle. Leonardo drew a plan and perspective views of the entire structure, in which the distribution of masses and the configuration of the internal space are outlined. Around this time, he obtained a skull and made a cross section, opening the sinuses of the skull for the first time. The notes around the drawings indicate that he was primarily interested in the nature and structure of the brain. Of course, these drawings were intended for purely research purposes, but they are striking in their beauty and similarity with the sketches of architectural projects in that both of them depict partitions separating parts of the interior space.

The mature period of Leonardo da Vinci belongs to two great paintings "La Gioconda (Mona Lisa)" and "The Last Supper".

Mona Lisa was created at a time when Leonardo was so absorbed in the study of the structure of the female body, anatomy and the problems associated with childbearing that it is almost impossible to separate his artistic and scientific interests. During these years, he sketched a human embryo in the uterus and created the last of several versions of Leda's painting based on the ancient myth of the birth of Castor and Pollux from the union of the mortal girl Leda and Zeus, who took the form of a swan. Leonardo was engaged in comparative anatomy and was interested in analogies between all organic forms.

Of all the sciences, Leonardo was most interested in anatomy and military affairs.

The most important of Leonardo's public commissions was also related to the war. In 1503, perhaps at the urging of Niccolò Machiavelli, he was commissioned to paint a fresco about 6 by 15 meters depicting the Battle of Anghiari for the Great Council Hall in the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence. In addition to this fresco, the Battle of Kashin, commissioned by Michelangelo, was to be depicted; both plots are the heroic victories of Florence. This commission allowed the two artists to continue the tense rivalry that began in 1501. Neither of the frescoes was completed, since both artists soon left Florence, Leonardo again for Milan, and Michelangelo for Rome; preparatory cardboards have not been preserved. In the center of Leonardo's composition (known from his sketches and copies from the central part apparently completed by that time) was an episode with a battle for the banner, where horsemen fiercely fight with swords, and fallen soldiers lie under the feet of their horses. Judging by other sketches, the composition should have consisted of three parts, with the battle for the banner in the center. Since there is no clear evidence, the surviving paintings of Leonardo and fragments of his notes suggest that the battle was depicted against the backdrop of a flat landscape with a mountain range on the horizon.

The late period of Leonardo da Vinci's work includes, first of all, several sketches on the plot of the "Madonna and Child" and St. Anna; the idea first arose in Florence. Perhaps around 1505 a cardboard was created (London, National Gallery), and in 1508 or a little later - a picture now in the Louvre. The Madonna sits on the lap of St. Anna and stretches out his hands to the Christ Child holding a lamb; free, rounded shapes of figures, outlined by smooth lines, form a single composition.

John the Baptist (Louvre) depicts a man with a gentle smiling face that emerges from the semi-darkness of the background; he addresses the viewer with a prophecy about the coming of Christ.

The later series of drawings of the Flood (Windsor, Royal Library) depict cataclysms, the power of tons of water, hurricane winds, rocks and trees turning into chips in a whirlwind of a storm. The notes contain many passages about the Flood, some of which are poetic, others are dispassionately descriptive, and others are scientific in the sense that they treat such problems as the eddying movement of water in a whirlpool, its power and trajectory.

For Leonardo, art and research were complementary aspects of the constant desire to observe and record the appearance and internal structure of the world. It can definitely be argued that he was the first among scientists whose studies were supplemented by art.

About seven thousand pages of surviving manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci contain his thoughts on various issues of art, science and technology. From these notes, a "Treatise on Painting" was later compiled. In particular, it outlines the doctrine of perspective, both linear and aerial. Leonardo writes: "... take a mirror, reflect a living object in it and compare the reflected object with your picture ... it is you who will see that a picture executed on a plane shows objects in such a way that they seem to be convex, and a mirror on a plane makes the same; the picture is only a surface, and the mirror is the same; the picture is intangible, because what appears to be round and separating cannot be grasped by hands - the same in the mirror; the mirror and the picture show images of objects, surrounded by shadow and light, both of which seem very far beyond the surface.There is still another perspective, which I call aerial, because, due to the change in air, one can recognize different distances to different buildings, bounded from below by one single (straight) line. Make the first building... your own color, make the one that is more distant more... blue, the one you want it to be just as far back, make it that much more blue..."

Unfortunately, many observations concerning the influence of transparent and translucent media on the perceived color could not yet find a proper physical and mathematical explanation from Leonardo. However, the first experimental attempts made by the scientist to determine the intensity of light depending on the distance, the study of the laws of binocular vision, seeing in them a condition for the perception of relief, are valuable.

The "Treatise on Painting" also provides information on proportions. In the Renaissance, the mathematical concept - the golden ratio was elevated to the rank of the main aesthetic principle. Leonardo da Vinci called it Sectio aurea, from which the term "golden section" originated. According to the artistic canons of Leonardo, the golden ratio corresponds not only to the division of the body into two unequal parts by the waist line (at the same time, the ratio of the larger part to the smaller is equal to the ratio of the whole to the larger part, this ratio is approximately equal to 1.618). The height of the face (to the roots of the hair) refers to the vertical distance between the arches of the eyebrows and the bottom of the chin, as the distance between the bottom of the nose and the bottom of the chin is related to the distance between the corners of the lips and the bottom of the chin, this distance is equal to the golden ratio. Developing the rules for depicting the human figure, Leonardo da Vinci tried to restore the so-called "square of the ancients" based on the literary information of antiquity. He made a drawing in which it is shown that the span of a person's arms extended to the side is approximately equal to his height, as a result of which the figure of a person fits into a square and a circle.

2.2 The greatest works - "La Gioconda" and "The Last Supper"

2.2.1 "La Gioconda"

In Milan, Leonardo da Vinci began work on his famous painting "La Gioconda (Mona Lisa)". The prehistory of "La Gioconda" is as follows.

Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo commissioned the great artist to paint a portrait of his third wife, 24-year-old Mona Lisa. The painting, 97x53 cm in size, was completed in 1503 and immediately became famous. The great artist wrote it for four years (he generally created his works for a long time). Evidence of this may be the use of various solvents during the writing period. So, the face of Mona Lisa, unlike the hands, is covered with a network of cracks. Francesco del Giocondo, for unknown reasons, did not buy this painting, and Leonardo did not part with it until the end of his life. The last years of his life, as noted above, the great artist, at the invitation of the King of France, Francis I, spent in Paris. After his death on May 2, 1519, the king himself bought this painting.

Creating his masterpiece, the artist used a secret known to many portrait painters: the vertical axis of the canvas passes through the pupil of the left eye, which should make the viewer feel excited. The portrait (it is in the Louvre) is a further development of the type that appeared earlier in Leonardo: the model is depicted from the waist, in a slight turn, the face is turned towards the viewer, the folded hands limit the composition from below. The soulful hands of Mona Lisa are as beautiful as the slight smile on her face and the primeval rocky landscape in the misty distance.

Gioconda is known as the image of a mysterious, even fatal woman, but this interpretation belongs to the 19th century.

The picture gives rise to various speculations. So in 1986, the American artist and researcher Lillian Schwartz compared the image of Mona Lisa with Leonardo's self-portrait. Using an inverted image of a self-portrait, she brought the paintings to the same scale with the help of a computer so that the distance between the pupils became the same. It is believed that at the same time she received a striking resemblance, although this version seems to be quite controversial.

There is an opinion that the artist encrypted something in his painting and in particular in the famous smile of Mona Lisa. A barely noticeable movement of the lips and eyes fit into the correct circle, which is not in the paintings of Raphael, Michelangelo, or Botticelli - other geniuses of the Renaissance. The background of "Madonnas" is just a dark wall, respectively, with one and two window slits. Everything is clear in these pictures: a mother lovingly looks at her child.

It is likely that for Leonardo this painting was the most difficult and successful exercise in the use of sfumato, and the background of the painting is the result of his research in the field of geology. Regardless of whether the subject was secular or religious, the landscape, exposing the "bones of the earth", is constantly found in the work of Leonardo. The secrets of Nature, which constantly tormented the great Leonardo da Vinci, the artist embodied in the gaze of Mona Lisa, all-penetrating, directed as if from the depths of a dark cave. In confirmation of this - the words of Leonardo himself: "Submitting to my greedy attraction, wanting to see a great variety of various and strange forms produced by skillful nature, wandering among the dark rocks, I approached the entrance to a large cave. For a moment I stopped in front of it, amazed ... I leaned forward to see what was happening there, in the depths, but the great darkness interfered with me. Thus I remained for some time. Suddenly two feelings arose in me: fear and desire; fear of a terrible and dark cave, a desire to see if there was something something wonderful in its depths.

2.2.2 "Last Supper"

Leonardo's reflections on space, linear perspective and the expression of various emotions in painting resulted in the creation of the fresco "The Last Supper", painted in an experimental technique on the far end wall of the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan in 1495-1497.

In connection with The Last Supper, Vasari cites a funny episode in his biography of Leonardo, which perfectly characterizes the artist’s manner of work and his sharp tongue. Dissatisfied with the slowness of Leonardo, the prior of the monastery insistently demanded that he finish his work as soon as possible. “It seemed strange to him to see that Leonardo was immersed in thought for half a day. He wanted the artist not to let go of his brushes, like they do not stop working in the garden. Without limiting himself to this, he complained to the duke and so began to pester him, that he was forced to send for Leonardo and in a delicate form ask him to take up the work, making it clear in every possible way that he was doing all this at the insistence of the prior. Having started a conversation with the duke on general artistic topics, Leonardo then pointed out to him that he was close to finishing the painting and that he had only two heads left to paint - Christ and the traitor Judas. “He would like to look for this last head, but in the end, if he does not find anything better, he is ready to use the head of this very prior, so intrusive and immodest. This remark made the duke laugh a lot, who told him that he was a thousand times right. Somehow the poor embarrassed prior continued to rush the work in the garden and left Leonardo alone, who finished the head of Judas, which turned out to be the true embodiment of betrayal and inhumanity.

Leonardo prepared carefully and for a long time for the Milanese painting. He made many sketches in which he studied the postures and gestures of individual figures. The Last Supper attracted him not with its dogmatic content, but with the opportunity to unfold a great human drama in front of the viewer, show various characters, reveal the spiritual world of a person and accurately and clearly describe his experiences. He took the "Last Supper" as a scene of betrayal and set himself the goal of introducing into this traditional image that dramatic beginning, thanks to which it would acquire a completely new emotional sound.

Thinking over the concept of The Last Supper, Leonardo not only made sketches, but also wrote down his thoughts about the actions of individual participants in this scene: looks at his companion, the other shows the palms of his hands, raises his shoulders to his ears and expresses surprise with his mouth ... "The record does not indicate the names of the apostles, but Leonardo, apparently, clearly imagined the actions of each of them and the place that each was called take in the overall composition. Specifying poses and gestures in the drawings, he was looking for such forms of expression that would involve all the figures in a single whirlpool of passions. He wanted to capture living people in the images of the apostles, each of whom responds to the event in his own way.

The Last Supper is Leonardo's most mature and complete work. In this painting, the master avoids everything that could obscure the main course of the action depicted by him, he achieves a rare convincing compositional solution. In the center, he places the figure of Christ, highlighting it with the opening of the door. He deliberately pushes the apostles away from Christ in order to further emphasize his place in the composition. Finally, for the same purpose, he makes all perspective lines converge at a point directly above the head of Christ. Leonardo divides his students into four symmetrical groups, full of life and movement. He makes the table small, and the refectory - strict and simple. This gives him the opportunity to focus the viewer's attention on figures that have tremendous plastic power. In all these techniques, the deep purposefulness of the creative plan is reflected, in which everything is weighed and taken into account.

The main task that Leonardo set himself in The Last Supper was the realistic transmission of the most complex mental reactions to the words of Christ: "One of you will betray me." Giving complete human characters and temperaments in the images of the apostles, Leonardo makes each of them react in his own way to the words spoken by Christ. It was this subtle psychological differentiation, based on a variety of faces and gestures, that struck Leonardo’s contemporaries the most, especially when comparing his paintings with earlier Florentine images on the same subject by Tadeo Gaddi, Andrea del Castagno, Cosimo Rosselli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. All these masters have apostles sitting quietly, like extras, at the table, remaining completely indifferent to everything that happens. Not having strong enough means in their arsenal to characterize Judas psychologically, Leonardo's predecessors singled him out from the general group of apostles and placed him in the form of a completely isolated figure in front of the table. Thus, Judas was artificially opposed to the entire assembly as an outcast and a villain. Leonardo boldly breaks this tradition. His artistic language is rich enough not to resort to such purely external effects. He unites Judas in one group with all the other apostles, but gives him such features that allow an attentive viewer to immediately identify him among the twelve disciples of Christ.

Leonardo treats each of his students individually. Like a stone thrown into the water, creating circles that spread out more and more on the surface, the words of Christ, falling in the middle of dead silence, cause the greatest movement in the assembly, a moment before being in a state of complete rest. Especially impulsively respond to the words of Christ those three apostles who sit on his left hand. They form an inseparable group imbued with a single will and a single movement. Young Philip jumped up, turning to Christ with a bewildered question, Jacob the elder spread his hands in indignation and leaned back a little, Thomas raised his hand up, as if trying to realize what was happening. The group on the other side of Christ is imbued with a completely different spirit. Separated from the central figure by a significant interval, she is distinguished by an incomparably greater restraint of gestures. Presented in a sharp turn, Judas convulsively squeezes a purse with pieces of silver and looks at Christ with fear; his shadowy, ugly, rough profile contrasts with the brightly lit, beautiful face of John, who limply lowered his head on his shoulder and calmly folded his hands on the table. Between Judas and John wedged the head of Peter; leaning towards John and leaning his left hand on his shoulder, he whispers something in his ear, while his right hand decisively grabbed the sword with which he wants to protect his teacher. Three other apostles sitting near Peter are turned in profile. Looking closely at Christ, they seem to be asking him about the culprit of the betrayal. At the opposite end of the table is the last group of three pieces. Matthew, stretching out his arms towards Christ, indignantly turns to the elderly Thaddeus, as if wanting to get an explanation from him of everything that is happening. However, the bewildered gesture of the latter clearly shows that he, too, remains in the dark.

It is far from accidental that Leonardo depicted both extreme figures sitting at the edges of the table in a clean profile. They close on both sides the movement coming from the center, performing here the same role that belonged in the "Adoration of the Magi" to the figures of an old man and a young man, placed at the very edges of the picture. But if the psychological means of expression in Leonardo did not rise above the traditional level in this work of the early Florentine era, then in The Last Supper they reach such perfection and depth, equal to which it would be in vain to look for in all Italian art of the 15th century. And this was well understood by the contemporaries of the master, who perceived Leonardo's "Last Supper" as a new word in art.

The method of painting with oil paints turned out to be very short-lived. Two years later, Leonardo was horrified to see his work changed so much. And ten years later, together with his students, he tries to make the first restoration work. A total of eight restorations have been made over the course of 300 years. In connection with these attempts, new layers of paint were repeatedly applied to the painting, which significantly distorted the original. In addition, by the beginning of the 20th century, the legs of Jesus Christ were completely erased, since the constantly opening door of the dining room was in contact with just this place. The door was cut through by the monks to enter the dining room, but since this was done in the 1600s, it is a historical hole and there is no way to wall it up.

Milan is justifiably proud of this masterpiece, which is the only Renaissance work of its magnitude. To no avail, two French kings dreamed of transporting the mural along with the wall to Paris. Napoleon also did not remain indifferent to this idea. But to the great joy of the Milanese and all of Italy, this unique work of the great genius remained in its place. During World War II, when British aircraft bombarded Milan, the roof and three walls of the famous building were completely demolished. And only the one on which Leonardo made his painting remained standing. It was a real miracle!

For a long time, the brilliant work was under restoration. For the reconstruction of the work, the latest technologies were used, which made it possible to gradually remove layer by layer. In this way, age-old hardened dust, mold and all sorts of other foreign materials were removed. And let's face it, from the original, 1/3 or even half of the original colors were lost within 500 years. But the general appearance of the painting has changed a lot. She seemed to come to life, playing with cheerful, lively colors, which the great master endowed her with. And, finally, in the spring of May 26, 1999, after a restoration that lasted 21 years, the work of Leonardo da Vinci was re-opened for public viewing. On this occasion, a big celebration was held in the city, and a concert was held in the church.

To protect this delicate work from damage, a constant temperature and humidity are maintained in the building through special filtering devices. Entrance is limited to 25 people, every 15 minutes.

Thus, in this chapter we examined Leonardo da Vinci as a creator - painter, sculptor, architect. In the next chapter he will be considered as a scientist and inventor.

3. Leonardo da Vinci - scientist and inventor

3.1 Contribution of Leonardo da Vinci to science

Da Vinci made the greatest contribution to the field of mechanics. Peru belongs to Leonardo Da Vinci research on the fall of a body on an inclined plane, on the centers of gravity of the pyramids, on the impact of bodies, on the movement of sand on sounding plates; about the laws of friction. Leonardo also wrote works on hydraulics.

Some historians whose research dates back to the Renaissance have expressed the opinion that although Leonardo da Vinci was talented in many areas, he nevertheless did not make a significant contribution to such an exact science as theoretical mechanics. However, a careful analysis of his recently discovered manuscripts, and in particular the drawings in them, convinces the opposite. The work of Leonardo da Vinci on the study of the action of various types of weapons, in particular the crossbow, apparently, was one of the reasons for his interest in mechanics. The subjects of his interest in this area, in modern terms, were the laws of addition of velocities and addition of forces, the concept of a neutral plane and the position of the center of gravity during the movement of a body.

The contribution of Leonardo da Vinci to theoretical mechanics can be appreciated to a greater extent by a closer study of his drawings, and not the texts of the manuscripts and the mathematical calculations contained in them.

Let's start with an example that reflects Leonardo da Vinci's persistent attempts to solve the problems associated with improving the design of weapons (never completely solved), which aroused his interest in the laws of the addition of velocities and the addition of forces. Despite the rapid development of gunpowder weapons during the life of Leonardo da Vinci, the bow, crossbow and spear still continued to be common weapons. Leonardo da Vinci paid special attention to such ancient weapons as the crossbow. It often happens that the design of a particular system reaches perfection only after descendants become interested in it, and the process of improving this system can lead to fundamental scientific results.

Fruitful experimental work to improve crossbows was carried out earlier, before Leonardo da Vinci. For example, shortened arrows began to be used in the crossbow, which had about 2 times better aerodynamic characteristics than conventional archery arrows. In addition, the study of the basic principles underlying crossbow shooting was initiated.

In an effort not to be limited to traditional constructive solutions, Leonardo da Vinci considered such a crossbow design that would allow shooting only with an arrowhead, leaving its shaft motionless. Apparently, he understood that by reducing the mass of the projectile, it is possible to increase its initial speed.

In some of his crossbow designs, he proposed the use of several arcs, acting either simultaneously or sequentially. In the latter case, the largest and most massive arc would actuate a smaller and lighter arc, and that, in turn, would be even smaller, and so on. An arrow shot would be fired on the last arc. Obviously, Leonardo da Vinci considered this process from the point of view of the addition of velocities. For example, he notes that the range of fire from a crossbow will be maximum if you shoot at a gallop from a galloping horse and lean forward at the moment of the shot. In reality, this would not lead to a significant increase in the speed of the arrow. However, the ideas of Leonardo da Vinci were directly related to the heated debate about whether an infinite increase in speed is possible. Later, scientists began to lean towards the conclusion that this process has no limit. This point of view existed until Einstein put forward his postulate, from which it followed that no body can move at a speed exceeding the speed of light. However, at speeds much lower than the speed of light, the law of addition of speeds (based on Galileo's principle of relativity) remains valid.

The law of addition of forces, or the parallelogram of forces, was discovered after Leonardo da Vinci. This law is considered in that branch of mechanics that allows you to answer the question of what happens when two or more forces interact at different angles.

In the manufacture of a crossbow, it is important to achieve symmetry in the forces that occur in each wing. Otherwise, the arrow may move when fired to the side of its groove, and thereby the accuracy of shooting will be impaired. Usually crossbowmen, preparing their weapons for shooting, checked whether the bending of the wings of its arc was the same. Today, all bows and crossbows are tested in this way. The weapon is hung on the wall so that its bowstring is horizontal, and the arc with its convex part is turned upwards. Various weights are suspended from the middle of the bowstring. Each weight causes a certain bending of the arc, which allows you to check the symmetry of the action of the wings. The easiest way to do this is to observe whether the center of the bowstring falls vertically or moves away from it when the load is increased.

This method may have led Leonardo da Vinci to use diagrams (found in the "Madrid Manuscripts"), in which the displacement of the ends of the arc (taking into account the position of the center of the bowstring) is presented depending on the size of the suspended load. He realized that the force needed to make the arc begin to bend is small at first and increases with increasing mixing of the ends of the arc. (This phenomenon is based on the law formulated much later by Robert Hooke: the absolute amount of mixing due to deformation of the body is proportional to the applied force).

Leonardo da Vinci called the relationship between the displacement of the ends of the crossbow arc and the value of the load suspended from the bowstring "pyramidal", since, just as opposite faces in a pyramid diverge as they move away from the intersection point, this dependence becomes more and more noticeable as the ends of the arc are displaced. Noting the change in the position of the bowstring depending on the size of the load, he, however, noticed non-linearities. One of them was that, although the displacement of the ends of the arc linearly depended on the magnitude of the load, there was no linear relationship between the mixing of the bowstring and the magnitude of the load. Based on this observation, Leonardo da Vinci apparently tried to find an explanation for the fact that in some crossbows the bowstring, released after applying a certain amount of force to it, moves at first faster than when approaching its original position.

Such non-linearity may have been observed when using crossbows with poorly made arcs. It is likely that Leonardo da Vinci's conclusions are based on faulty reasoning and not on calculations, although he did sometimes resort to calculations. However, this task aroused in him a deep interest in the analysis of the design of the crossbow. Is it true that an arrow, which has rapidly gained speed at the beginning of the shot, begins to move faster than the bowstring and will break away from it before the bowstring returns to its original position?

Not having a clear understanding of such concepts as inertia, force and acceleration, Leonardo da Vinci, of course, could not find a definitive answer to this question. On the pages of his manuscript there are arguments of the opposite nature: in some of them he is inclined to answer this question in the affirmative, in others - in the negative. Leonardo da Vinci's interest in this problem led him to further attempts to improve the design of the crossbow. This suggests that he intuitively guessed the existence of a law, later called the "law of addition of forces."

Leonardo da Vinci did not limit himself to the problem of the speed of the arrow and the action of tension forces in the crossbow. For example, he was also interested in whether the range of an arrow would double if the weight of the bow of a crossbow was doubled. If you measure the total weight of all arrows, located one after the other back to back and forming a continuous line, the length of which is equal to the maximum flight range, will this weight be equal to the force with which the bowstring acts on the arrow? Sometimes Leonardo da Vinci did look deeply, for example, in search of an answer to the question, does the vibration of the bowstring immediately after the shot indicate the loss of energy in the arc?

As a result, in the "Madrid Manuscript", regarding the relationship between the force on the arc and the displacement of the bowstring, Leonardo da Vinci states: "The force that forces the bowstring of a crossbow to move increases as the angle at the center of the bowstring decreases." The fact that this statement is not found anywhere else in his notes may mean that such a conclusion was made by him definitively. Undoubtedly, he used it in repeated attempts to improve the design of a crossbow with the so-called block arcs.

Block arcs, in which the string is passed through the blocks, are known to modern archers. These arcs allow you to achieve a high speed of the arrow. The laws underlying their operation are now well known. Leonardo da Vinci did not have such a complete understanding of the action of block arches, but he invented crossbows in which the bowstring was passed through blocks. In his crossbows, the blocks usually had a rigid mount: they did not move with the ends of the arc, as in modern crossbows and bows. Therefore, the arc in the design of Leonardo da Vinci's crossbow did not have the same effect as in modern block arcs. One way or another, Leonardo da Vinci obviously intended to make an arc, the design of which would solve the problem of "bowstring - angle", i.e. an increase in the force acting on the arrow would be achieved by reducing the angle in the center of the bowstring. In addition, he tried to reduce the energy loss when firing a crossbow.

In the basic design of the Leonardo da Vinci crossbow, a very flexible arc was fixed on the bed. In some figures, it can be seen that at the maximum tension of the bowstring, the arc was bent almost into a circle. From the ends of the arc, the string on each side was passed through a pair of blocks, reinforced in front of the frame next to the guide groove for the arrow, and then went to the trigger.

Leonardo da Vinci, apparently, did not give an explanation of his design anywhere, however, its scheme is repeatedly found in his drawings along with the image of a crossbow (also with a strongly curved arc), in which a stretched bowstring, going from the ends of the arc to the trigger, has V -shaped form.

It seems most likely that Leonardo da Vinci sought to minimize the angle in the center of the bowstring so that the arrow would get more acceleration when fired. It is possible that he also used blocks so that the angle between the bowstring and the wings of the crossbow remained close to 90 ° as long as possible. An intuitive understanding of the law of the addition of forces helped him radically change the time-tested design of the crossbow based on the quantitative relationship between the energy "stored" in the arc of the crossbow and the speed of the arrow. Undoubtedly, he had an idea of ​​the mechanical efficiency of his design and tried to improve it further.

The block arc of Leonardo da Vinci was apparently impractical, since the sharp tension of the bowstring led to its significant bending. Only compound arcs made in a special way could withstand such a significant deformation.

Composite arcs were used during Leonardo da Vinci's lifetime, and perhaps it was they that aroused his interest in the problem, the attempts to solve which led him to the idea of ​​what is called the neutral plane. The study of this problem was also associated with a deeper study of the behavior of materials under the action of mechanical stress.

In a typical composite bow used in the era of Leonardo da Vinci, the outer and inner sides of the crossbow wings were made of different materials. The inner side, which was under compression, was usually made of horn, and the outer, which worked in tension, was made of tendons. Each of these materials is stronger than wood. Between the outer and inner sides of the arc, a layer of wood was used, strong enough to give rigidity to the wings. The wings of such an arc could be bent more than 180°. Leonardo da Vinci had some idea of ​​how such an arc was made, and the problem of choosing materials that could withstand high tension and compression may have led him to a deep understanding of how stresses arise in a particular structure.

In two small drawings (discovered in the "Madrid Manuscript"), he depicted a flat spring in two states - deformed and undeformed. In the center of the deformed spring, he drew two parallel lines, symmetrical about the central point. When the spring is bent, these lines diverge from the convex side and converge - from the concave side.

These drawings are accompanied by a caption in which Leonardo da Vinci notes that when the spring is bent, the convex part becomes thicker, and the concave part becomes thinner. "Such a modification is pyramidal and therefore will never change at the center of the spring." In other words, the distance between initially parallel lines will increase at the top as it decreases at the bottom. The central part of the spring serves as a kind of balance between the two sides and is a zone where the stress is zero, i.e. neutral plane. Leonardo da Vinci also understood that both tension and compression increase in proportion to the distance to the neutral zone.

From the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci it can be seen that the idea of ​​​​a neutral plane arose in him while studying the action of a crossbow. An example is his drawing of a giant stone-shooting catapult. The bending of the arc of this weapon was carried out using a screw gate; the stone flew out of a pocket located in the center of a double bowstring. Both the collar and the pocket for the stone are drawn (on an enlarged scale) the same as in the drawings of the crossbow. However, Leonardo da Vinci apparently understood that increasing the size of the arc would lead to complex problems. Judging by Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of the neutral zone, he knew that (for a given bending angle) the stresses in the arc increase in proportion to its thickness. So that the stresses did not reach a critical value, he changed the design of the giant arc. Its front (frontal) part, which was under tension, according to his ideas, should be made of a single log, and its rear part (rear), working in compression, from separate blocks fixed behind the front part. The shape of these blocks was such that they could come into contact with each other only at the maximum bending of the arc. This construction, as well as others, shows that Leonardo da Vinci believed that the forces of tension and compression should be considered separately from each other. In the manuscript of the "Treatise on the Flight of Birds" and his other writings, Leonardo da Vinci notes that the stability of a bird's flight is achieved only when its center of gravity is ahead of the center of resistance (the point at which pressure is equal in front and behind). This functional principle, used by Leonardo da Vinci in the theory of bird flight, is still of great importance in the theory of aircraft and rocket flight.

3.2 Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci

The inventions and discoveries made by da Vinci cover all areas of knowledge (there are more than 50 of them), completely anticipating the main directions of development of modern civilization. Let's talk about just a few of them. In 1499, Leonardo designed a wooden mechanical lion to meet the French king Louis XII in Milan, which, after taking a few steps, plowed open its chest and showed the insides "filled with lilies." The scientist is the inventor of the spacesuit, submarine, steamer, flippers. He has a manuscript that shows the possibility of diving to great depths without a space suit due to the use of a special gas mixture (the secret of which he deliberately destroyed). To invent it, it was necessary to have a good understanding of the biochemical processes of the human body, which were completely unknown at that time! It was he who first proposed installing batteries of firearms on armored ships (he gave the idea of ​​​​an armadillo!), He invented a helicopter, a bicycle, a glider, a parachute, a tank, a machine gun, poison gases, a smoke screen for troops, a magnifying glass (100 years before Galileo!). Da Vinci invented textile machines, looms, needle-making machines, powerful cranes, systems for draining marshes through pipes, and arched bridges. He creates blueprints for gates, levers and propellers designed to lift enormous weights, mechanisms that did not exist in his time. It is amazing that Leonardo describes these machines and mechanisms in detail, although they could not be made at that time due to the fact that they did not know ball bearings at that time (but Leonardo himself knew this - the corresponding drawing was preserved).

Leonardo da Vinci owns the invention of a dynamometer, an odometer, some blacksmith tools, a double-air lamp.

In astronomy, the most significant are the advanced cosmological ideas of Leonardo da Vinci: the principle of the physical homogeneity of the Universe, the denial of the central position of the Earth in space, for the first time he correctly explained the ashy color of the Moon.

A separate line in this series of inventions are aircraft.

In front of the entrance to Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Fiumicino International Airport, there is a huge bronze statue. It depicts a great scientist with a model of a rotary-wing machine - a prototype of a helicopter. But this is not the only invention in aviation that Leonardo gave to the world. On the margins of the previously mentioned "Treatise on the Flight of Birds" from the collection of scientific works of da Vinci "Madrid Code" there is a strange author's drawing, which only relatively recently attracted the close attention of researchers. It turned out that this is a draft drawing of another "flying machine", which Leonardo dreamed about 500 years ago. Moreover, as experts were convinced, this is the only device of all the devices conceived by the genius of the Renaissance, which was really capable of lifting a person into the air. "Feather" - this is how Leonardo called his apparatus.

The famous Italian athlete and traveler Angelo D "Arrigo, a 42-year-old free-flying champion, with an experienced eye saw in Leonardo da Vinci's drawing a real prototype of a modern hang glider and decided not only to recreate, but also to test it. Angelo himself has been studying the life and routes of migratory birds, often accompanies them on a sports hang glider, turning into their companion, into the likeness of a "bird-man", that is, it puts into practice the cherished dream of Leonardo and many generations of naturalists.

Last year, for example, he made a 4,000-kilometer flight with Siberian cranes, and next spring he is going to fly a hang glider over Everest, following the route of the Tibetan eagles. It took D'Arrigo two years of hard work to, together with professional engineers and technicians, embody the "artificial wings" in the material, first at a scale of 1: 5, and then in full size, thus reproducing Leonardo's plan. An elegant structure was built, consisting of thin, ultra-light and strong aluminum tubes and sail-shaped synthetic fabric "dacron", the result is a trapezoid-shaped design, very reminiscent of the spread wings, invented by the American space agency NASA in the 60s for the smooth return from orbit of the Gemini descent capsules Angelo first checked all the calculations on a computer flight "simulator" and on the stand, and then he himself tested the new device in the wind tunnel of the FIAT aircraft workshops in Orbassano (15 km from Turin, Piedmont region). Leonardo smoothly lifted off the floor and hovered in the air for two hours with his pilot-passenger. "I realized that I proved the teacher right," the pilot admits in shock. So, the ingenious intuition of the great Florentine did not deceive him. Who knows, if the maestro had lighter materials (and not just wood and homespun canvas), humanity could celebrate this year not the centenary of aeronautics, but its five hundredth anniversary. And it is not known how civilization would develop on Earth if "homo sapiens" could see their small and fragile cradle from a bird's eye view five thousand years earlier.

From now on, the current model of the "Feather" will take pride of place in the section of the history of aircraft of the National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, near the monastery and temple of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo da Vinci's fresco "The Last Supper" is kept.

In the sky over the county of Surrey (Great Britain), prototypes of a modern hang glider, assembled exactly according to the drawings of a brilliant painter, scientist and engineer of the Renaissance, were successfully tested.

Test flights from the hills of Surrey were carried out by two-time world champion hang glider Judy Liden. She managed to raise da Vinci's "proto-glider" to a maximum height of 10 m and stay in the air for 17 seconds. This was enough to prove that the apparatus actually worked. The flights were carried out as part of an experimental television project. The device was recreated according to drawings familiar to the whole world by 42-year-old mechanic from Bedfordshire Steve Roberts. A medieval hang glider resembles a bird skeleton from above. It is made from Italian poplar, cane, animal sinew and linen treated with a glaze derived from beetle secretions. The aircraft itself was far from perfect. “It was almost impossible to control it. I flew where the wind was blowing, and I could not do anything about it. Probably, the tester of the first car in history felt the same way,” said Judy.

When creating the second hang glider, built for Channel 4, several designs of the great Leonardo were used: a steering wheel and a trapezoid, which Leonardo invented later, were added to the drawing of 1487. “My first reaction was surprise. His beauty just struck me,” says Judy Liden. The hang glider flew a distance of 30 meters at a height of 15 meters.

Before Liden flew on a hang glider, he was placed on a test bench at the University of Liverpool. "The main problem is stability," said Professor Gareth Padfield.

According to Air Force science producer Michael Mosley, the reason why a hang glider can't fly flawlessly is Leonardo's unwillingness to have his inventions used for military purposes. "Creating the machines that he designed, and discovering errors, we felt: they were made for a reason. Our hypothesis is that Leonardo, a pacifist who had to work for the military leaders of that era, deliberately introduced erroneous information into his projects." As evidence, a note made on the back of a drawing of a respirator for scuba diving can be cited: "Knowing how the human heart works, they can learn how to kill people under water."

3.3 Predictions by Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci practiced special psychotechnical exercises, dating back to the esoteric practices of the Pythagoreans and ... modern neurolinguistics, in order to sharpen his perception of the world, improve memory and develop imagination. He seemed to know the evolutionary keys to the secrets of the human psyche, which is still far from being realized in modern man. 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! In the esoteric tradition, similar techniques have been known since time immemorial, but they have always been considered so secret that, like other psychics and mnemonics, they have never been made public.

And he was also an excellent magician (contemporaries spoke more frankly - a magician). Leonardo could call a multicolored flame from a boiling liquid by pouring wine into it; easily turns white wine into red; with one blow he breaks a cane, the ends of which are placed on two glasses, without breaking either of them; puts a little of his saliva on the end of the pen - and the inscription on the paper turns black. The miracles that Leonardo shows are so impressive to his contemporaries that he is seriously suspected of serving "black magic". In addition, there are always strange, dubious moral personalities near the genius, like Tomaso Giovanni Masini, known under the pseudonym Zoroaster de Peretola, a good mechanic, jeweler and at the same time an adherent of the secret sciences.

Leonardo kept a very strange diary, referring to himself in it as "you", giving orders and orders to himself as a servant or slave: "command me to show you ...", "you must show in your essay ...", "order make two travel bags ... "It seems that two personalities lived in da Vinci: one - known to everyone, friendly, not devoid of some human weaknesses, and the other - incredibly strange, secretive, unknown to anyone, who commanded him and controlled his actions.

Da Vinci had the ability to foresee the future, which, apparently, even surpassed the prophetic gift of Nostradamus. His famous "Prophecies" (originally a series of notes made in Milan in 1494) paint terrifying pictures of the future, many of which have either already been our past or are now our present. "People will talk to each other from the most distant countries and answer each other" - we are certainly talking about the telephone. "People will walk and not move, they will talk to those who are not, they will hear those who do not speak" - television, tape recording, sound reproduction. "People ... will instantly scatter in different parts of the world without moving from their place" - TV image transmission.

"You will see yourself falling from great heights without any harm to you" - obviously skydiving. "Countless lives will be destroyed, and countless holes will be made in the earth" - here, most likely, the seer is talking about craters from air bombs and shells that really killed countless lives. Leonardo even foresees travel into space: "And many terrestrial and aquatic animals will rise between the stars ..." - the launch of living beings into space. "Many will be those from whom their little children will be taken away, who will be skinned and quartered in the cruelest way!" - transparent reference to children whose body parts are used in the organ bank.

Thus, the personality of Leonardo da Vinci is unique and multifaceted. He was not only a man of art, but also a man of science.

Conclusion

Most people know Leonardo da Vinci as the creator of immortal artistic masterpieces. But for Leonardo, art and research were complementary aspects of the constant desire to observe and fix the appearance and internal structure of the world. It can definitely be argued that he was the first among scientists whose studies were supplemented by art.

Leonardo worked very hard. Now it seems to us that everything was easy for him. But no, his fate was filled with eternal doubts and routine. He worked all his life and did not imagine a different state. Rest for him was a change of occupation and a four-hour sleep. He worked always and everywhere. “If everything seems easy, this unmistakably proves that the worker is very little skilled and that the work is beyond his understanding,” Leonardo repeatedly repeated to his students.

If you take a look at the vast expanse of areas of science and human knowledge that Leonardo's thought touched, it becomes clear that not a huge number of discoveries, and not even the fact that many of them were years ahead of their time, made him immortal. The main thing in his work remains that his genius in science is the birth of an era of experience.

Leonardo da Vinci is the brightest representative of the new natural science based on experiment. "Simple and pure experience is the true teacher," the scientist wrote. He studies not only the machines existing in his time, but also refers to the mechanics of the ancients. Persistently, carefully examines the individual parts of the machines, carefully measures and records everything in search of the best form, both details and the whole. He is convinced that the scientists of antiquity were just approaching the understanding of the basic laws of mechanics. He sharply criticizes the scholastic sciences, contrasting them with a harmonious combination of experiment and theory: “I know well that some proud people, because I am not well-read, will seem as if they have the right to blame me, referring to the fact that I am a person without a book education. Stupid people I could answer them like this, saying: "You, who have adorned yourself with other people's works, you do not want to recognize my rights to my own" ... They do not know that my objects, more than from other people's words, are drawn from experience, which was the mentor of those who wrote well; so I take him as my mentor and in all cases I will refer to him. As a practical scientist, Leonardo da Vinci enriched almost all branches of knowledge with deep observations and insightful conjectures.

This is the biggest mystery. As you know, answering it, some modern researchers consider Leonardo a message from alien civilizations, others - a time traveler from a distant future, others - a resident of a parallel, more developed world than ours. It seems that the last assumption is the most plausible: da Vinci knew too well worldly affairs and the future that awaits humanity, with which he himself was little concerned ...

Literature

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4. Gelb, M. J. Learn to think and draw like Leonardo da Vinci. M., 1961.

5. Gukovsky M.A., Leonardo da Vinci, L. - M., 1967.

6. Zubov V.P., Leonardo da Vinci, M. - L., 1961.

8. Lazarev V.N. Leonardo da Vinci. L. - M., 1952.

9. Foley W. Werner S. The contribution of Leonardo da Vinci to theoretical mechanics. // Science and life. 1986-#11.

10. The mechanical investigations of Leonardo da Vinci, Berk. - Los Ang., 1963.

11. Heydenreich L. H., Leonardo architetto. Firenze, 1963.

Application

Leonardo da Vinci - self-portrait

Last Supper

Gioconda (Mona Lisa)

lady with ermine

Baby in the womb - anatomical drawing

Leonardo da Vinci - Anatomical drawings:

Human heart - anatomical drawing

You will find a message about the Italian scientist and artist, inventor and scientist, musician and writer, as well as a representative of the art of the Renaissance, in this article.

Message about Leonardo da Vinci briefly

The great genius was born in the village of Anchiato near the town of Vinci on April 15, 1452. His parents were unmarried, and he spent the first years of his life with his mother. After that, the father, a well-to-do notary, took his son into his family. The young man in 1466 enters the workshop of the Florentine artist Verrocchio as an apprentice. Among his hobbies are drawing, modeling, sculpture, work with leather, metal and plaster. In 1473, in the Guild of St. Luke, he received the qualification of a master.

The beginning of his creative path was marked by the fact that he devoted all his free time only to painting. In the period 1472 - 1477, such famous paintings by Leonardo da Vinci as "The Annunciation", "The Baptism of Christ", "Madonna with a Flower", "Madonna with a Vase" were created. And in 1481 he created the first major work - "Madonna with a Flower".

The further activity of Leonardo da Vinci is connected with Milan, where he moves in 1482. Here he enters the service of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. The scientist had his own workshop, where he worked with his students. In addition to creating paintings, he developed a flying machine based on the flight of birds. First, the inventor created the simplest apparatus on the basis of wings, and then he developed an airplane mechanism with the described complete control. But they failed to bring their idea to life. In addition to design, he studied anatomy and architecture, gave the world a new, independent discipline - botany.

At the end of the 15th century, the artist created the painting “Lady with an Ermine”, the drawing “Vitruvian Man” and the world-famous fresco “The Last Supper”.

In April 1500, he returned to Florence, where he entered the service of Cesare Borgia as an engineer and architect. After 6 years, da Vinci is back in Milan. In 1507, the genius met Count Francesco Melzi, who would become his student, heir and life partner.

The next three years (1513 - 1516) Leonardo da Vinci lives in Rome. Here he created the painting "John the Baptist". 2 years before his death, he began to have health problems: his right hand became numb, it was difficult to move independently. And the last years the scientist was forced to spend in bed. The great artist died on May 2, 1519.

• The artist perfectly owned both the left and right hand.
• Leonardo da Vinci was the first to give the correct answer to the question "Why is the sky blue?". He was sure that the sky was blue because there was a layer of illuminated air particles between the planet and the blackness above it. And he was right.
• Since childhood, the inventor suffered from "verbal blindness", that is, a violation of the ability to read. Therefore, he wrote in a mirror way.
• The artist did not sign his paintings. But he left identification marks, which have not yet been studied.
• He was excellent at playing the lyre.

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Introduction

1. Biography

1.1 Childhood

1.2 Workshop of Verrocchio

1.3 Defeated teacher

1.4 Professional activity, 1472-1513

2. Achievements

2.1 Art

2.2 Science and engineering

2.3 Anatomy and medicine

2.4 Invention

2.5 Thinker

2.6 Literary heritage

3. Image in modern mass consciousness

4. Editions of essays

Conclusion

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

The Renaissance was rich in outstanding personalities. But Leonardo, who was born in the town of Vinci near Florence on April 15, 1452, stands out even against the general background of other famous people of the Renaissance.

This supergenius of the beginning of the Italian Renaissance is so strange that it causes scientists not just amazement, but almost awe, mixed with confusion. Even a general overview of its capabilities shocks researchers: well, a person, even if he has at least seven spans in his forehead, cannot immediately be a brilliant engineer, artist, sculptor, inventor, mechanic, chemist, philologist, scientist, seer, one of the best in his time singer, swimmer, musical instrument maker, cantata, equestrian, swordsman, architect, fashion designer, etc. His external data are also striking: Leonardo is tall, slender and so beautiful in face that he was called an "angel", while being superhumanly strong (with his right hand - being left-handed! - he could crush a horseshoe).

About Leonardo da Vinci wrote repeatedly. But the theme of his life and work, both as a scientist and a person of art, is still relevant today.

renaissance leonardo scientist inventor legacy

1. BIOGRAPHY

1.1 Detstin

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in the village of Anchiano near the small town of Vinci, not far from Florence at "three in the morning" that is, at 22:30 according to the modern countdown [source not specified 792 days]. Noteworthy is the entry in the diary of Leonardo's grandfather, Antonio da Vinci (1372--1468) (literal translation): “On Saturday, at three in the morning on April 15, my grandson, the son of my son Piero, was born. The boy was named Leonardo. He was baptized by Father Piero di Bartolomeo." His parents were the 25-year-old notary Piero (1427--1504) and his beloved, a peasant woman Katerina. Leonardo spent the first years of his life with his mother. His father soon married a rich and noble girl, but this marriage turned out to be childless, and Piero took his three-year-old son to be raised. Separated from his mother, Leonardo tried all his life to recreate her image in his masterpieces. He lived at that time with his grandfather.

(Figure 1. Leonardo da Vinci)

In Italy at that time, illegitimate children were treated almost like legitimate heirs. Many influential people of the city of Vinci took part in the further fate of Leonardo.

When Leonardo was 13, his stepmother died in childbirth. The father remarried - and again soon became a widower. He lived for 77 years, was married four times and had 12 children. The father tried to introduce Leonardo to the family profession, but to no avail: the son was not interested in the laws of society.

Leonardo did not have a surname in the modern sense; "da Vinci" simply means "(hailed from) the town of Vinci." His full name is Italian. Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, that is, "Leonardo, son of Mr. Piero of Vinci."

1.2 Workshop of Verrocchio

In 1466, Leonardo da Vinci entered Verrocchio's workshop as an apprentice artist.

Verrocchio's workshop was located in the intellectual center of what was then Italy, the city of Florence, which allowed Leonardo to study the humanities, as well as acquire some technical skills. He studied drawing, chemistry, metallurgy, working with metal, plaster and leather. In addition, the young apprentice was engaged in drawing, sculpture and modeling. In addition to Leonardo, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Agnolo di Polo studied in the workshop, Botticelli worked, such famous masters as Ghirlandaio and others often visited. Subsequently, even when Father Leonardo hires him to work in his workshop, he continues to collaborate with Verrocchio .

In 1473, at the age of 20, Leonardo da Vinci qualified as a master in the Guild of St. Luke.

1.3 Defeated teacher

In the 15th century, ideas about the revival of ancient ideals were in the air. At the Florentine Academy, the best minds of Italy created the theory of the new art. Creative youth spent their time in lively discussions. Leonardo remained aloof from the hectic social life and rarely left the studio. He had no time for theoretical disputes: he improved his skills. Once Verrocchio received an order for the painting "The Baptism of Christ" and instructed Leonardo to paint one of the two angels. It was a common practice in art workshops of that time: the teacher created a picture together with student assistants. The most talented and diligent were entrusted with the execution of a whole fragment. Two angels, painted by Leonardo and Verrocchio, clearly demonstrated the superiority of the student over the teacher. As Vasari writes, the amazed Verrocchio abandoned the brush and never returned to painting.

1.4 Professional activity, 1472- 1513

In 1472-1477, Leonardo worked on: "The Baptism of Christ", "Annunciation", "Madonna with a Vase".

In the second half of the 70s, the "Madonna with a Flower" ("Madonna Benois") was created.

At the age of 24, Leonardo and three other young men were brought to trial on false and anonymous accusations of sodomy. They were acquitted. Very little is known about his life after this event, but probably (there are documents) he had his own workshop in Florence in 1476-1481.

In 1481, da Vinci completed the first large order in his life - the altarpiece "The Adoration of the Magi" (not completed) for the monastery of San Donato a Sisto, located near Florence. In the same year, work began on the painting "Saint Jerome"

In 1482, Leonardo, being, according to Vasari, a very talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo Medici sent him to Milan as a peacemaker to Lodovico Moro, and sent the lyre with him as a gift. At the same time, work began on the equestrian monument of Francesco Sforza.

Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine, 1490, Czartoryski Museum, Krakow

1483 - Work began on the "Madonna in the Grotto"

1487 - development of a flying machine - an ornithopter based on bird flight

1489--1490 -- painting "Lady with an Ermine"

1489 -- anatomical drawings of skulls

1490 - painting "Portrait of a Musician". A clay model of the monument to Francesco Sforza was made.

1490 -- Vitruvian Man -- famous drawing, sometimes called canonical proportions

1490--1491 -- "Madonna Litta" created

1490--1494 - completed "Madonna in the Grotto"

1495 - 1498 - work on the fresco "The Last Supper" in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan

1499 - Milan is captured by the French troops of Louis XII, Leonardo leaves Milan, the model of the Sforza monument is badly damaged

1502 - enters the service of Cesare Borgia as an architect and military engineer

1503 - return to Florence

1503 - cardboard for the fresco "Battle in Anjaria (at Anghiari)" and the painting "Mona Lisa"

1505 -- sketches of the flight of birds

1506 - return to Milan and service with King Louis XII of France (at that time in control of northern Italy, see Italian Wars)

1507 - study of the structure of the human eye

1508--1512 - work in Milan on the equestrian monument to Marshal Trivulzio

1509 - painting in the Cathedral of St. Anne

1512 -- "Self-portrait"

1512 - moving to Rome under the auspices of Pope Leo X

2. ACHIEVEMENTS

2.1 Art

Leonardo is primarily known to our contemporaries as an artist. In addition, it is possible that da Vinci could have been a sculptor: researchers from the University of Perugia - Giancarlo Gentilini and Carlo Sisi - claim that the terracotta head they found in 1990 is the only sculptural work of Leonardo da Vinci that has come down to us. However, da Vinci himself at different periods of his life considered himself primarily an engineer or scientist. He gave the fine arts not much time and worked rather slowly. Therefore, the artistic heritage of Leonardo is not quantitatively large, and a number of his works have been lost or badly damaged. However, his contribution to world artistic culture is extremely important even against the background of the cohort of geniuses that the Italian Renaissance gave. Thanks to his works, the art of painting moved to a qualitatively new stage in its development. The Renaissance artists who preceded Leonardo decisively abandoned many of the conventions of medieval art. It was a movement towards realism and much has already been achieved in the study of perspective, anatomy, greater freedom in compositional decisions. But in terms of picturesqueness, work with paint, the artists were still quite conventional and constrained. The line in the picture clearly outlined the subject, and the image had the appearance of a painted drawing. The most conditional was the landscape, which played a secondary role. Leonardo realized and embodied a new painting technique. His line has the right to blur, because that's how we see it. He realized the phenomenon of light scattering in the air and the appearance of sfumato - haze between the viewer and the depicted object, which softens color contrasts and lines. As a result, realism in painting moved to a qualitatively new level.

(Fig 2. Mona Lisa (1503--1505/1506)

Leonardo was the first to explain why the sky is blue. In the book "On Painting" he wrote: "The blue of the sky is due to the thickness of the illuminated particles of air, which is located between the Earth and the blackness above."

Leonardo, apparently, did not leave a single self-portrait that could be unambiguously attributed to him. Scientists have doubted that Leonardo's famous self-portrait of sanguine (traditionally dated 1512-1515), depicting him in old age, is such. It is believed that perhaps this is just a study of the head of the apostle for the Last Supper. Doubts that this is a self-portrait of the artist have been expressed since the 19th century, the last of which was recently expressed by one of the largest experts on Leonardo, Professor Pietro Marani.

2.2 Science and Engineering

His only invention, which received recognition during his lifetime, was the Wheel lock for a pistol (wound with a key). At the beginning, the Wheeled Pistol was not very common, but by the middle of the 16th century it had gained popularity among the nobles, especially among the cavalry, which even affected the design of armor, namely: 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.

Leonardo da Vinci was interested in the problems of flight. In Milan, he made many drawings and studied the flight mechanism of birds of various breeds and bats. In addition to observations, he also conducted experiments, but they were all unsuccessful. Leonardo really wanted to build an aircraft. He said: “He who knows everything, he can do everything. Just to find out - and the wings will be!

First, Leonardo developed the problem of flight with the help of wings set in motion by human muscle power: the idea of ​​​​the simplest apparatus of Daedalus and Icarus. But then he came to the idea of ​​building such an apparatus to which a person should not be attached, but should retain complete freedom to control it; the apparatus must set itself in motion by its own power. This is essentially the idea of ​​an airplane.

Leonardo da Vinci worked on a vertical takeoff and landing apparatus. On the vertical "ornitottero" Leonardo planned to place a system of retractable ladders. Nature served as an example for him: “look at the stone swift, which sat on the ground and cannot fly up because of its short legs; and when he is in flight, pull out the ladder, as shown in the second image from the top ... so you need to take off from the plane; these ladders serve as legs ... ". Regarding landing, he wrote: “These hooks (concave wedges) which are attached to the base of the stairs serve the same purpose as the tips of the toes of the person who jumps on them, and his whole body is not shaken by this, as if he jumped on his heels."

Leonardo da Vinci proposed the first scheme for a spotting scope (telescope) with two lenses (now known as the Kepler spotting scope). In the manuscript of the Atlantic Code, sheet 190a, there is an entry: “Make spectacle glasses (ochiali) for the eyes to see the moon big” (Leonardo da Vinci. “LIL Codice Atlantico ...”, I Tavole, S. A. 190a),

Leonardo da Vinci may have first formulated the simplest form of the law of conservation of mass for the movement of fluids, describing the flow of a river, however, due to the vagueness of the formulation and doubts about the authenticity, this statement is criticized.

2.3 Anatomy and medicine

During his life, Leonardo da Vinci made thousands of notes and drawings on anatomy, but did not publish his work. Making an autopsy of the bodies of people and animals, he accurately conveyed the structure of the skeleton and internal organs, including small details. According to professor of clinical anatomy Peter Abrams, da Vinci's scientific work was 300 years ahead of its time and in many ways surpassed the famous Grey's Anatomy.

2.4 Inventions

List of inventions, both real and attributed to Leonardo da Vinci:

(Figure 3. Parachute)

(Figure 4. Wheel lock)

(Figure 5. Bicycle)

(Figure 6. Tank)

(Figure 7. Light portable bridges for the army)

(Figure 8. Spotlight)

(Figure 9. Catapult)

(Figure 10. Robot)

(Fig. 11. Two lens telescope)

2.5 Thinker

The creator of The Last Supper and Mona Lisa also showed himself as a thinker, realizing early on the need for a theoretical substantiation of artistic practice: “Those who devote themselves to practice without knowledge are like a sailor setting off on a journey without a rudder and a compass ... practice should always be based on good knowledge of theory.

Demanding from the artist an in-depth study of the objects depicted, Leonardo da Vinci entered all his observations in a notebook, which he constantly carried with him. The result was a kind of intimate diary, the like of which is not found in all world literature. Drawings, drawings, and sketches are here accompanied by brief notes on perspective, architecture, music, natural science, military engineering, and the like; all this is interspersed with various sayings, philosophical reasoning, allegories, anecdotes, fables. Taken together, the records of these 120 books provide materials for an extensive encyclopedia. However, he did not seek to publish his thoughts and even resorted to cryptography, a complete transcript of his notes has not yet been completed.

Recognizing experience as the only criterion of truth and contrasting the method of observation and induction with abstract speculation, Leonardo da Vinci, not only in words, but in deeds, deals a mortal blow to medieval scholasticism with its predilection for abstract logical formulas and deduction. For Leonardo da Vinci, to speak well means to think correctly, that is, to think independently, like the ancients, who did not recognize any authorities. So Leonardo da Vinci comes to deny not only scholasticism, this echo of the feudal-medieval culture, but also humanism, the product of still fragile bourgeois thought, frozen in superstitious worship of the authority of the ancients. Denying book scholarship, declaring the task of science (as well as art) to be the knowledge of things, Leonardo da Vinci anticipates Montaigne's attacks on learned letter-eaters and opens the era of new science a hundred years before Galileo and Bacon.

... Those sciences are empty and full of errors that are not generated by experience, the father of all certainty, and do not end in visual experience ...

No human research can be called true science unless it has gone through mathematical proofs. And if you say that the sciences that begin and end in thought have truth, then we cannot agree with you on this, ... because experience, without which there is no certainty, does not participate in such purely mental reasoning.

2.6 literary heritage

Already after the death of Leonardo da Vinci, his friend and student Francesco Melzi selected from them passages related to painting, from which the “Treatise on Painting” (Trattato della pittura, 1st edition, 1651) was subsequently compiled. In its full form, the manuscript legacy of Leonardo da Vinci was published only in the 19th-20th centuries. In addition to its enormous scientific and historical significance, it also has artistic value due to its concise, energetic style and unusually clear language. Living in the heyday of humanism, when the Italian language was considered secondary compared to Latin, Leonardo da Vinci admired his contemporaries for the beauty and expressiveness of his speech (according to legend, he was a good improviser), but did not consider himself a writer and wrote as he spoke; his prose is therefore an example of the colloquial language of the 15th century intelligentsia, and this saved it as a whole from the artificiality and grandiosity inherent in the prose of the humanists, although in some passages of the didactic writings of Leonardo da Vinci we find echoes of the pathos of the humanistic style.

Even in the least "poetic" fragments, the style of Leonardo da Vinci is distinguished by vivid imagery; thus, his "Treatise on Painting" is equipped with magnificent descriptions (for example, the famous description of the flood), which amaze with the skill of verbal transmission of picturesque and plastic images. Along with descriptions in which the manner of an artist-painter is felt, Leonardo da Vinci gives in his manuscripts many examples of narrative prose: fables, facets (joking stories), aphorisms, allegories, prophecies. In fables and facies, Leonardo stands on the level of the prose writers of the fourteenth century with their ingenuous practical morality; and some of his facets are indistinguishable from Sacchetti's short stories.

Chessboard480.svg h8 black queen a7 white king d6 white queen a5 white pawn b5 black pawn h5 black rook d4 white knight e4 black king h4 black bishop b3 black pawn h3 black knight a2 black bishop b2 white pawn c2 white rook f2 white rook b1 white knight d1 white bishop f1 black rook g1 black knight

(Figure 12. Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci. Mate in three moves from the manuscript).

Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci. Mate in three moves from the manuscript "On the Game of Chess"

Allegories and prophecies have a more fantastic character: in the first, Leonardo da Vinci uses the techniques of medieval encyclopedias and bestiaries; the latter are in the nature of playful riddles, distinguished by the brightness and accuracy of phraseology and imbued with caustic, almost Voltaireian irony, directed at the famous preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Finally, in the aphorisms of Leonardo da Vinci, his philosophy of nature, his thoughts about the inner essence of things, are expressed in epigrammatic form. Fiction had for him a purely utilitarian, auxiliary meaning.

A special place in the artist's heritage is occupied by the treatise "On the Game of Chess" (lat. "De Ludo Schacorum") - a book by the Italian monk-mathematician Luca Bartolomeo Pacioli from the monastery of the Holy Sepulcher in Latin. The treatise is also known under the name "Repelling Boredom" (lat. "Schifanoia"). Some of the illustrations for the treatise are attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and some researchers claim that he also compiled some of the chess problems from this collection.

3 . IMAGE IN MODERN MASS CONSCIOUSNESS

Leonardo is an example of a historical figure turned by the mass consciousness into the image of a "magician from science". He was a brilliant artist and an unsurpassed mechanical engineer, although by no means the most educated person of his time. The source of myth-making was his notebooks, where he sketched and described both his own technical ideas and what he discovered in the works of predecessor scientists or diaries of travelers, “peeped” from other practitioners (often with his own improvements). Now he is perceived by many as the inventor of "everything in the world." Considered outside the context of other Renaissance engineers, his contemporaries and predecessors, he appears in the eyes of the public as a man who single-handedly laid the foundation of modern engineering knowledge.

Leonardo da Vinci is the protagonist of Kit Reed's short story "Signor da V."

In the books of science fiction writer Terry Pratchett there is a character named Leonard, whose prototype 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 Jagg).

Leonardo is a minor character in Assassin's Creed 2. Here he is shown as a young but talented artist and inventor.

4 . EDITIONS OF WORK

*Leonardo da Vinci. Selected natural science works. -- M. 1955

* Tales and parables of Leonardo da Vinci

* Natural science writings and works on aesthetics. (1508).

*Leonardo da Vinci. "Fire and Cauldron (story)"

CONCLUSION

In the history of science, which is the history of human knowledge, people who make revolutionary discoveries are important. The most striking example of a person who made such discoveries is Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo da Vinci - Italian painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, naturalist. There is no doubt that in all areas of his activity throughout his life he showed the highest intelligence and creativity, which was reflected both in his scientific achievements and in engineering inventions. Researchers continue to see in Leonardo da Vinci primarily an artist, but at the same time they perceive him as a generally perfect personality, harmoniously developed.

The art of Leonardo da Vinci, his scientific and theoretical research, the uniqueness of his personality have passed through the entire history of world culture and science, had a huge impact on it...

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Website about Leonardo da Vinci

2. Leonardo da Vinci. Artist's website.

3. All paintings and biography of Leonardo da Vinci

4. Leonardo Da Vinci: Encrypted Life. The program "Echo of Moscow" from the cycle "Everything is so"

5. A large collection of works by Leonardo da Vinci

6. Da Vinci at artcyclopedia.com

7. Da Vinci on Web Gallery of Art

8. Detailed biography, scientific discoveries and creativity of Leonardo da Vinci on istorya.ru

9. Works by Leonardo da Vinci in the Hermitage

10. Biography of Leonardo da Vinci

11. Homer Bautdinov, Leonardo da Vinci

12. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4

13. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%BE_%D0%B4 %D0%B0_%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%87%D0%B8#.D0.94.D0.BD.D0.B5.D0.B2.D0.BD.D0.B8. D0.BA.D0.B8

14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%BE_%D0%B4 %D0%B0_%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%87%D0%B8#.D0.98.D0.B7.D0.B4.D0.B0.D0.BD.D0.B8. D1.8F_.D1.81.D0.BE.D1.87.D0.B8.D0.BD.D0.B5.D0.BD.D0.B8.D0.B9

15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%86%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8B %D0%B9_%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BA

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Oddly enough, only one invention of da Vinci received recognition during his lifetime - a wheel lock for a pistol that was wound by 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 lighting stoves to ... ventilation of rooms.

Leonardo is not the first scientist who was interested in the ability of a person to remain under water for a long time. For example, Leon Battista Alberti planned to raise some of the Roman ships from the bottom of Lake Nemi. Leonardo, on the other hand, went beyond just plans: he created a design for a diving suit, which 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 that connected his helmet to a protective floating dome on the surface of the water (preferably made of reed with leather connections).

It is well known that Leonardo da Vinci also developed a drawing of the "ancestor" of the modern helicopter. The radius of the screw was supposed to be 4.8 m. According to the plan of the scientist, he had a metal edging and a linen coating. The propeller was driven by people walking around the axle and pushing the levers. “I think that if this screw mechanism is solidly made, i.e. made of starched fabric (to avoid tears) and quickly spun, then it will find support in the air and fly high,” da Vinci wrote in his works.

One of the most necessary things for teaching a person to swim is a lifebuoy. This invention of Leonardo remained practically unchanged.

To speed up swimming, the scientist developed a scheme of webbed gloves, which eventually turned into well-known flippers.

It is hard to believe, but to facilitate the work of workers, Leonardo came up with ... excavators that were more likely to lift and transport dug material than to dig as such. As scientists suggest, excavators could be needed for the project of diverting the Arno River. It was supposed to dig a ditch 18m wide and 6m long.

The inventor's drawings give an idea of ​​the size of the machine and the channel to be dug. The multi-length boom crane was interesting because it could be used with multiple counterweights on two or more excavation levels. The crane booms deployed 180° and covered the entire width of the channel. The excavator was mounted on rails and, as the work progressed, moved forward using a screw mechanism on the central rail.

One of Leonardo's most famous drawings represents the ancient developments of the automobile. A self-propelled cart had to move with the help of a complex crossbow mechanism that would transfer energy to drives connected to the steering wheel. The rear wheels had differentiated drives and could move independently. The fourth wheel is connected to the steering wheel, with which you can steer the cart.

Initially, this vehicle was intended for the amusement of the royal court and belonged to the range of self-propelled vehicles that were created by other engineers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Humanity dares to test some inventions of a scientist only now: for example, in the Norwegian town of As, in 2001, a 100-meter pedestrian bridge was opened, designed by Leonardo da Vinci. This was the first time in 500 years when the architectural project of the Master, far ahead of his time, was actually realized..

Leonardo da Vinci designed this structure for the Turkish Sultan: the bridge was to be thrown over the Golden Horn in Istanbul. If the project had been implemented, this bridge would have been the longest bridge of its time - its length was 346 meters. However, Leonardo failed to realize his project - Sultan Bayazet II refused the proposals of the Florentine artist.

True, the new bridge is inferior to its medieval prototype in length - 100 m instead of 346 - but it exactly repeats all the design and aesthetic advantages of Leonardo's project. This bridge serves as a pedestrian crossing at a height of 8 m above the E-18 motorway, 35 km south of Oslo. During its construction, only one idea of ​​Leonardo da Vinci had to be sacrificed - wood was used as a building material, while 500 years ago the bridge was planned to be built of stone.

In 2002, one of the inventions of the great Leonardo da Vinci was also recreated in the UK: a prototype of a modern hang glider, assembled exactly according to the drawings, was successfully tested in the sky over Surrey.

Test flights from the hills of Surrey were carried out by two-time world champion hang glider Judy Liden. She managed to raise da Vinci's "proto-glider" to a maximum height of 10 m and stay in the air for 17 seconds. This was enough to prove that the apparatus actually worked.

The flights were carried out as part of an experimental television project. The device was recreated according to drawings familiar to the whole world by 42-year-old mechanic from Bedfordshire Steve Roberts.

A medieval hang glider resembles a bird skeleton from above. It is made from Italian poplar, cane, animal sinew and linen treated with a glaze derived from beetle secretions.

The aircraft itself was far from perfect. “It was almost impossible to manage it. I flew where the wind was blowing and I couldn't do anything about it. Probably, the tester of the first car in the history felt the same way, ”said Judy.

As Leonardo da Vinci believed, “if a person has an awning made of dense fabric, each side of which is 12 arm lengths, and the height is 12, then he can jump without breaking from any significant height.” He himself failed to test this device, however, in December 2000, the British paratrooper Adrian Nicholas in South Africa descended from a height of 3 thousand meters from a balloon on a parachute made according to a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. The descent was successful.

Today is Leonardo da Vinci's birthday. Scientist, inventor, writer, musician

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci is a man of Renaissance art, sculptor, inventor, painter, philosopher, writer, scientist, polymath (universal man).

The future genius was born as a result of a love affair between the noble Piero da Vinci and the girl Katerina (Katarina). According to the social norms of that time, the marriage union of these people was impossible due to the low birth of Leonardo's mother. After the birth of her first child, she was given in marriage to a potter, with whom Katerina lived the rest of her life. It is known that from her husband she gave birth to four daughters and a son.

Portrait of Leonardo da Vinci

The parent gave Leonardo as an apprentice to the Tuscan master Andrea Verrocchio. During his studies with a mentor, Piero's son learned not only the art of painting and sculpture. Young Leonardo studied the humanities and technical sciences, the skill of leather dressing, the basics of working with metal and chemical reagents. All this knowledge was useful to da Vinci in life.

Leonardo received confirmation of the qualifications of the master at the age of twenty, after which he continued to work under the supervision of Verrocchio. The young artist was involved in minor work on the paintings of his teacher, for example, he prescribed background landscapes and clothes of minor characters. Leonardo had his own workshop only in 1476.

Drawing "Vitruvian Man" by Leonardo da Vinci

In 1482, da Vinci was sent by his patron Lorenzo de' Medici to Milan. In Milan, Duke Lodovico Sforza enrolled Leonardo in the court staff as an engineer. A high-ranking person was interested in defensive devices and devices for entertaining the court. Da Vinci had the opportunity to develop the talent of an architect and the ability of a mechanic. His inventions turned out to be an order of magnitude better than those offered by contemporaries.

The engineer stayed in Milan under the Duke of Sforza for about seventeen years. At this time, Leonardo created his most famous drawing “Vitruvian Man”, made a clay model of the equestrian monument of Francesco Sforza, painted the wall of the refectory of the Dominican monastery with the composition “The Last Supper”, made a number of anatomical sketches and drawings of devices.

Leonardo's engineering talent was useful to him after returning to Florence in 1499. He got a job with Duke Cesare Borgia, who counted on da Vinci's ability to create military mechanisms. The engineer worked in Florence for about seven years, after which he returned to Milan again. By that time, he had already completed work on his most famous painting, which is now stored in the Louvre Museum.

The master's second Milan period lasted six years, after which he left for Rome. In 1516, Leonardo went to France, where he spent his last years. On the journey, the master took with him Francesco Melzi, a student and main heir to the artistic style of da Vinci.

Portrait of Francesco Melzi

Despite the fact that Leonardo spent only four years in Rome, it is in this city that the museum named after him is located. In the three halls of the institution you can get acquainted with the devices built according to the drawings of Leonardo, look at copies of paintings, photos of diaries and manuscripts.

The Italian devoted most of his life to engineering and architectural projects. His inventions were both military and peaceful. Leonardo is known as a developer of tank prototypes, an aircraft, a self-propelled cart, a searchlight, a catapult, a bicycle, a parachute, a mobile bridge, a machine gun. Some drawings of the inventor are still a mystery to researchers.

Drawings and sketches of some of the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci

In 2009, the Discovery TV channel aired a series of films called Da Vinci Apparatus. Each of the ten episodes of the documentary series was dedicated to the construction and testing of mechanisms according to Leonardo's original drawings. The film's technicians tried to recreate the inventions of the Italian genius using materials from his era.

Modern researchers have concluded that the probable cause of the artist's death is a stroke. Da Vinci died at the age of 67 in 1519. Thanks to the memoirs of contemporaries, it is known that by that time the artist was already suffering from partial paralysis. Leonardo could not move his right hand, as researchers believe, due to a stroke in 1517.

Despite the paralysis, the master continued an active creative life, resorting to the help of his student Francesco Melzi. Da Vinci's health was deteriorating, and by the end of 1519 it was already difficult for him to walk without assistance. This evidence is consistent with the theoretical diagnosis. Scientists believe that a second attack of cerebrovascular accident in 1519 ended the life of the famous Italian.

Monument to Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, Italy

At the time of his death, the master was in the Clos Luce castle near the city of Amboise, where he lived for the last three years of his life. In accordance with Leonardo's will, his body was buried in the gallery of the church of Saint-Florentin.

Unfortunately, the master's grave was devastated during the Huguenot wars. The church, in which the Italian rested, was plundered, after which it fell into severe disrepair and was demolished by the new owner of the Amboise castle, Roger Ducos, in 1807.

Amboise castle

After the destruction of the Saint-Florentin chapel, the remains from many graves from different years were mixed and buried in the garden.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, researchers made several attempts to identify the bones of Leonardo da Vinci. Innovators in this matter were guided by the lifetime description of the master and chose the most suitable fragments from the remains found. They have been studied for some time. The work was led by archaeologist Arsen Usse. He also found fragments of a tombstone, presumably from the grave of da Vinci, and a skeleton, in which some fragments were missing. These bones were reburied in the reconstructed tomb of the artist in the chapel of Saint Hubert on the grounds of the Château d'Amboise.

Da Vinci's grave at the Château d'Amboise

In 2010, a team of researchers led by Silvano Vincheti was about to exhume the remains of a Renaissance master. It was planned to identify the skeleton using genetic material taken from the graves of Leonardo's paternal relatives. Italian researchers failed to obtain permission from the owners of the castle to carry out the necessary work.

In the place where the Church of Saint-Florentin used to be, at the beginning of the last century, a granite monument was erected, marking the four hundredth anniversary of the death of the famous Italian. The reconstructed tomb of the engineer and the stone monument with his bust are among the most popular sights of Amboise.