DECIPHERING DA VINCI. THE LIFE OF A GENIUS [1]
Welcome dear reader.
With this first post, I want to welcome the new art series that will consist of studying the five most outstanding artists from different countries, movements and times. Each artist will have a biography, a post dedicated to their contributions to the arts, and then four or five of their more outstanding artworks will be studied, and each one will have its own post.
Without further comment, let’s start with Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo didn’t leave anything that could be read directly as a diary. Writers ranging from 16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari, to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud have combed through the thousands of pages of written notes left by Leonardo in search of clues.
The homo universalis, the Renaissance scholar, the artist versed in all areas of human knowledge. The absolute prototype of the humanist man of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, sculptor, engineer, musician, geometrician, theorist… a visionary whose reality would not be an adequate framework for the complete development of his capacity; being perhaps the reason why his figure has reached the present time in a halo of mystery.
In itself, his life was a legend from the times when he was still hanging around in Florence, fed by cryptic writings, futuristic inventions and masterpieces of painting. His biographers have a hard time, at once starved and overwhelmed, tasked with constructing a man around the spectacular evidence of this disembodied mind.
Throughout his life, as has already been pointed out, his interest will focus on various subjects, but it will be to painting that he dedicates his best efforts. Despite the fact that his work can be considered as belonging to the early Cinquecento, Leonardo’s spirit is timeless, there are no limits capable of limiting the definition of his art.
The paintings offer little more in the way of knowledge. Arguments persist even about the identity of the woman known as Mona Lisa, or why Leonardo never delivered the portrait to the husband who commissioned it, if indeed it was her husband who commissioned it.
However, it is possible to establish Leonardo’s contributions to the world of painting concretized in the creation of the sfumato technique, the classic symmetry of his compositions, geometrically framed, in addition to a love for detail and truthfulness responsible for the enormous importance that it will give to the knowledge of nature and the preparation prior to the execution of the piece.
The systematic publication of the notebooks, beginning in the late nineteenth century, has helped to gain a better understanding of the works and mind of this misunderstood genius; but the more that is known about him, the more doubts arise.
Leonardo Da Vinci will remain a code to be deciphered for a few more decades.
However, beyond his works, the life of this artist is very interesting to read and discuss.
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, better known as Leonardo da Vinci, was the illegitimate son of Piero Fruosino di Antonio, nobleman and ambassador of the Republic of Florence, and of a young peasant woman named Caterina di Meo Lippi.
He was born on April 15, 1452. That same year, his father Piero had married Albiera Giovanni Amadori, of whom he had no children. Back then, bastard children did not carry their father’s last name. He had no surname in the current sense, and “da Vinci” simply means that he was born and came “from Vinci”.
He spent his first five years in the village of Anchiano at his mother’s house, and since 1457, at the home of his father and grandparents. It was in the Florentine municipality of Vinci that he learned the basic knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic.
He moved to Florence to live with his father at about the age of twelve, shortly after Piero’s wife and their only child died. The exact year is uncertain, as is the year, not long after, when he became an apprentice in the workshop of Verrocchio, a leading artist and his father’s client.
The city of Florence was a revelation for young Leonardo: the place was full of palaces built by the new business class, full of art everywhere. An enormously wealthy place with streets that became a gallery for works of the revolutionary generation that had just passed, such as Donatello and Brunelleschi.
Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher and later his closest father figure (he was never recognized as a legitimate son by his real father), not only educated him in painting or sculpture. With him, he learned about engineering and metalwork. It is said that Leonardo was a very handsome and young man, who later became an idealized male beauty figure.
Goldsmith, blacksmith, sculptor and painter, Verrocchio worked for the Medici family. In his workshop, Leonardo learned from drawing and painting techniques to the basis of chemistry, through engraving and sculpture techniques.
During his apprenticeship with Verrocchio there is no work that is attributed to Leonardo for sure. According to Vasari, at this time, da Vinci collaborated with his teacher in the painting of Baptism of Christ (1472–1465). The legend attributes to Leonardo the angels that appear in the work, which contrasts with the rudeness of the Baptist.
The divide between the two is technical as well as imaginative: Leonardo used oil paint, not old-fashioned egg-based tempera, and applied it in multiple thin layers, each a luminescent veil, so that his angel appears to be modelled in light. Giorgio Vasari, who wrote the first authoritative biographies of Renaissance artists, in 1550, claimed that Verrocchio gave up painting when he saw what his pupil had done, an exaggeration meant to stress the unprecedented nature of Leonardo’s genius, and of the generation he introduced.
It is thought that during these years, he also learned the first notions about anatomy. It was in Antonio Pallaiuolo’s workshop, which was near Verrocchio’s.
At the age of twenty, in order to cover his expenses, he took up a position as a waiter at night in a tavern called The Three Snails, located on the Ponte Vecchio, serving meals, but after the mysterious death by poisoning of all his cooks in the spring of 1473, Leonardo took over the kitchen, leaving the workshop of Maestro Verrocchio.
He tries to revolutionize the traditional Renaissance cuisine (type what we would call today Castilian cuisine) and invents what we know today as the nouvelle cuisine and ingenious dishes very well presented with small portions of food, something that his fellow citizens were not used to. They wanted to eat until they gorged themselves, which created such a scandal that they almost killed him for thinking he was laughing at the customers.
After the six years he spent as an apprentice, Leonardo set up his own workshop in Florence. At this time, he painted his first painting: Madonna of the Carnation (1476). After collaborating with his teacher, even though he was not his apprentice anymore, da Vinci became an independent painter around 1478.
He was still living with Verrocchio when he was charged with sodomy in 1476. As soon as he was cleared, he left town for a year, to work on a project in Pistoia. Some have speculated that the charges contributed to the evident disfavor of Florence’s most important patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici. But there were other possible reasons for the omission. Leonardo had never painted in fresco, the durable technique favored for wall paintings. And he was already known for leaving things unfinished.
Indeed, by 1483, he had abandoned two important commissions and departed for Milan. He was thirty years old, and had accomplished little. In a long and detailed letter that reads like a job application, he offered his services to the local ruler, Ludovico Sforza, as a military engineer. As a seeming afterthought, he mentioned that he could also paint. Sforza became his patron. He remained in his court for 17 years as an engineer.
The hedonistic court life suited him: he became something of a dandy, dressing in pinks and purples, satins and velvets, his hands scented with lavender. He completed portraits, much admired, of Ludovico’s mistresses, and set up a workshop that turned out devotional pictures for a wealthy clientele. He enjoyed the company of colleagues in widespread disciplines, from architecture to mathematics.
The most important work of the period in Milan are the two versions of the Virgin of the rocks (1483–1485) where he applies the triangular compositional scheme that encloses the Virgin, the Child, Saint John and the angel, and where he applies for the first time the sfumato technique.
In 1490, he opened a school in the Lombard city where he taught all his knowledge and shared his research. The Vitruvian Man dates from this same year, the famous drawing with which Leonardo explained the ideal proportions of the human body.
That same year, Gian Giacomo Caprotti came into his life.At that time, Gian Giacomo Caprotti comes into his life. He was in the habit, early on, of stealing purses, silverpoint pens, and anything else he could get his hands on, so Da Vinci called him Salaí (i.e. “little devil”). He was a poor boy who entered the workshop at the age of 10, in 1490. At that time the master was just over 30 years old. The boy immediately became known as a rogue.
And with that, the first lesson is finished.
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