Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)

Leonardo da Vinci is an Italian master of the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, a draftsman, an accomplished engineer, and a pioneer investigator in the natural sciences. He was a rare universal genius, the epitome of the "ideal" Renaissance humanist, and he started the style of High Renaissance art and had an immediate and profound influence on the 16th century art, and the following generations.

Life and works in painting

Born in 1452 in Vinci, Republic of Florence (now in Italy), Leonardo spent his youth in Tuscany and in 1469, went to Florence with his father. Shortly thereafter, he entered the studio of sculp­tor Andrea del Verrocchio as an apprentice, where he received a diversified training, until 1476. He worked with Verrocchio on the painting of the "Baptism of Christ."

He is generally believed to have contributed to the landscape background of-this picture, and the head of one of the angels is considered to be one of the earliest from his hand. He replaced the bulbous-nosed facial type of his master, clearly modeled in sharp contrasts of light and dark, with one whose aquiline elegance was to become known as Leonardesque. The lighting, already soft and atmospheric, was to develop into the famous smoky shadow effect that is generally associated with Leonardo and is referred to as Sfumato. He painted in Florence until 1481.

In 1482, Leonardo went to Milan, where he remained in the service of the court of Ludovico Sforza until 1499, painting portraits, inventing machines of war, staging theatrical pageants, and designing town plans and architecture. He worked as artist and technical adviser on architecture and engineering, already displaying his amazing versatility. During his stay there, he worked on a prancing equestrian statue, a bronze horse intended as a monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's father. However, the project, like so many of Leonardo's, never fully materialized.

It was in Milan, too, that he painted the famous Last Supper, which was ordered by Ludovico il Moro for the refectory of the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. With his insatiable thirst for experimentation, Leonardo used a medium containing oil and varnish, instead of the more traditional fresco, and the painting has suffered considerably because of this. Nonetheless, its design is still a supreme example of the change from Early to High Renaissance artistic concepts. In the simplicity of grouping, in the subordination of individual details to a strong central focus, in the almost mathematical ordering of the parts within the whole, there is a shift from realistic intent to the more ideal, abstract harmony that keynotes the High Renaissance.

In 1499, Leonardo made a short visit to Mantua and proceeded from there to Venice and then to Florence, arriving there in 1500, almost 20 years after he had left. He remained there until 1506, although he visited Rome during 1502 and 1503. Soon after his arrival, he executed a cartoon, now in the "National Gallery, London, for a painting of The Virgin and Child and St. Anne. This cartoon may be related to the finished painting of 1508-1510 in the Louvre in Paris. It is one of the great lyric paintings of the Renaissance, with a glistening background of light and atmos­phere casting a suggestive veil of mist over the fantastic rocks in the distance.

It is precisely this provocative atmospheric quality that adds so greatly to the ineffable mystery of the famous Mona Lisa (Louvre), the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, which Leonardo began in 1503 at Louvre, The enigma is heightened further by the famous smile, which has appeared before in Gandharan art in India, in Gothic art at Reims Cathedral, and even earlier in archaic Greek art-wherever in art, it would seem, the world of the real and the world of the ideal made glancing contract. It is precisely this blend of the real and the ideal that adds to the mystery of Leonardo's mind and art.

Leonardo returned to Milan in 1508 and remained there until 1513. After three more years in Italy, mainly in Rome, he went to France at the invitation of King Francis I, to live in the castle of Cloux, near Ambroise, until his death in May 2,1519.

Leonardo completed few of his commissions and the list of his surviving works is not long. Among his other important works are: an unfinished Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi in Florence; The Virgin of the Rocks of which there are two versions, one in the Louvre and one in the National Gallery in London; and a St. John in the Louvre, his last painting. In 1504, he began a large wall painting, The Battle of the Anghiari, in the council chamber of the Florentine Republic in the Palazzo Vecchio. This was carried hardly beyond the preliminary stages, and even the cartoons have been lost, but a concept of Leonardo's idea has survived through copies by other artists.

Leonardo's surviving works consist primarily of a few paintings together with a large quantity of drawings, scientific drawings, and notes on diverse subjects. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of his time. Despite the fragmentary nature of his surviving achievement, Leonardo's genius has maintained its power to fire the imagination of modern man.

Analysis and evaluation of Leonardo and some of his paintings

Leonardo's art of expression needs utmost admiration. This expression was nurtured by his power of invention and also by every technical means: drawing, color, use of light and shadow. To Leonardo, expression became a key concept of art; it also included the basic demands of truth, beauty, and accuracy in everything depicted.

His Last Supper (1495-97) and Mona Lisa (1503-06), which are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance, need careful analysis.

The Last Supper, which is among the most famous paintings in the world, portrays the apostles' reaction to Christ's startling announcement that one of them would betray him. The scene seems at first to be one of tumultuous activity, in response to the dramatic stimulus of Christ's words "One of you will betray me" as related in the New Testament, which is a contrast to the traditional static row of figures. The power of its effects comes from the striking contrast in the attitudes of the 12 apostles as counter­poised to Christ. All of the apostles - as human beings who do not understand what is about to occur - who form four equal clusters around Christ are agitated, whereas Christ alone, conscious of his divine mission, sits in lonely, transfigured serenity at the middle. Only one other being shares the secret knowledge - Judas, who is both part of and yet excluded from the movement of his companions. In his isolation, he becomes the second lonely figure - the guilty one - of the company. Thus, Leonardo once again enriches the emperical observation of vital activity but simulta­neously develops a containing formula and emphasizes the center. This blend of the immediate reality of the situation and the underlying order of the composition is perhaps the reason the painting has always been extraordinarily popular and has remained the standard image of the subject.

Leonardo was a great virtuoso in his anatomical rendition of the human form. The Mona Lisa is a portrait of a woman, the wife of Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolommeo del Giocondo - hence the alternate title for the painting La Giaconda. The painting's slight smile, suggested rather than stated, puzzles and fascinates the beholder. Its smile is mysterious because it is in the process of either appearing or disappearing. Yet, it is not just a physical portrait. It conveys a mystic mood, it reflects warmth. Da Vinci achieved such effect by employing sfumato - a technique which produces a haze or mist caused by light, shadow and aerial perspective and which gives the painting a poetic, dreamlike quality.

The portrait contains its animation in neatly balanced designs. In the portrait, the crossed arms form the base of a pyramid capped by the head, which gives the lady her quality of classic Tightness and prevents the less than full-length portrait from seeming in­complete and arbitrary amputated at the lower edge. Leonardo mastered the realistic rendition of the forms, yet, at the same time, his painting reflects mysticism and spirituality. Thus, he created a psychological world, complementing the physical one. This compositional control and expressive subtlety established a new standard of portraiture in European painting from Raphael to Rembrandt.

While the full effect of the picture depends on the jux­taposition of the serene face and figure of the sitter in the foreground with the turbulent backdrop of craggy rocks and mountains but by the swirling rivers, its most memorable and haunting aspect is the enigmatic mask of the lady herseh.The extremely delicate sfumato modeling around her features sets them into quiet motion. Mona Lisa's slight smile, suggested rather than stated, seems to imply a potential expression on her basically bland face. Through such understanding and gentle inflection, Leonardo created a psychological world, complement­ing the physical one, which he considered the painter's first mimetic concern.