| Leonardo da
Vinci, the Renaissance Man
Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452 in Vinci near Florence, at the
time of the flowering of an intellectual movement which rediscovered
the Classical Graeco-Roman world, its ideals, literature, art and
culture as a resurgent credo, eventually came to be regarded as the
quintessential Renaissance man.
He left us with 20 paintings, and 5000 pages of notes, drawings,
sketches touching upon such diverse disciplines as art, painting,
engineering, mathematics, anatomy, physics, astronomy, natural
history, philosophy that his encyclopedic reach set him apart from
his contemporaries. Many of his engineering ideas, such as the
parachute and the helicopter, were far ahead of his time; and many
others were simply impractical. But in his method of scientific
inquiry, and his pursuit of the unknown through experiments, there
is an incipient element of the scientific revolution which was to
flourish throughout the Renaissance period.
If Renaissance means rediscovery of Classicism with its emphasis
on measure, simplicity, proportion, restrained emotion, and formal
stringencies in art and literature that inspired the surpassing
works of Raphael, Michangelo, Titian, the humanism that provides
such powerful impetus for the works of Erasmus, Dante, and Petrarch,
then the scientific method practiced by Leonardo represents the
remaining strand of the movement that propels the West into
modernity.
In his youth because of his great physical beauty and strength,
Leonardo had served as model for painters and scuptors. He entered
into an apprenticeship with the renowned artist Verocchio and before
long, so surpassed his master in grace and elegance that, according
to the art historian Vasari, his master would relinquish painting in
favor of sculpting for the rest of his career.
Leonardo was constantly experimenting with new ways of doing
things, mixing his colors with unusual ingredients, and many times
failed. The Last Supper was an infelicitous result of his
experiment. Despite the deterioration of the colors, the painting is
an unsurpassed example of subtlety of nuance, delicate feeling, and
dramatic effect. On the other hand, the Mona Lisa has become not
only the crowning achievement of Renaissance painting, but the
masterpiece of all time.
In 1482 he wrote a letter to Ludovico Sforza, the regent of
Milan, to offer his engineering skills in the building of a
formidable war machine for Milan. Leonardo remained in Milan until
1499, when the French deposed Ludovico, driving Leonardo to
Florence, where he was commissioned to paint two patriotic figures
neither of which was finished. It was here that Leonardo spent three
years to paint the Mona Lisa before moving to Rome in 1513, where he
worked on commissions for the Pope Leo X alongside Raphael and
Michelangelo. Finally in 1516 King Francis I invited him to France,
where he remained until his death in 1519, again according to
Vasari, in the King's arms.
Of completed works, Leonardo left us few. He had left many major
projects unfinished, to the disappointment of his patrons. Yet, his
relentless search for the unknown in the study of nature, his
exactitude, his varied interests, his boundless faith in the
potentialities of man, all converge to characterize him not as a man
of the Renaissance but as the fullest man of the Renaissance. In
that sense, Leonardo da Vinci is a thoroughly modern man as well.
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