Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452—1519) was one of the most famous people of the Renaissance period. He was not only a famous painter but also studied science, designed machines, and drew plans for new inventions. Young Leonardo grew up near Florence and studied painting with the great painters of the city.  After a few years in Milan, where he painted for a famous duke ,he came back to Florence and painted a new hall for the city council. In his paintings da Vinci experimented with many techniques that artists had not used before.  For example, he started to use perspective in his paintings. He put small objects in the background to make them appear far away. He also experimented with light, shade and colours.

Leonardo da Vinci Image:See page for author, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Adoration of the Kings is an unfinished painting. You can only see the figures as outlines of light and dark areas. In this painting he shows three kings who worship the Christ child.

Da Vinci finished painting The Last Supper  in 1497.  The painting shows the last meal of Jesus Christ and his 12 apostles. In the picture Jesus has just announced that one of them will betray him. He created this famous scene on a wall of a dining room in a monastery.

Mona Lisa is probably the most famous painting ever painted. It is a portrait of the young wife of a Florentine silk merchant. It shows a young woman with her famous smile sitting on a balcony high above a landscape.

Da Vinci’s Other Interests

Leonardo was interested in mechanics and he had ideas that no one had thought about before. For example, he drew plans for an airplane, a helicopter and a parachute. He sometimes worked as an engineer or military architect and designed tanks, machine guns and bridges that could be moved.

Da Vinci showed great interest in the human body. He dissected dead people in order to study bones and other parts of the body. He also made drawings to show how the human body worked. Like other artists, da Vinci was interested in the proportions of the human body. In his drawing of the Vitruvian Man, he showed that a human being   fits perfectly into a circle and a square. It is one of the most famous pictures of European art.

Nature and the growth of plants and trees was also one of da Vinci‘s fields of interests. He tried to find out what made birds fly.

Later on, da Vinci started writing books on many of these topics but never completed them. They were forgotten but when they appeared again centuries later, they showed that Leonardo da Vinci was far ahead of his time.

Mona Lisa
Image: Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain,
via Wikimedia Commons