Leonardo da Vinci: A Biography

Author: Shi Ting
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-05-01
Features: In 1430, the Florentine humanist Matteo Palmieri wrote: "Every man of sense should indeed be grateful to God for having been born in this new age, an age full of hope and promise, which has produced many geniuses and masters unseen in a thousand years." Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was born in this era of tremendous transformation in human civilization, the Renaissance. When the three giants of the Italian Renaissance are mentioned, Leonardo is always the first to be named, renowned as a genius primarily as a painter. It is impossible to reconstruct history in its entirety, and thus, it is equally impossible to fully recover his true nature from the many biographies of Leonardo, which have varied since the time of Vasari. However, there is no doubt that this great all-around artist, who devoted his entire life to scientific research, was one of the most important figures of the Renaissance in perfectly blending science and art. His astonishing erudition earned him numerous titles in later generations: painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, urban planner, fashion designer, stage designer, musician, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, geographer, geologist, botanist, astronomer, hydraulic engineer, military scientist, anatomist, inventor, mechanical master, and equestrian.
Therefore, the great Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari regarded him as "a special gift from God, an extraordinary talent beyond human achievement." This artistic giant who lived in an age of giants left behind approximately 13 notebooks and 7,000 pages of manuscripts for posterity, which were only a part of the notes he had made at the time. No one can imagine how many sparks of brilliant ideas had once flashed through the mind of that golden-haired handsome youth in his youth, the elegant Florentine beauty a decade later, and the philosopher with white hair and beard decades later. However, later generations learned from the fragments he left behind that his genius had almost touched every field of art and science at the time. He excelled particularly in combining the two, a feat unmatched in the history of world art.
In the late 19th century, when his notebooks were published, they instantly sparked a Leonardo da Vinci fever, with people admiring this master to an extreme degree. As an artist, he demanded perfection in his art, and due to his wide-ranging interests, the number of unfinished works and sketches he left behind ranked him among the top painters in this regard—a great loss to the history of art. Although he completed very few works in his lifetime, each one that emerged was an immortal masterpiece. The monumental fresco The Last Supper, completed in Milan, held unprecedented revolutionary significance but has since caused endless headaches for later generations due to its poor preservation. The portrait Mona Lisa, which he reluctantly refused to part with even in his lifetime, later became the crown jewel of the Louvre, attracting millions of visitors each year to gaze upon her beauty and experience her mysterious smile.
The mystery and ambiguity in his works are like living entities, slow to spread and ethereal, or quick to flash and vanish. Leonardo da Vinci, the founder of Renaissance and High Renaissance art, was not only the most brilliant genius among painters but also a sculptor, poet, musician, and architect. He was also a mechanical technician, mathematician, and scientist, truly a complete and all-encompassing painter of the Renaissance. Leonardo was extremely sensitive, often capturing the enchanting beauty of the surface of things without losing the perspective of a physicist or anatomist. He successfully blended the rationality of a scientist with the sensibility of an artist, two seemingly contradictory qualities, to create masterpieces with precise compositions yet natural emotional expression.
This book collects some of Leonardo da Vinci's most brilliant paintings throughout his life, such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Last Supper, and Mona Lisa, along with numerous sketches, offering readers a more comprehensive perspective on this great painter of the Renaissance.