Leonardo da Vinci was born in the town of Vinci (or near it), located west of Florence, on April 15, 1452. He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a peasant girl, brought up in his father's house and, being the son of an educated man, received a solid elementary education.
1467 - at the age of 15, Leonardo became an apprentice to one of the leading masters of the Early Renaissance in Florence, Andrea del Verrocchio; 1472 - joined the guild of artists, studied the basics of drawing and other necessary disciplines; 1476 - and he worked in Verrocchio's workshop, apparently, in collaboration with the master himself.
By 1480, Leonardo already had large orders, but 2 years later he moved to Milan. In a letter to the ruler of Milan, Lodovico Sforza, he introduced himself as an engineer, military expert and artist. The years he spent in Milan were filled with various pursuits. Leonardo da Vinci painted several paintings and the famous fresco "The Last Supper" and began to carefully and seriously take his notes. The Leonardo whom we recognize from his notes is an architect-designer (creator of innovative plans that were never realized), anatomist, hydraulics, inventor of mechanisms, creator of scenery for court performances, writer of riddles, riddles and fables for the entertainment of the court, musician and theorist of painting.
1499 - after the expulsion of Lodovico Sforza from Milan by the French, Leonardo leaves for Venice, visits Mantua on the way, where he participates in the construction of defensive structures, after which he returns to Florence. In those days, he was so passionate about mathematics that he did not even want to think about picking up a brush. For 12 years, Leonardo has been moving from city to city all the time, working for the famous Cesare Borgia in Romagna, designing defensive structures (never built) for Piombino.
In Florence, he enters into a rivalry with Michelangelo; This rivalry culminated in the creation of huge battle compositions that the two artists wrote for Palazzo della Signoria (also Palazzo Vecchio). Then Leonardo conceived a second equestrian monument, which, like the first, was never created. Throughout these years, he continues to fill out his notebooks. They reflect his ideas related to a variety of subjects. This is the theory and practice of painting, anatomy, mathematics and even the flight of birds. 1513 - as in 1499, his patrons are expelled from Milan …
Leonardo leaves for Rome, where he spends 3 years under the auspices of the Medici. Depressed and distressed at the lack of material for anatomical research, he engages in experiments that lead to nothing.
The kings of France, first Louis XII, then Francis I, admired the works of the Italian Renaissance, especially Leonardo's Last Supper. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that in 1516 Francis I, well aware of the versatile talents of Leonardo, invited him to the court, which was then located in the castle of Amboise in the Loire Valley. As the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini wrote, despite the fact that the Florentine worked on the hydraulic projects and plans for the new royal palace, his main occupation is the honorary position of court sage and adviser.
Carried away by the idea of creating an aircraft, the Florentine first developed the simplest aircraft (Daedalus and Icarus) based on wings. His new idea is an airplane with full control. But it was not possible to bring the idea to life due to the lack of a motor. Also the famous idea of the scientist is a vertical take-off and landing apparatus.
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Studying the laws of fluid and hydraulics in general, Leonardo made a great contribution to the theory of locks, sewer ports, testing ideas in practice.
Famous paintings by Leonardo - "La Gioconda", "The Last Supper", "Madonna with an Ermine", and many others. Leonardo was exacting and exacting in everything he did. Even before painting a picture, he insisted on a complete study of the object before starting.
Leonardo's manuscripts are priceless. They were fully published only in the 19th and 20th centuries. In his notes, Leonardo da Vinci noted not just reflections, but supplemented them with drawings, drawings, descriptions.
Leonardo da Vinci was talented in many fields, he made a significant contribution to the history of architecture, art, physics.
Died Leonardo da Vinci at Amboise on May 2, 1519; By this time, his paintings were usually dispersed in private collections, and the notes lay in different collections, almost in complete oblivion, for several more centuries.
Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci
• Leonardo da Vinci encrypted a lot so that his ideas were revealed gradually, as humanity could “mature” to them. He wrote with his left hand and in very small letters, from right to left, so that the text looked like a mirror image. He spoke in riddles, made metaphorical prophecies, loved to make puzzles. Leonardo da Vinci did not sign his works, but there are identification marks on them. For example, if you take a closer look at the paintings, you may find a symbolic bird flying up. There are, as you can see, a lot of such signs, because one or another of his hidden "offspring" are unexpectedly found on famous canvases, centuries later. So, for example, it was with "Madonna Benoit", which for a long time, as a home icon, wandering actors carried with them.
• Leonard discovered the principle of scattering (or sfumato). The objects on his canvases have no clear boundaries: everything, as in life, is blurry, penetrates one into another, which means it breathes, lives, awakens imagination. To master this principle, he advised to exercise: to look at the spots on the walls, ash, clouds or dirt that appear from dampness. He deliberately fumigated the room where he worked in order to find images in clubs.
Thanks to the sfumato effect, a flickering smile of the Mona Lisa appeared: depending on the focus of the gaze, the viewer thinks that the Mona Lisa is smiling either tenderly or somehow ominously. The second miracle of "Mona Lisa" is that she is "alive". Over the centuries, her smile has changed, the corners of her lips rise higher. In the same way, the Master mixed the knowledge of various sciences, because his inventions find more and more applications over time. From the treatise on light and shadow, the beginnings of the sciences of penetrating force, vibrational motion, and wave propagation originate. All of his 120 books have spread around the world and are gradually being revealed to mankind.
• Leonardo da Vinci preferred analogy to all others. The approximation of an analogy is an advantage over the accuracy of a syllogism, when a third inevitably follows from two inferences. But the more bizarre the analogy, the further the inferences from it extend. Take, for example, the famous illustration of da Vinci, proving the proportionality of the human body. A human figure with outstretched arms and legs apart fits into a circle, and with closed legs and raised arms - into a square. This "mill" gave impetus to various conclusions. Leonardo was the only one who created projects of churches in which the altar is placed in the middle (symbolizing the navel of a person), and the worshipers are evenly around. This church plan in the form of an octahedron served as another invention of the genius - the ball bearing.
• The Florentine liked to use counterpost, which creates the illusion of movement. Everyone who saw his sculpture of a giant horse in Corte Vecchio involuntarily changed their gait to a more relaxed one.
• Leonardo was never in a hurry to finish a work, because incompleteness is an integral quality of life. To finish is to kill! The slowness of the Florentine was the talk of the town, he could make two or three strokes and leave the city for many days, for example, to improve the valleys of Lombardy or was engaged in the creation of an apparatus for walking on water. Almost every one of his significant works is "unfinished". The master had a special composition, with the help of which he made “windows of unfinishedness” on a finished painting on purpose. As you can see, in this way he left a place where life itself could intervene and correct something …
Interesting about Leonardo da Vinci
He played the lyre masterly. When Leonardo's case was heard in the Milan court, he figured there precisely as a musician, and not as an artist or inventor.
There is a version that Leonardo da Vinci was a homosexual. When the artist studied at Verrocchio's workshop, he was accused of molesting a boy who posed for him. The court acquitted him.
According to one version, Gioconda smiles at the realization of her secret pregnancy for everyone.
According to another, the Mona Lisa is entertained by musicians and clowns while she posed for the artist.
There is another assumption, according to which, "Mona Lisa" is a self-portrait of Leonardo.
Leonardo da Vinci, apparently, did not leave a single self-portrait that could be unambiguously attributed to him. Experts doubt that the famous self-portrait of Leonardo's sanguine (traditionally dated 1512-1515), depicting him in old age, is such. It is believed that this is probably only a sketch of the head of the apostle for the Last Supper. Doubts that this is a self-portrait of the artist began to be expressed in the 19th century, the latter was recently expressed by one of the greatest experts on Leonardo da Vinci, Professor Pietro Marani.
Scientists at the University of Amsterdam and American researchers, having studied the mysterious smile of Mona Lisa using a new computer program, unraveled its composition: according to their data, it contains 83 percent of happiness, 9 percent of neglect, 6 percent of fear and 2 percent of anger.
Leonardo loved water: he developed instructions for scuba diving, invented and described a diving device, a breathing apparatus for scuba diving. All the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci formed the basis of modern scuba equipment.
Leonardo was the first painter who began to dismember corpses in order to understand the location and structure of muscles.
Observations of the moon in the waxing crescent phase led the researcher to one of the important scientific discoveries - Leonardo da Vinci found that sunlight is reflected from our planet and returns to the moon in the form of secondary illumination.
The Florentine was ambidextrous - he was equally good at right and left hands. He suffered from dyslexia (impaired reading ability) - this ailment, called "verbal blindness", is associated with decreased brain activity in a certain area of the left hemisphere. It is a well-known fact that Leonardo wrote in a mirror-like manner.
Relatively not so long ago, the Louvre spent 5.5 million dollars to outweigh the famous masterpiece of the artist "La Gioconda" from the general to a hall specially equipped for it. Two-thirds of the State Hall, covering a total area of 840 sq. M., Was allocated for the "La Gioconda". m. The huge room was rebuilt into a gallery, on the far wall of which now hangs the famous creation of the great Leonardo. The reconstruction, which was designed by the Peruvian architect Lorenzo Piqueras, lasted about 4 years. The decision to move the Mona Lisa to a separate room was made by the Louvre administration due to the fact that in the same place, surrounded by other paintings by Italian masters, this masterpiece was lost, and the public was forced to stand in line to see the famous painting.
2003, August - the painting of the great Leonardo worth 50 million dollars "Madonna of the Spindle" was stolen from the Drumlanrig castle in Scotland. The masterpiece was stolen from the home of one of the wealthiest landowners in Scotland, the Duke of Bucklew.
It is believed that Leonardo was a vegetarian (Andrea Corsali, in a letter to Giuliano di Lorenzo Medici, compares him to one Indian who did not eat meat). The phrase often attributed to Leonardo “If a person strives for freedom, why does he keep birds and animals in cages?.. Man is truly the king of animals, because he cruelly exterminates them. We live by killing others. We are walking cemeteries! Even at an early age, I gave up meat "is taken from the English translation of Dmitry Merezhkovsky's novel" The Resurrected Gods. Leonardo da Vinci ".
Leonardo da Vinci created designs for a submarine, propeller, tank, loom, ball bearing and flying machines.
While building the canals, Leonardo made an observation that later entered geology under his name as a theoretical principle for recognizing the time of formation of earth layers. He came to the conclusion that our planet is much older than indicated in the Bible.
Da Vinci's hobbies even included cooking and the art of serving. In Milan for thirteen years he was the steward of the court feasts. He invented several culinary devices that facilitate the work of cooks. An original dish from Leonardo - a thinly sliced stew with vegetables on top - was very popular at court feasts.
In the books of 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 (the most famous is the portrait of Mona Yagg)
A considerable number of Leonardo's manuscripts were first published by the curator of the Ambrosian Library, Carlo Amoretti.
Italian scientists have made a statement about the sensational find. According to them, an early self-portrait of Leonardo was discovered. The discovery belongs to the journalist Piero Angela.
