Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most celebrated artists of all time. The Italian Renaissance artist was a master painter, engineer, architect, anatomist, inventor and sculptor. Leonardo is considered to be a genius, creating some of the most famous paintings ever painted (Including the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper) and his notebooks filled with drawings of many inventions that were to become the machines and technology that we now use (flying machines, submarines and war machines).
Leonardo da Vinc was borni on the 15th of April in 1452, in Anchiano, Vinci, not far from Florence in Italy. Hi father was a notary "ser Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci" and mother Caterina was a peasant woman. Leonardo was born an illegitimate child and raised in his father's home in Florence.
Leonardo impressed his father with his early drawings, prompting him to introduce the young Leonardo to the painter Andrea del Verrocchio. At just 14 Leonardo da Vinci became an apprentice of Verrochio and quickly became his most talented worker. In the painting "Baptism of Christ", Leonardo was assigned to paint one angel, while Verrocchio painted the other. Da Vinci chose to paint his angel in the relatively new medium of oil, while Verrocchio painted his in the usual tempera medium. The young Leonardo clearly upstaged his master, and left the studio of Verrocchio in 1477 to work in his own.
Da Vinci was employed by the Duke of Milan (Ludovico Sforza) in 1482, allowing him to work in his own workshop until after the Duke's fall to the French in 1498. Leonardo stayed until 1499, but moved on to Mantua, then to Venice where he was employed as a military engineer. He then worked for Cesare Borgia as a military architect in Florence until 1506, before returning to Milan. Leonardo worked in Rome between 1513 and 1516 where his contemporaries included great Renaissance painters like Michelangelo and Raphael. He then moved to France where he worked for the French King until his death in Clos Lucé, 1519.
Facts about LEONARDO
• Leonardo was raised by his single father.
• Leonardo was one of the first Italians to use oil paint .
• He was left-handed
• Leonardo da Vinci left many paintings unfinished and destroyed most of his work.
• Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper , are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time.
• Leonardo was a vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons.
• Leonardo drew the plans for the first armored car in 1485!
• He invented the bicycle 300 years before it appeared on the road.
• Leonardo di Vinci created an inflatable tube so people could float in the water.
• Leonardo da Vinci had dyslexia, when he made notes on his inventions it was all written in reverse, which made it hard for others to dig through his notes and steal his ideas.
• Leonardo da Vinci dug into graveyards at night to steal corpses and study human anatomy (and find out where the soul was).
• He produced aeriel maps for Cesare Borgia which are still accurate today.
• Leonardo is considered by many as the father of modern science.
• He was one of the most acclaimed artists of the Renaissance.
• He was the illegitimate child of Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant.
• Leonardo sketched the first parachute, first helicopter, first aeroplane, first tank, first repeating rifle, swinging bridge, paddleboat and the first motorcar.
• Leonardo was very much interested in the possibility of human flight. He produced many studies of the flight of birds and plans for several flying machines.
• He was also a sculptor, designer of costumes, mathematician and botanist.
• He made maps of Europe.
• He invented hydraulic pumps.
• He designed a movable bridge for the Duke of Milan.
• He drew the plans of the first armored car in 1485.
• The Mona Lisa is perhaps his most famous work. The subject of this portrait is still debated to this day, the most popular current view being that it is of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo. One of the most unusual hypotheses is that it is a self-portrait of Leonardo as a woman.
• It took da Vinci about ten years to paint Mona Lisa's lips.
• Leonardo was famous for the way he used light in his portraits.
• He painted The Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan; a dramatic depiction of the moment Jesus announced that he would be betrayed.
• He established modern techniques of scientific illustration with highly accurate renderings such as ‘Embryo in the Womb’.
• Leonardo would wear pink to make his complexion look fresh.
• Leonardo da Vinci never married or had children.
