Leonardo da Vinci

It is said that Leonardo first learned to play the musical instrument, the lyre, when he was a child and began to compose his own tunes. It is also believed that the Duke of Milan preferred Leonardo’s musical performances over his own court musicians’, because his techniques, talent and skill were matchless.

Leonardo Da Vinci had many friends and patrons, such as Luca Pacioli, Cesare Bogaria, Isabelle d’Este and Niccolo Machiavelli, who were now renowned in their respective fields.

Leonardo was a nature enthusiast mainly because he was surrounded by trees, mountains and rivers as a child. This may have also inspired many of his landscape works.

Very little is known about Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci’s early life and, for many years, it has been the subject of historic surmise.

It is believed that he spent the first five years of his life in Anchonio, a hamlet, and, from 1457 onwards, he lived with uncle, Francesco, in the town of Vinci and received formal education in Latin, mathematics and geometry.

He was greatly inspired by the unique and bizarre incidents that took place in his life when he was a boy such as, discovering a cave in the mountains where he believed a great monster lived. This went on to inspire many of his paintings and works in the later years.

At the age of 14, Leonardo da Vinci became an apprentice to one of the greatest painters of the time, Andrea del Verrocchio. He learned to paint and sculpt under him and was also taught the basics of metallurgy, drafting, chemistry, botany, cartography and carpentry at his workshop.

Although he was a star student and a thorough all-rounder, Da Vinci chose art as his main profession but also pledged to use all that he learned from the workshop, in his life.

He collaborated with Verrocchio on a number of paintings such as ‘The Baptism of Christ’. It was while painting this piece that Verrocchio was stunned with the boy’s sheer talent and vowed never to use the paint brush again because Da Vinci’s work, he believed, was far too superior.

By 1472, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St. Luke, an association of artists and doctors. Da Vinci was so attached to Verrocchio, that he abandoned the workshop that his father set-up and continued to collaborate with his master on a number of pieces.

One of his earliest drawings is ‘Arno Valley’, a sketch of the valley of the same name, which was made on August 5, 1473, with the help of Verrocchio.

In 1478, he received two important painting commissions viz., ‘St. Jerome in the Wilderness’ and ‘Adoration of the Magi’, both of which were never completed.

From 1478 to 1480, he painted ‘Madonna of the Carnation’, an oil painting, with the central motifs of Young Mary and Baby Jesus on her lap and a carnation in her left hand. Originally, the painting was believed to have been created by Verrocchio, but historians later agreed that it was purely one of Leonardo’s early works.

The next important works were ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’ and ‘Madonna of the Rocks’ which were similar in style but differed in composition. The former version, made from 1483 to 1486, is housed in the Musee du Louvre and the latter, made from 1495 to 1508, is a darker version and was transferred to the National Gallery of London.

He was commissioned to create a massive horse statue for a patron and over seventy tons of bronze was sent to him for the purpose however, it was never used. Finally, the structure was made of clay and completed in 1492 and became known as the ‘Gran Cavallo’.

One of his greatest paintings, ‘The Last Supper’, was commissioned to him by the Duke Lodovico Sforza and Leonardo worked on it from 1495 to 1498.