What style did Leonardo da Vinci work in? Unbelievable but true

Introduction

Italian artist, writer, engineer and scientist of outstanding and versatile abilities. He studied at the Florentine workshop of VERROCCHIO. IN early work The Annunciation is depicted against the backdrop of a plein air landscape. His extraordinary author's style and innovative methods of monochrome modeling "figurative" introducing color can be seen in the huge unfinished painting "The Adoration of the Magi" (1481). Through this preparation, he developed the “sfumato” effect, which consists of slightly blurred contours and became distinctive feature Milan school. From 1483 he worked in Milan for the Sforza family, and his first commission was the Madonna of the Rocks, where he depicted the figures of saints in a mystical light against a background fantastic landscape. Innovative " last supper"in Santa Maria delle Grazie, located in Milan, is one of the artist's most significant works. His experimental technique of oil painting on dry primer led to the fact that painting began to deteriorate during his lifetime. He undertook preparatory work and created a huge model for the equestrian monument of Francesco Sforza, but this project was not carried out due to the French invasion of Milan in 1499.

Leonardo returned to Florence and in subsequent years painted, among other works, the Mona Lisa and several versions of the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne. Leonardo spent his last years restlessly - he lived in Rome and Florence, and eventually moved to France under the patronage of Francis I. last years He painted little in life, but was actively involved in other areas of activity, devoting himself to scientific experiments and scrupulous observations of nature. A significant number of his diaries and drawings, some of which are kept in the Royal Library at Windsor, testify to his unique research mind and exceptional intellect. The main objects of research were:

Anatomy (Leonardo performed autopsies on bodies and described the internal organs in detail);

Botany;

The movement of water, often with the idea of controlling the flow of rivers;

Military vehicles and aircraft that display ingenuity but are mostly extremely impractical;

Architecture.

The artist designed centrally symmetrical churches (which may have influenced Bramante). Leonardo was not a humanist scholar and seems to have had little interest classical literature and culture. Consequently, he was not a typical humanist, but he won an enormous reputation during his lifetime and convincingly proved that the artist is a thinker and not a craftsman.

Life and art

Leonardo da Vinci was born in the village of Anchiano near the town of Vinci between Florence and Pisa. Exact date His birth was only relatively recently established on the basis of a document found in the State Archives of Florence. Namely, the diary of Leonardo’s grandfather, Antonio da Vinci, contains the following entry: “In 1452, my grandson was born from Ser Piero, my son, on April 15, Saturday at 3 o’clock in the morning. Received the name Leonardo. He was baptized by the priest Piero de Bartolomei da Vinci.” Leonardo was illegitimate son notary Piero da Vinci. Nothing is known about his mother, Katerina. It is only known that soon after his birth she married a local resident, Antonio, nicknamed Akkat-tabrig.

The young father married Albiera Amadori in the year his son was born. Leonardo spent his childhood years with his grandmother Lucia and uncle Francesco, living in Vinci. Ser Piero moved with his family to Florence around 1464. Here he soon lost his wife and remarried.

In 1466, fourteen-year-old Leonardo was apprenticed to the famous Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea Verrocchio (1436-1488). In Florence, his interests developed and his first knowledge was accumulated.

Another Florentine artist, Antonio Pollaiuolo (1429-1498), whose workshop was located next to Verrocchio's, dissected corpses to study muscles and joints. During the same years, the Florentine artist Benozzo Gozzoli (1420 - ca. 1497) diligently studied anatomy.

Young Leonardo grew and developed in communication with such master experimenters, observers, and researchers. At the end of May 1472, a golden ball and cross were installed on top of the lantern of Santa Maria del Fiore. The implementation of this technical task was entrusted to Verrocchio in 1468, and the young Leonardo was the closest witness to the development of the project. In the same 1472, Leonardo completed his studies with Verrocchio and was enrolled in the workshop of Florentine artists. His interests were not limited to painting even then. According to Vasari, “he was the first who, as a youth, raised the question of how to use the Arno River to connect Pisa and Florence by a canal.” Even if the indication that Leonardo already in his youth raised the question of this particular channel is incorrect, it is undeniable that it was Florence that gave Leonardo the first incentive to technical creativity. His invention of machines for spinning and twisting silk and for processing cloth more than definitely points to Florence - at that time a major center of the silk and wool industry. However, social conditions were not favorable to the activities of Leonardo the technician. In 1469, that is, around the time when Piero da Vinci's family moved to Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici, nicknamed the Magnificent, came to power.

In 1478, Leonardo received his first major commission: to paint an altarpiece in the chapel of the city hall, Palazzo Vecchio. The work proceeded slowly - apparently, and then Leonardo, as later, carried out preparatory experiments with paints and made numerous sketches. As a result, it was never completed, and in 1483 the order was transferred to another person.

Despite the great events that took place in Florence in 1478, Leonardo did not stop his work, but on the contrary painted two of his many famous paintings - “Benois Madonna” located in the St. Petersburg Hermitage, as well as the painting “Saint Jerome”.

The surprising thing was that, no matter how the importance of painting was judged in Florence, the financial situation of Leonardo and other artists remained difficult. It is known that, out of necessity, he had to paint the clock tower of San Donato with gold and ultramarine. In Leonardo's notes there are angry lines directed against “trumpeters and retellers of other people's works,” arrogant and pompous, proud of their book education. It is clear why the eyes of Leonardo the inventor, Leonardo the technician from Medicean Florence with its cult of Plato and sophisticated artificial literature imitating ancient models turned to Milan.

Milan at that time was one of the richest cities in Italy. Officially, the young Gian Galeazzo Sforza was considered its ruler; in fact, his uncle, Lodovico Sforza, nicknamed Moro, ruled. Poets, humanists, and scientists flocked to his court. But the nature of the scientific community was somewhat different than in Florence. Here the mathematical and natural sciences enjoyed great importance, this was reflected in the proximity of the University of Pavia.

Around 1482, Leonardo addressed Lodovico Moro with a letter in which he offered him his services as an engineer. Nine paragraphs of Leonardo's letter are devoted to military inventions, which should have been of particular interest to the Milanese rulers. Also in the letter, Leonardo listed in detail some of the secrets of the military craft that he possessed, such as the construction of light, but at the same time very strong portable bridges, knowledge of the construction of various artillery weapons and many of his other knowledge, which spoke of the originality of his personality.

This is how Leonardo moved to Milan, and the Milanese period of his life (1483-1499), rich in creative events, began. Leonardo was enrolled in the Duke's College of Engineers. He performs in Milan as a military engineer, architect, hydraulic engineer, sculptor, and painter. But it is characteristic that in documents of this period he is referred to first as an “engineer” and then as an “artist.”

From the very first months of his stay in Milan, Leonardo became closely involved in all sectors military equipment. His notes and drawings of this time are, as it were, the implementation of the program that he outlined in a letter to Lodovico Moro: re-equipment of the fortifications of the Milan Castle, siege equipment, mobile ladders, battering rams, etc.

In 1487-1490 Leonardo took part in the competition to build the vestibule of the Milan Cathedral, but his candidacy was rejected. In 1490, the competition was resumed, but Leonardo shortly before withdrew his model, promising to return it. He did not return it and did not participate in the new competition. The winners were the cathedral builders Amadeo and Dolcebono, who completed the vestibule in 1500.

Despite the lack of immediate practical results, the project had great importance in the creative biography of Leonardo. This is precisely the time when a large number of drawings showing how hard Leonardo thought about the problems of the domed ceiling and various forms his architectural solutions. The drawings show that Leonardo seemed to be experimenting mentally, going through various possible options in his mind.

A number of his notes on structural mechanics - on the theory of arches and vaults - date back to the Milanese period of Leonardo's life. Leonardo theoretically and experimentally develops questions about the resistance of materials, being in this regard the predecessor of Galileo. Later, he conceived special treatises on cracks in walls and means of preventing them.

Hydrotechnical projects occupied a lot of space in the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Political and economic conditions were such that these plans were not realized during his lifetime.

Just as in Florence, Leonardo had to waste his technical ingenuity on decorative, lavish festivities and undertakings. Here he organized festivities in honor of the wedding of Moro's nephew, Gian Galeazzo, and the granddaughter of the Neapolitan king, Isabella of Aragon (1489), and organized grandiose spear competitions for the wedding of Lodovico Moro with Beatrice d'Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara (1491). In Milan, Leonardo came into contact with university science, with the Aristotelian scientific traditions, not in a purely scholastic medieval form, but with traditions significantly updated under the influence of new trends characteristic of the Renaissance.Also in Milan, Leonardo communicated with the engineer and philosopher Pietro Monti, author book “On Recognizing People,” was quite close to Luca Pacioli, who was considered the “father of accounting.”

During the Renaissance there were many brilliant sculptors, artists, musicians, and inventors. Leonardo da Vinci stands out against their background. He created musical instruments, he owned many engineering inventions, painted paintings, sculptures and much more.

His external characteristics are also striking: tall, angelic appearance and extraordinary strength. Let's get acquainted with the genius Leonardo da Vinci; a short biography will tell about his main achievements.

Biography facts

He was born near Florence in the small town of Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a famous and wealthy notary. His mother is an ordinary peasant woman. Since the father had no other children, at the age of 4 he took little Leonardo to live with him. The boy demonstrated his extraordinary intelligence and friendly character from the very beginning. early age, and he quickly became a favorite in the family.

To understand how the genius of Leonardo da Vinci developed, a brief biography can be presented as follows:

At the age of 14 he entered Verrocchio's workshop, where he studied drawing and sculpture.
In 1480 he moved to Milan, where he founded the Academy of Arts.
In 1499, he left Milan and began moving from city to city, where he built defensive structures. During this same period, his famous rivalry with Michelangelo began.
Since 1513 he has been working in Rome. Under Francis I, he becomes a court sage.

Leonardo died in 1519. As he believed, nothing he started was ever completed.

Creative path

The work of Leonardo da Vinci, whose brief biography was outlined above, can be divided into three stages.

Early period. Many works of the great painter were unfinished, such as the “Adoration of the Magi” for the monastery of San Donato. During this period, the paintings “Benois Madonna” and “Annunciation” were painted. Despite his young age, the painter already demonstrated high skill in his paintings.
Leonardo's mature period of creativity took place in Milan, where he planned to make a career as an engineer. Most popular work, written at this time, was “The Last Supper”, at the same time he began work on “Mona Lisa”.
IN late period creativity, the painting “John the Baptist” and a series of drawings “The Flood” were created.

Painting always complemented science for Leonardo da Vinci, as he sought to capture reality.

Inventions

A short biography cannot fully convey Leonardo da Vinci's contribution to science. However, we can note the most famous and valuable discoveries of the scientist.

He made his greatest contribution to mechanics, as can be seen from his many drawings. Leonardo da Vinci studied the fall of a body, the centers of gravity of pyramids and much more.
He invented a car made of wood, which was driven by two springs. The car mechanism was equipped with a brake.
He came up with a spacesuit, fins and a submarine, as well as a way to dive to depth without using a spacesuit with a special gas mixture.
The study of dragonfly flight has led to the creation of several variants of wings for humans. The experiments were unsuccessful. However, then the scientist came up with a parachute.
He was involved in developments in the military industry. One of his proposals was chariots with cannons. He came up with a prototype of an armadillo and a tank.
Leonardo da Vinci made many developments in construction. Arch bridges, drainage machines and cranes are all his inventions.

There is no man like Leonardo da Vinci in history. That is why many consider him an alien from other worlds.

Five secrets of da Vinci

Today, many scientists are still puzzling over the legacy left by the great man of the past era. Although it’s not worth calling Leonardo da Vinci that way, he predicted a lot, and foresaw even more, creating his unique masterpieces and amazing with his breadth of knowledge and thought. We offer you five secrets of the great Master that help lift the veil of secrecy over his works.

Encryption

The master encrypted a lot in order not to present ideas openly, but to wait a little until humanity “ripened and grew up” to them. Equally good with both hands, da Vinci wrote with his left hand, in the smallest font, and even from right to left, and often in mirror image. Riddles, metaphors, puzzles - this is what is found on every line, in every work. Never signing his works, the Master left his marks, visible only to an attentive researcher. For example, after many centuries, scientists discovered that by looking closely at his paintings, you can find a symbol of a bird taking off. Or the famous “Benois Madonna,” found among traveling actors who carried the canvas as a home icon.

Sfumato

The idea of dispersion also belongs to the great mystifier. Take a closer look at the canvases, all the objects do not reveal clear edges, just like in life: the smooth flow of one image into another, blurriness, dispersion - everything breathes, lives, awakening fantasies and thoughts. By the way, the Master often advised practicing such vision, peering into water stains, mud deposits or piles of ash. Often he deliberately fumigated his work areas with smoke in order to see in the clubs what was hidden beyond the reasonable eye.

Look at famous painting– the smile of “Mona Lisa” from different angles is sometimes tender, sometimes slightly arrogant and even predatory. The knowledge gained through the study of many sciences gave the Master the opportunity to invent perfect mechanisms that are becoming available only now. For example, this is the effect of wave propagation, the penetrating power of light, oscillatory motion... and many things still need to be analyzed not even by us, but by our descendants.

Analogies

Analogies are the main thing in all the works of the Master. The advantage over accuracy, when a third follows from two conclusions of the mind, is the inevitability of any analogy. And Da Vinci still has no equal in his whimsicality and drawing absolutely mind-blowing parallels. One way or another, all his works have some ideas that are not consistent with each other: the famous illustration “ golden ratio" - one of them. With limbs spread and apart, a person fits into a circle, with his arms closed into a square, and with his arms slightly raised into a cross. It was this kind of “mill” that gave the Florentine magician the idea of creating churches, where the altar was placed exactly in the middle, and the worshipers stood in a circle. By the way, engineers liked this same idea - this is how the ball bearing was born.

Contrapposto

The definition denotes the opposition of opposites and the creation of a certain type of movement. An example is the sculpture of a huge horse in Corte Vecchio. There, the animal’s legs are positioned precisely in the contrapposto style, forming a visual understanding of the movement.

Incompleteness

This is perhaps one of the Master’s favorite “tricks”. None of his works are finite. To complete is to kill, and da Vinci loved every one of his creations. Slow and meticulous, the hoaxer of all times could take a couple of brush strokes and go to the valleys of Lombardy to improve the landscapes there, switch to creating the next masterpiece device, or something else. Many works turned out to be spoiled by time, fire or water, but each of the creations, at least meaning something, was and is “unfinished”. By the way, it is interesting that even after the damage, Leonardo da Vinci never corrected his paintings. Having created his own paint, the artist even deliberately left a “window of incompleteness,” believing that life itself would make the necessary adjustments.

What was art before Leonardo da Vinci? Born among the rich, it fully reflected their interests, their worldview, their views on man and the world. The works of art were based on religious ideas and themes: affirmation of those views on the world that the church taught, depiction of scenes from sacred history, instilling in people a sense of reverence, admiration for the “divine” and consciousness of their own insignificance. The dominant theme also determined the form. Naturally, the image of the “saints” was very far from the images of real living people, therefore, schemes, artificiality, and staticity dominated in art. The people in these paintings were a kind of caricature of living people, the landscape is fantastic, the colors are pale and inexpressive. True, even before Leonardo, his predecessors, including his teacher Andrea Verrocchio, were no longer satisfied with the template and tried to create new images. They had already begun the search for new methods of depiction, began to study the laws of perspective, and thought a lot about the problems of achieving expressiveness in the image.

However, these searches for something new did not yield great results, primarily because these artists did not have a sufficiently clear idea of the essence and tasks of art and knowledge of the laws of painting. That is why they fell again into schematism, then into an equally dangerous true art naturalism, copying individual phenomena of reality. The significance of the revolution made by Leonardo da Vinci in art and in particular in painting is determined primarily by the fact that he was the first to clearly, clearly and definitely establish the essence and tasks of art. Art should be deeply life-like and realistic. It must come from a deep, careful study of reality and nature. It must be deeply truthful, it must depict reality as it is, without any artificiality or falsehood. Reality, nature is beautiful in itself and does not need any embellishment. The artist must carefully study nature, but not to blindly imitate it, not to simply copy it, but in order to create works, having understood the laws of nature, the laws of reality; strictly comply with these laws. Create new values, values real world- this is the purpose of art. This explains Leonardo's desire to connect art and science. Instead of simple, casual observation, he considered it necessary to systematically, persistently study the subject. It is known that Leonardo never parted with the album and wrote drawings and sketches in it.

They say that he loved to walk through the streets, squares, markets, noting everything interesting - people’s poses, faces, their expressions. Leonardo's second requirement for painting is the requirement for the truthfulness of the image, its vitality. The artist must strive for the most accurate representation of reality in all its richness. At the center of the world stands a living, thinking, feeling person. It is he who must be depicted in all the richness of his feelings, experiences and actions. For this purpose, it was Leonardo who studied human anatomy and physiology; for this purpose, as they say, he gathered peasants he knew in his workshop and, treating them, told them funny stories in order to see how people laugh, how the same event causes people have different impressions. If before Leonardo there was no real man in painting, now he has become dominant in the art of the Renaissance. Hundreds of Leonardo's drawings provide a gigantic gallery of types of people, their faces, and parts of their bodies. Man in all the diversity of his feelings and actions is the task artistic image. And this is the strength and charm of Leonardo’s painting. Forced by the conditions of the time to paint pictures mainly on religious subjects, because his customers were the church, feudal lords and rich merchants, Leonardo powerfully subordinates these traditional subjects to his genius and creates works of universal significance. The Madonnas painted by Leonardo are, first of all, an image of one of the deeply human feelings– feelings of motherhood, the mother’s boundless love for the baby, admiration and admiration for him. All his Madonnas are young, blooming women full of life, all the babies in his paintings are healthy, full-cheeked, playful boys, in whom there is not an ounce of “holiness.”

His apostles in The Last Supper are living people of various ages, social status, various nature; in appearance they are Milanese artisans, peasants, and intellectuals. Striving for truth, the artist must be able to generalize what he finds individual and must create the typical. Therefore, even when drawing portraits of certain people, historically we famous people, like, for example, Mona Lisa Gioconda - the wife of a bankrupt aristocrat, Florentine merchant Francesco del Gioconda, Leonardo gives in them, along with individual portrait features, a typical feature common to many people. That is why the portraits he painted survived the people depicted in them for many centuries. Leonardo was the first who not only carefully and carefully studied the laws of painting, but also formulated them. He deeply, like no one before him, studied the laws of perspective, the placement of light and shadow. He needed all this to achieve the highest expressiveness of the picture, in order to, as he said, “become equal to nature.” For the first time, it was in the works of Leonardo that the painting as such lost its static character and became a window into the world. When you look at his painting, the feeling of what was painted, enclosed in a frame, is lost and it seems that you are looking through an open window, revealing to the viewer something new, something they have never seen. Demanding the expressiveness of the painting, Leonardo resolutely opposed the formal play of colors, against the enthusiasm for form at the expense of content, against what so clearly characterizes decadent art.

For Leonardo, form is only the shell of the idea that the artist must convey to the viewer. Leonardo pays a lot of attention to the problems of the composition of the picture, the problems of placement of figures, and individual details. Hence his favorite composition of placing figures in a triangle - the simplest geometric harmonic figure - a composition that allows the viewer to embrace the whole picture as a whole. Expressiveness, truthfulness, accessibility - these are the laws of the present, truly folk art, formulated by Leonardo da Vinci, the laws that he himself embodied in his brilliant works. Already in his first major painting, “Madonna with a Flower,” Leonardo showed in practice what the principles of art he professed meant. What is striking about this picture is, first of all, its composition, the surprisingly harmonious distribution of all the elements of the picture that make up a single whole. The image of a young mother with a cheerful child in her arms is deeply realistic. The directly felt deep blue of the Italian sky through the window slot is incredibly skillfully conveyed. Already in this picture, Leonardo demonstrated the principle of his art - realism, the depiction of a person in the deepest accordance with his true nature, the depiction of not an abstract scheme, which was what medieval ascetic art taught and did, namely a living, feeling person.

These principles are even more clearly expressed in Leonardo’s second major painting, “The Adoration of the Magi,” 1481, in which it is not the religious subject that is significant, but the masterful depiction of people, each of whom has his own, individual person, his posture, expresses his feeling and mood. Life truth is the law of Leonardo’s painting. The fullest possible disclosure of a person’s inner life is its goal. In “The Last Supper” the composition is brought to perfection: despite the large number of figures - 13, their placement is strictly calculated so that they all as a whole represent a kind of unity, full of great internal content. The picture is very dynamic: some terrible news communicated by Jesus struck his disciples, each of them reacts to it in their own way, hence the huge variety of expressions of inner feelings on the faces of the apostles. Compositional perfection is complemented by an unusually masterful use of colors, harmony of light and shadows. The expressiveness of the painting reaches its perfection thanks to the extraordinary variety of not only facial expressions, but the position of each of the twenty-six hands drawn in the picture.

This recording by Leonardo himself tells us about the careful preliminary work that he carried out before painting the picture. Everything in it is thought out to the smallest detail: poses, facial expressions; even details such as an overturned bowl or knife; all this in its sum forms a single whole. The richness of colors in this painting is combined with a subtle use of chiaroscuro, which emphasizes the significance of the event depicted in the painting. The subtlety of perspective, the transmission of air and color make this painting a masterpiece of world art. Leonardo successfully solved many problems facing artists at that time and opened the way further development art. By the power of his genius, Leonardo overcame the medieval traditions that weighed heavily on art, broke them and discarded them; he was able to push the narrow boundaries that limited the creative power of the artist by the then ruling clique of churchmen, and show, instead of the hackneyed gospel stencil scene, a huge, purely human drama, show living people with their passions, feelings, experiences. And in this picture the great, life-affirming optimism of the artist and thinker Leonardo again manifested itself.

Over the years of his wanderings, Leonardo painted many more paintings that received well-deserved world fame and recognition. In "La Gioconda" a deeply vital and typical image is given. It is this deep vitality, the unusually relief rendering of facial features, individual details, and costume, combined with a masterfully painted landscape, that gives this picture special expressiveness. Everything about her—from the mysterious half-smile playing on her face to her calmly folded hands—speaks of great inner content, of the great spiritual life of this woman. Leonardo's desire to convey inner world in external manifestations emotional movements expressed here especially fully. An interesting painting by Leonardo is “The Battle of Anghiari”, depicting the battle of cavalry and infantry. As in his other paintings, Leonardo sought here to show a variety of faces, figures and poses. Dozens of people depicted by the artist create a complete impression of the picture precisely because they are all subordinated to a single idea underlying it. It was a desire to show the rise of all man’s strength in battle, the tension of all his feelings, brought together to achieve victory.

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

Brief message about Leonardo da Vinci

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 lived the first years of his life with his mother. Afterwards the father, a quite wealthy notary, took his son into his family. In 1466, the young man entered the workshop of the Florentine artist Verrocchio as an apprentice. His hobbies include drawing, modeling, sculpture, working with leather, metal and plaster. In 1473, he qualified as a master at the Guild of St. Luke.

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

Leonardo da Vinci's further activities are connected with Milan, where he moved in 1482. Here he enters the service of Ludovico Sforza, 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 a simple apparatus based on wings, and then he developed an airplane mechanism with the described full control. But they failed to bring their idea to life. In addition to design, he studied anatomy and architecture, and 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 “The 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. 6 years later, da Vinci is again in Milan. In 1507, the genius met Count Francesco Melzi, who would become his student, heir and life partner.

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

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

We hope that the report on the topic: “Leonardo da Vinci” helped you prepare for classes. You can submit your message about Leonardo da Vinci in the comment form below.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452 -1519) - Italian artist (painter, sculptor, architect) and scientist (anatomist, naturalist), inventor, writer, one of the largest representatives of art High Renaissance, shining example"universal man".

BIOGRAPHY OF LEONARDO DA VINCI

Born in 1452 near the city of Vinci (where the prefix of his surname came from). His artistic interests are not limited to painting, architecture and sculpture. Despite his enormous achievements in the field of exact sciences (mathematics, physics) and natural science, Leonardo did not find sufficient support and understanding. Only many years later his work was truly appreciated.

Fascinated by the idea of creating an aircraft, Leonardo da Vinci first developed the simplest aircraft (Daedalus and Icarus) based on wings. His new idea was an airplane with full control. However, it was not possible to implement it due to the lack of a motor. The scientist’s also famous idea is a vertical take-off and landing device.

Studying the laws of fluid and hydraulics in general, Leonardo made significant contributions to the theory of locks and sewer ports, testing ideas in practice.

Famous paintings by Leonardo da Vinci are “La Gioconda”, “The Last Supper”, “Madonna with an Ermine”, and many others. Leonardo was demanding and precise in all his affairs. Even when he became interested in painting, he insisted on fully studying the object before starting to draw.

Giaconda Last Supper Madonna with an ermine

Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts are priceless. They were published in full only in the 19th and 20th centuries, although even during his lifetime the author dreamed of publishing Part 3. In his notes, Leonardo noted not just thoughts, but supplemented them with drawings, drawings, and descriptions.

Being talented in many fields, Leonardo da Vinci made significant contributions to the history of architecture, art, and physics. The great scientist died in France in 1519.

THE WORK OF LEONARDO DA VINCI

To the number early works Leonardo also refers to the “Madonna with a Flower” kept in the Hermitage (the so-called “Benois Madonna”, around 1478), which is decidedly different from the numerous Madonnas of the 15th century. Refusing the genre and meticulous detail inherent in the creations of masters early Renaissance, Leonardo deepens the characteristics, generalizes the forms.

In 1480, Leonardo already had his own workshop and received orders. However, his passion for science often distracted him from his studies in art. The large altar composition “Adoration of the Magi” (Florence, Uffizi) and “Saint Jerome” (Rome, Vatican Pinacoteca) remained unfinished.

The Milanese period includes paintings of a mature style - “Madonna in the Grotto” and “The Last Supper”. “Madonna in the Grotto” (1483-1494, Paris, Louvre) is the first monumental altar composition of the High Renaissance. Her characters Mary, John, Christ and the angel acquired features of greatness, poetic spirituality and fullness of life expressiveness.

The most significant of Leonardo’s monumental paintings, “The Last Supper,” executed in 1495-1497 for the monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan, takes you into the world of real passions and dramatic feelings. Departing from the traditional interpretation of the Gospel episode, Leonardo gives an innovative solution to the theme, a composition that deeply reveals human feelings and experiences.

After Milan was captured by French troops, Leonardo left the city. Years of wandering began. Commissioned by the Florentine Republic, he made cardboard for the fresco “The Battle of Anghiari”, which was to decorate one of the walls of the Council Chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio (city government building). When creating this cardboard, Leonardo entered into competition with the young Michelangelo, who was executing an order for the fresco “The Battle of Cascina” for another wall of the same hall.

In Leonardo's composition, full of drama and dynamics, an episode of the battle for the banner, a moment is given high voltage forces fighting, the cruel truth of war is revealed. The creation of a portrait of Mona Lisa (“La Gioconda”, circa 1504, Paris, Louvre), one of the most famous works of world painting, dates back to this time.

The depth and significance of the created image is extraordinary, in which individual features are combined with great generalization.

Leonardo was born into the family of a wealthy notary and landowner Piero da Vinci; his mother was a simple peasant woman, Katerina. He received a good education at home, but he lacked systematic studies in Greek and Latin.

He played the lyre masterfully. When Leonardo's case was heard in the Milan court, he appeared there precisely as a musician, and not as an artist or inventor.

According to one theory, Mona Lisa smiles from the realization of her secret pregnancy.

According to another version, Gioconda was entertained by musicians and clowns while she posed for the artist.

There is another theory according to which the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait of Leonardo.

Leonardo, apparently, did not leave a single self-portrait that could be unambiguously attributed to him. Scientists doubted that famous self-portrait Sanguine Leonardo (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 latest to be expressed recently by one of the leading experts on Leonardo, Professor Pietro Marani.

Scientists from the University of Amsterdam and specialists from the USA, having studied mysterious smile Mona Lisa, using a new computer program, unraveled its composition: according to them, it contains 83% happiness, 9% disdain, 6% fear and 2% anger.

In 1994, Bill Gates purchased Codex Leicester, a collection of works by Leonardo da Vinci, for $30 million. Since 2003 it has been on display at the Seattle Art Museum.

Leonardo loved water: he developed instructions for underwater diving, invented and described a device for underwater diving, and a breathing apparatus for scuba diving. All of Leonardo's inventions formed the basis of modern underwater equipment.

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

Observations of the moon in the waxing crescent phase led Leonardo to one of the important scientific discoveries - the researcher found that sunlight reflected from the Earth and returned to the moon in the form of secondary illumination.

Leonardo was ambidextrous - he was equally good with his right and left hands. He suffered from dyslexia (impaired reading ability) - this ailment, called “word blindness,” is associated with reduced brain activity in a certain area of the left hemisphere. As you know, Leonardo wrote in a mirror way.

The Louvre recently spent $5.5 million to move the artist's famous masterpiece, La Gioconda, from the general public to a room specially equipped for it. Two thirds were allocated for La Gioconda State Hall, occupying a total area of 840 square meters. The huge room was rebuilt into a gallery, on the far wall of which Leonardo’s famous creation now hangs. The reconstruction, which was carried out according to the design of the Peruvian architect Lorenzo Piqueras, lasted about four years. The decision to move the Mona Lisa to separate room was adopted by the administration of the Louvre due to the fact that same place, surrounded by other paintings by Italian painters, this masterpiece was lost, and the public had to stand in line to see the famous painting.

In August 2003, a painting by the great Leonardo da Vinci worth $50 million, “Madonna of the Spindle,” was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland. The masterpiece disappeared from the home of one of Scotland's richest landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch. The FBI last November released a list of the 10 most high-profile crimes in the field of art, including this robbery.

Leonardo left designs for a submarine, a propeller, a tank, a loom, a ball bearing and flying cars.

In December 2000, British paratrooper Adrian Nicholas South Africa descended from a height of 3 thousand meters from hot air balloon on a parachute made according to a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. The Discover website writes about this fact.

Leonardo was the first painter to dismember corpses in order to understand the location and structure of muscles.

A great lover of word games, Leonardo left it in the Codex Arundel long list synonyms for male penis.

While building canals, Leonardo da Vinci made an observation, which later entered geology under his name as theoretical principle recognition of the time of formation of the earth's layers. He came to the conclusion that the Earth is much older than the Bible believed.

It is believed that da Vinci was a vegetarian (Andrea Corsali, in a letter to Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici, compares Leonardo to an Indian who did not eat meat). The phrase often attributed to da Vinci: “If a person strives for freedom, why does he keep birds and animals in cages? .. man is truly the king of animals, because he cruelly exterminates them. We live by killing others. We are walking cemeteries! At an early age I gave up meat" taken from English translation novel by Dmitry Merezhkovsky “Resurrected Gods. Leonardo da Vinci."

Leonardo wrote in his famous diaries from right to left in mirror image. Many people think that in this way he wanted to make his research secret. Perhaps this is true. According to another version, the mirror handwriting was his individual feature(there is even evidence that it was easier for him to write this way than in the normal way); There is even a concept of “Leonardo’s handwriting.”

Leonardo's hobbies even included cooking and the art of serving. In Milan, for 13 years he was the manager of court feasts. He invented several culinary devices to make the work of cooks easier. Leonardo's original dish - thinly sliced stewed meat with vegetables laid on top - was very popular at court feasts.

Italian scientists announced a sensational discovery. They claim that an early self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci has been discovered. The discovery belongs to the journalist Piero Angela.

In Terry Pratchett's books, there is a character named Leonard, whose prototype was Leonardo da Vinci. Pratchett's Leonard writes from right to left, invents various machines, practices alchemy, paints pictures (the most famous is the portrait of Mona Ogg)

Leonardo - minor character in the game Assassin's Creed 2. Here he is shown still young, but talented artist and also an inventor.

A considerable number of Leonardo's manuscripts were first published by the curator of the Ambrosian Library, Carlo Amoretti.

Bibliography

Symbols

Fairy tales and parables of Leonardo da Vinci
Natural science writings and works on aesthetics (1508).
Leonardo da Vinci. "Fire and the Cauldron (story)"

About him

Leonardo da Vinci. Selected natural science works. M. 1955.
Monuments of world aesthetic thought, vol. I, M. 1962. Les manuscrits de Leonard de Vinci, de la Bibliothèque de l’Institut, 1881-1891.
Leonardo da Vinci: Traité de la peinture, 1910.
Il Codice di Leonardo da Vinci, nella Biblioteca del principe Trivulzio, Milano, 1891.
Il Codice Atlantico di Leonardo da Vinci, nella Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milano, 1894-1904.
Volynsky A.L., Leonardo da Vinci, St. Petersburg, 1900; 2nd ed., St. Petersburg, 1909.
General history of art. T.3, M. “Art”, 1962.
Gastev A. Leonardo da Vinci (ZhZL)
Gukovsky M. A. Mechanics of Leonardo da Vinci. - M.: Publishing House of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1947. - 815 p.
Zubov V.P. Leonardo da Vinci. M.: Publishing house. USSR Academy of Sciences, 1962.
Pater V. Renaissance, M., 1912.
Seil G. Leonardo da Vinci as an artist and scientist. Experience in psychological biography, St. Petersburg, 1898.
Sumtsov N. F. Leonardo da Vinci, 2nd ed., Kharkov, 1900.
Florentine readings: Leonardo da Vinci (collection of articles by E. Solmi, B. Croce, I. del Lungo, J. Paladina, etc.), M., 1914.
Geymüller H. Les manuscrits de Leonardo de Vinci, extr. de la "Gazette des Beaux-Arts", 1894.
Grothe H., Leonardo da Vinci als Ingenieur und Philosopher, 1880.
Herzfeld M., Das Traktat von der Malerei. Jena, 1909.
Leonardo da Vinci, der Denker, Forscher und Poet, Auswahl, Uebersetzung und Einleitung, Jena, 1906.
Müntz E., Leonardo da Vinci, 1899.
Péladan, Leonardo da Vinci. Textes choisis, 1907.
Richter J. P., The literary works of L. da Vinci, London, 1883.
Ravaisson-Mollien Ch., Les écrits de Leonardo de Vinci, 1881.

Leonardo Da Vinci in works of art

The Life of Leonardo da Vinci is a 1971 television miniseries.
Da Vinci's Demons is a 2013 American television series.

When writing this article, materials from the following sites were used:wikipedia.org ,

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His external characteristics are also amazing: tall height, angelic appearance and extraordinary strength. Let's get acquainted with the genius Leonardo da Vinci; a short biography will tell about his main achievements.

Biography facts

He was born near Florence in the small town of Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a famous and wealthy notary. His mother is an ordinary peasant woman. Since the father had no other children, at the age of 4 he took little Leonardo to live with him. The boy demonstrated his extraordinary intelligence and friendly character from a very early age, and he quickly became a favorite in the family.

To understand how the genius of Leonardo da Vinci developed, a brief biography can be presented as follows:

At the age of 14 he entered Verrocchio's workshop, where he studied drawing and sculpture.
In 1480 he moved to Milan, where he founded the Academy of Arts.
In 1499, he left Milan and began moving from city to city, where he built defensive structures. During this same period, his famous rivalry with Michelangelo began.
Since 1513 he has been working in Rome. Under Francis I, he becomes a court sage.

Leonardo died in 1519. As he believed, nothing he started was ever completed.

Creative path

The work of Leonardo da Vinci, whose brief biography was outlined above, can be divided into three stages.

Early period. Many works of the great painter were unfinished, such as the “Adoration of the Magi” for the monastery of San Donato. During this period, the paintings “Benois Madonna” and “Annunciation” were painted. Despite his young age, the painter already demonstrated high skill in his paintings.
Leonardo's mature period of creativity took place in Milan, where he planned to make a career as an engineer. The most popular work written at this time was The Last Supper, and at the same time he began work on the Mona Lisa.
In the late period of creativity, the painting “John the Baptist” and a series of drawings “The Flood” were created.

Painting always complemented science for Leonardo da Vinci, as he sought to capture reality.

Inventions

A short biography cannot fully convey Leonardo da Vinci's contribution to science. However, we can note the most famous and valuable discoveries of the scientist.

He made his greatest contribution to mechanics, as can be seen from his many drawings. Leonardo da Vinci studied the fall of a body, the centers of gravity of pyramids and much more.
He invented a car made of wood, which was driven by two springs. The car mechanism was equipped with a brake.
He came up with a spacesuit, fins and a submarine, as well as a way to dive to depth without using a spacesuit with a special gas mixture.
The study of dragonfly flight has led to the creation of several variants of wings for humans. The experiments were unsuccessful. However, then the scientist came up with a parachute.
He was involved in developments in the military industry. One of his proposals was chariots with cannons. He came up with a prototype of an armadillo and a tank.
Leonardo da Vinci made many developments in construction. Arch bridges, drainage machines and cranes are all his inventions.

There is no man like Leonardo da Vinci in history. That is why many consider him an alien from other worlds.

Five secrets of da Vinci

Encryption

Sfumato

Look at the famous painting - the smile of the “Mona Lisa” from different angles, sometimes tender, sometimes slightly arrogant and even predatory. The knowledge gained through the study of many sciences gave the Master the opportunity to invent perfect mechanisms that are becoming available only now. For example, this is the effect of wave propagation, the penetrating power of light, oscillatory motion... and many things still need to be analyzed not even by us, but by our descendants.

Analogies

Analogies are the main thing in all the works of the Master. The advantage over accuracy, when a third follows from two conclusions of the mind, is the inevitability of any analogy. And Da Vinci still has no equal in his whimsicality and drawing absolutely mind-blowing parallels. One way or another, all of his works have some ideas that are not consistent with each other: the famous “golden ratio” illustration is one of them. With limbs spread and apart, a person fits into a circle, with his arms closed into a square, and with his arms slightly raised into a cross. It was this kind of “mill” that gave the Florentine magician the idea of creating churches, where the altar was placed exactly in the middle, and the worshipers stood in a circle. By the way, engineers liked this same idea - this is how the ball bearing was born.

Contrapposto

Incompleteness

However, these searches for something new did not yield great results, primarily because these artists did not have a sufficiently clear idea of the essence and tasks of art and knowledge of the laws of painting. That is why they fell again into schematism, then into naturalism, which is equally dangerous for genuine art, copying individual phenomena of reality. The significance of the revolution made by Leonardo da Vinci in art and in particular in painting is determined primarily by the fact that he was the first to clearly, clearly and definitely establish the essence and tasks of art. Art should be deeply life-like and realistic. It must come from a deep, careful study of reality and nature. It must be deeply truthful, it must depict reality as it is, without any artificiality or falsehood. Reality, nature is beautiful in itself and does not need any embellishment. The artist must carefully study nature, but not to blindly imitate it, not to simply copy it, but in order to create works, having understood the laws of nature, the laws of reality; strictly comply with these laws. To create new values, values of the real world - this is the purpose of art. This explains Leonardo's desire to connect art and science. Instead of simple, casual observation, he considered it necessary to systematically, persistently study the subject. It is known that Leonardo never parted with the album and wrote drawings and sketches in it.

They say that he loved to walk through the streets, squares, markets, noting everything interesting - people’s poses, faces, their expressions. Leonardo's second requirement for painting is the requirement for the truthfulness of the image, its vitality. The artist must strive for the most accurate representation of reality in all its richness. At the center of the world stands a living, thinking, feeling person. It is he who must be depicted in all the richness of his feelings, experiences and actions. For this purpose, it was Leonardo who studied human anatomy and physiology; for this purpose, as they say, he gathered peasants he knew in his workshop and, treating them, told them funny stories in order to see how people laugh, how the same event causes people have different impressions. If before Leonardo there was no real man in painting, now he has become dominant in the art of the Renaissance. Hundreds of Leonardo's drawings provide a gigantic gallery of types of people, their faces, and parts of their bodies. Man in all the diversity of his feelings and actions is the task of artistic depiction. And this is the strength and charm of Leonardo’s painting. Forced by the conditions of the time to paint pictures mainly on religious subjects, because his customers were the church, feudal lords and rich merchants, Leonardo powerfully subordinates these traditional subjects to his genius and creates works of universal significance. The Madonnas painted by Leonardo are, first of all, an image of one of the deeply human feelings - the feeling of motherhood, the boundless love of a mother for her baby, admiration and admiration for him. All his Madonnas are young, blooming women full of life, all the babies in his paintings are healthy, full-cheeked, playful boys, in whom there is not an ounce of “holiness.”

His apostles in The Last Supper are living people of different ages, social status, and different characters; in appearance they are Milanese artisans, peasants, and intellectuals. Striving for truth, the artist must be able to generalize what he finds individual and must create the typical. Therefore, even when painting portraits of certain historically known people, such as Mona Lisa Gioconda, the wife of a bankrupt aristocrat, Florentine merchant Francesco del Gioconda, Leonardo gives them, along with individual portrait features, a typical feature common to many people. That is why the portraits he painted survived the people depicted in them for many centuries. Leonardo was the first who not only carefully and carefully studied the laws of painting, but also formulated them. He deeply, like no one before him, studied the laws of perspective, the placement of light and shadow. He needed all this to achieve the highest expressiveness of the picture, in order to, as he said, “become equal to nature.” For the first time, it was in the works of Leonardo that the painting as such lost its static character and became a window into the world. When you look at his painting, the feeling of what was painted, enclosed in a frame, is lost and it seems that you are looking through an open window, revealing to the viewer something new, something they have never seen. Demanding the expressiveness of the painting, Leonardo resolutely opposed the formal play of colors, against the enthusiasm for form at the expense of content, against what so clearly characterizes decadent art.

For Leonardo, form is only the shell of the idea that the artist must convey to the viewer. Leonardo pays a lot of attention to the problems of the composition of the picture, the problems of placement of figures, and individual details. Hence his favorite composition of placing figures in a triangle - the simplest geometric harmonic figure - a composition that allows the viewer to embrace the whole picture as a whole. Expressiveness, truthfulness, accessibility - these are the laws of real, truly folk art formulated by Leonardo da Vinci, laws that he himself embodied in his brilliant works. Already in his first major painting, “Madonna with a Flower,” Leonardo showed in practice what the principles of art he professed meant. What is striking about this picture is, first of all, its composition, the surprisingly harmonious distribution of all the elements of the picture that make up a single whole. The image of a young mother with a cheerful child in her arms is deeply realistic. The directly felt deep blue of the Italian sky through the window slot is incredibly skillfully conveyed. Already in this picture, Leonardo demonstrated the principle of his art - realism, the depiction of a person in the deepest accordance with his true nature, the depiction of not an abstract scheme, which was what medieval ascetic art taught and did, namely a living, feeling person.

These principles are even more clearly expressed in Leonardo’s second major painting, “The Adoration of the Magi” from 1481, in which what is significant is not the religious plot, but the masterful depiction of people, each of whom has his own, individual face, his own pose, expresses his own feeling and mood. Life truth is the law of Leonardo’s painting. The fullest possible disclosure of a person’s inner life is its goal. In “The Last Supper” the composition is brought to perfection: despite the large number of figures - 13, their placement is strictly calculated so that they all as a whole represent a kind of unity, full of great internal content. The picture is very dynamic: some terrible news communicated by Jesus struck his disciples, each of them reacts to it in their own way, hence the huge variety of expressions of inner feelings on the faces of the apostles. Compositional perfection is complemented by an unusually masterful use of colors, harmony of light and shadows. The expressiveness of the painting reaches its perfection thanks to the extraordinary variety of not only facial expressions, but the position of each of the twenty-six hands drawn in the picture.

This recording by Leonardo himself tells us about the careful preliminary work that he carried out before painting the picture. Everything in it is thought out to the smallest detail: poses, facial expressions; even details such as an overturned bowl or knife; all this in its sum forms a single whole. The richness of colors in this painting is combined with a subtle use of chiaroscuro, which emphasizes the significance of the event depicted in the painting. The subtlety of perspective, the transmission of air and color make this painting a masterpiece of world art. Leonardo successfully solved many problems facing artists at that time and opened the way for the further development of art. By the power of his genius, Leonardo overcame the medieval traditions that weighed heavily on art, broke them and discarded them; he was able to push the narrow boundaries that limited the creative power of the artist by the then ruling clique of churchmen, and show, instead of the hackneyed gospel stencil scene, a huge, purely human drama, show living people with their passions, feelings, experiences. And in this picture the great, life-affirming optimism of the artist and thinker Leonardo again manifested itself.

Over the years of his wanderings, Leonardo painted many more paintings that received well-deserved world fame and recognition. In "La Gioconda" a deeply vital and typical image is given. It is this deep vitality, the unusually relief rendering of facial features, individual details, and costume, combined with a masterfully painted landscape, that gives this picture special expressiveness. Everything about her—from the mysterious half-smile playing on her face to her calmly folded hands—speaks of great inner content, of the great spiritual life of this woman. Leonardo's desire to convey the inner world in the external manifestations of mental movements is especially fully expressed here. An interesting painting by Leonardo is “The Battle of Anghiari”, depicting the battle of cavalry and infantry. As in his other paintings, Leonardo sought here to show a variety of faces, figures and poses. Dozens of people depicted by the artist create a complete impression of the picture precisely because they are all subordinated to a single idea underlying it. It was a desire to show the rise of all man’s strength in battle, the tension of all his feelings, brought together to achieve victory.