LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519), the great Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mechanician, engineer and natural philosopher, was the son of a Florentine lawyer, born out of wedlock by a mother in a humble station, variously described as a peasant and as of gentle birth. The place of his birth was Vinci, a castello or fortified hill village in the Florentine territory near Empoli, from which his father’s family derived its name. The Christian name of the father was Piero (the son of Antonio the son of Piero the son of Guido, all of whom had been men of law like their descendant). Leonardo’s mother was called Catarina. Her relations with Ser Piero da Vinci seem to have come to an end almost immediately upon the birth of their son. She was soon afterwards married to one Accattabriga di Piero del Vacca, of Vinci. Ser Piero on his part was four times married, and had by his last two wives nine sons and two daughters; but he had from the first acknowledged the boy Leonardo and brought him up in his own house, principally, no doubt, at Florence. In that city Ser Piero followed his profession with success, as notary to many of the chief families in the city, including the Medici, and afterwards to the signory or governing council of the state. The son born to him before marriage grew up into a youth of shining promise. To splendid beauty and activity of person he joined a winning charm of temper and manners, a tact for all societies, and an aptitude for all accomplishments. An inexhaustible intellectual energy and curiosity lay beneath this amiable surface. Among the multifarious pursuits to which the young Leonardo set his hand, the favourites at first were music, drawing and modelling. His father showed some of his drawings to an acquaintance, Andrea del Verrocchio, who at once recognized the boy’s artistic vocation, and was selected by Ser Piero to be his master.
Verrocchio, although hardly one of the great creative or inventive forces in the art of his age at Florence, was a first-rate craftsman alike as goldsmith, sculptor and painter, and particularly distinguished as a teacher. In his studio Leonardo worked for several years (about 1470-1477) in the company of Lorenzo di Credi and other less celebrated pupils. Among his contemporaries he formed special ties of friendship with the painters Sandro Botticelli and Pietro Perugino. He had soon learnt all that Verrocchio had to teach—more than all, if we are to believe the oft-told tale of the figure, or figures, executed by the pupil in the picture of Christ’s Baptism designed by the master for the monks of Vallombrosa. The work in question is now in the Academy at Florence. According to Vasari the angel kneeling on the left, with a drapery over the right arm, was put in by Leonardo, and when Verrocchio saw it his sense of its superiority to his own work caused him to forswear painting for ever after. The latter part of the story is certainly false. The picture, originally painted in tempera, has suffered much from later repaints in oil, rendering exact judgment difficult. The most competent opinion inclines to acknowledge the hand of Leonardo, not only in the face of the angel, but also in parts of the drapery and of the landscape background. The work was probably done in or about 1470, when Leonardo was eighteen years old. By 1472 we find him enrolled in the lists of the painters’ gild at Florence. Here he continued to live and work for ten or eleven years longer. Up till 1477 he is still spoken of as a pupil or apprentice of Verrocchio; but in that year he seems to have been taken into special favour by Lorenzo the Magnificent, and to have worked as an independent artist under his patronage until 1482-1483. In 1478 we find him receiving an important commission from the signory, and in 1480 another from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto.
Leonardo was not one of those artists of the Renaissance who sought the means of reviving the ancient glories of art mainly in the imitation of ancient models. The antiques of the Medici gardens seem to have had little influence on him beyond that of generally stimulating his passion for perfection. By his own instincts he was an exclusive student of nature. From his earliest days he had flung himself upon that study with an unprecedented ardour of delight and curiosity. In drawing from life he had early found the way to unite precision with freedom and fire—the subtlest accuracy of expressive definition with vital movement and rhythm of line—as no draughtsman had been able to unite them before. He was the first painter to recognize the play of light and shade as among the most significant and attractive of the world’s appearances, the earlier schools having with one consent subordinated light and shade to colour and outline. Nor was he a student of the broad, usual, patent appearances only of the world; its fugitive, fantastic, unaccustomed appearances attracted him most of all. Strange shapes of hills and rocks, rare plants and animals, unusual faces and figures of men, questionable smiles and expressions, whether beautiful or grotesque, far-fetched objects and curiosities, were things he loved to pore upon and keep in memory. Neither did he stop at mere appearances of any kind, but, having stamped the image of things upon his brain, went on indefatigably to probe their hidden laws and causes. He soon satisfied himself that the artist who was content to reproduce the external aspects of things without searching into the hidden workings of nature behind them, was one but half equipped for his calling. Every fresh artistic problem immediately became for him a far-reaching scientific problem as well. The laws of light and shade, the laws of “perspective,” including optics and the physiology of the eye, the laws of human and animal anatomy and muscular movement, those of the growth and structure of plants and of the powers and properties of water, all these and much more furnished food almost from the beginning to his insatiable spirit of inquiry.
The evidence of the young man’s predilections and curiosities is contained in the legends which tell of lost works produced by him in youth. One of these was a cartoon or monochrome painting of Adam and Eve in tempera, and in this, besides the beauty of the figures, the infinite truth and elaboration of the foliage and animals in the background are celebrated in terms which bring to mind the treatment of the subject by Albrecht Dürer in his famous engraving done thirty years later. Again, a peasant of Vinci having in his simplicity asked Ser Piero to get a picture painted for him on a wooden shield, the father is said to have laughingly handed on the commission to his son, who thereupon shut himself up with all the noxious insects and grotesque reptiles he could find, observed and drew and dissected them assiduously, and produced at last a picture of a dragon compounded of their various shapes and aspects, which was so fierce and so life-like as to terrify all who saw it. With equal research and no less effect he painted on another occasion the head of a snaky-haired Medusa. (A picture of this subject which long did duty at the Uffizi for Leonardo’s work is in all likelihood merely the production of some later artist to whom the descriptions of that work have given the cue.) Lastly, Leonardo is related to have begun work in sculpture about this time by modelling several heads of smiling women and children.
Of certified and accepted paintings produced by the young genius, whether during his apprentice or his independent years at Florence (about 1470-1482), very few are extant, and the two most important are incomplete. A small and charming strip of an oblong “Annunciation” at the Louvre is generally accepted as his work, done soon after 1470; a very highly wrought drawing at the Uffizi, corresponding on a larger scale to the head of the Virgin in the same picture, seems rather to be a copy by a later hand. This little Louvre “Annunciation” is not very compatible in style with another and larger, much-debated “Annunciation” at the Uffizi, which manifestly came from the workshop of Verrocchio about 1473-1474, and which many critics claim confidently for the young Leonardo. It may have been joint studio-work of Verrocchio and his pupils including Leonardo, who certainly was concerned in it, since a study for the sleeve of the angel, preserved at Christ Church, Oxford, is unquestionably by his hand. The landscape, with its mysterious spiry mountains and winding waters, is very Leonardesque both in this picture and in another contemporary product of the workshop, or as some think of Leonardo’s hand, namely a very highly and coldly finished small “Madonna with a Pink” at Munich. The likeness he is recorded to have painted of Ginevra de’ Benci used to be traditionally identified with the fine portrait of a matron at the Pitti absurdly known as La Monaca: more lately it has been recognized in a rather dull, expressionless Verrocchiesque portrait of a young woman with a fanciful background of pine-sprays in the Liechtenstein gallery at Vienna. Neither attribution can be counted convincing. Several works of sculpture, including a bas-relief at Pistoia and a small terra-cotta model of a St John at the Victoria and Albert Museum, have also been claimed, but without general consent, as the young master’s handiwork. Of many brilliant early drawings by him, the first that can be dated is a study of landscape done in 1473. A magnificent silver-point head of a Roman warrior at the British Museum was clearly done, from or for a bas-relief, under the immediate influence of Verrocchio. A number of studies of heads in pen or silver point, with some sketches for Madonnas, including a charming series in the British Museum for a “Madonna with the Cat,” may belong to the same years or the first years of his independence. A sheet with two studies of heads bears a MS. note of 1478, saying that in one of the last months of that year he began painting the “Two Maries.” One of the two may have been a picture of the Virgin appearing to St Bernard, which we know he was commissioned to paint in that year for a chapel in the Palace of the Signory, but never finished: the commission was afterwards transferred to Filippino Lippi, whose performance is now in the Badia. One of the two heads on this dated sheet may probably have been a study for the same St Bernard; it was used afterwards by some follower for a St Leonard in a stiff and vapid “Ascension of Christ,” wrongly attributed to the master himself in the Berlin Museum. A pen-drawing representing a ringleader of the Pazzi conspiracy, Bernardo Baroncelli, hung out of a window of the Bargello after his surrender by the sultan at Constantinople to the emissaries of Florence, can be dated from its subject as done in December 1479. A number of his best drawings of the next following years are preparatory pen-studies for an altar-piece of the “Adoration of the Magi,” undertaken early in 1481 on the commission of the monks of S. Donato at Scopeto. The preparation in monochrome for this picture, a work of extraordinary power both of design and physiognomical expression, is preserved at the Uffizi, but the painting itself was never carried out, and after Leonardo’s failure to fulfil his contract Filippino Lippi had once more to be employed in his place. Of equal or even more intense power, though of narrower scope, is an unfinished monochrome preparation for a St Jerome, found accidentally at Rome by Cardinal Fesch and now in the Vatican gallery; this also seems to belong to the first Florentine period, but is not mentioned in documents.
The tale of completed work for these twelve or fourteen years (1470-1483 or thereabouts) is thus very scanty. But it must be remembered that Leonardo was already full of projects in mechanics, hydraulics, architecture, and military and civil engineering, ardently feeling his way in the work of experimental study and observation in every branch of theoretical or applied science in which any beginning had been made in his age, as well as in some in which he was himself the first pioneer. He was full of new ideas concerning both the laws and the applications of mechanical forces. His architectural and engineering projects were of a daring which amazed even the fellow-citizens of Alberti and Brunelleschi. History presents few figures more attractive to the mind’s eye than that of Leonardo during this period of his all-capable and dazzling youth. He did not indeed escape calumny, and was even denounced on a charge of immoral practices, but fully and honourably acquitted. There was nothing about him, as there was afterwards about Michelangelo, dark-tempered, secret or morose; he was open and genial with all men. He has indeed praised “the self-sufficing power of solitude” in almost the same phrase as Wordsworth, and from time to time would even in youth seclude himself for a season in complete intellectual absorption, as when he toiled among his bats and wasps and lizards, forgetful of rest and food, and insensible to the noisomeness of their corruption. But we have to picture him as anon coming out and gathering about him a tatterdemalion company, and jesting with them until they were in fits of laughter, for the sake of observing their burlesque physiognomies; anon as eagerly frequenting the society of men of science and learning of an older generation like the mathematician Benedetto Aritmetico, the physician, geographer and astronomer Paolo Toscanelli, the famous Greek Aristotelian Giovanni Argiropoulo; or as out-rivalling all the youth of the city now by charm of recitation, now by skill in music and now by feats of strength and horsemanship; or as stopping to buy caged birds in the market that he might set them free and watch them rejoicing in their flight; or again as standing radiant in his rose-coloured cloak and his rich gold hair among the throng of young and old on the piazza, and holding them spellbound while he expatiated on the great projects in art and mechanics that were teeming in his mind. Unluckily it is to written records and to imagination that we have to trust exclusively for our picture. No portrait of Leonardo as he appeared during this period of his life has come down to us.
But his far-reaching schemes and studies brought him no immediate gain, and diverted him from the tasks by which he should have supported himself. For all his shining power and promise he remained poor. Probably also his exclusive belief in experimental methods, and slight regard for mere authority whether in science or art made the intellectual atmosphere of the Medicean circle, with its passionate mixed cult of the classic past and of a Christianity mystically blended and reconciled with Platonism, uncongenial to him. At any rate he was ready to leave Florence when the chance was offered him of fixed service at the court of Ludovico Sforza (il Moro) at Milan. Soon after that prince had firmly established his power as nominal guardian and protector of his nephew Gian Galeazzo but really as usurping ruler of the state, he revived a project previously mooted for the erection of an equestrian monument in honour of the founder of his house’s greatness, Francesco Sforza, and consulted Lorenzo dei Medici on the choice of an artist. Lorenzo recommended the young Leonardo, who went to Milan accordingly (at some uncertain date in or about 1483), taking as a gift from Lorenzo and a token of his own skill a silver lute of wondrous sweetness fashioned in the likeness of a horse’s head. Hostilities were at the moment imminent between Milan and Venice; it was doubtless on that account that in the letter commending himself to the duke, and setting forth his own capacities, Leonardo rests his title to patronage chiefly on his attainments and inventions in military engineering. After asserting these in detail under nine different heads, he speaks under a tenth of his proficiency as a civil engineer and architect, and adds lastly a brief paragraph with reference to what he can do in painting and sculpture, undertaking in particular to carry out in a fitting manner the monument to Francesco Sforza.
The first definite documentary evidence of Leonardo’s employments at Milan dates from 1487. Some biographers have supposed that the interval, or part of it, between 1483 and that date was occupied by travels in the East. The grounds of the supposition are some drafts occurring among his MSS. of a letter addressed to the diodario or diwâdar of Syria, lieutenant of the sultan of Babylon (Babylon meaning according to a usage of that time Cairo). In these drafts Leonardo describes in the first person, with sketches, a traveller’s strange experiences in Egypt, Cyprus, Constantinople, the Cilician coasts about Mount Taurus and Armenia. He relates the rise and persecution of a prophet and preacher, the catastrophe of a falling mountain and submergence of a great city, followed by a general inundation, and the claim of the prophet to have foretold these disasters; adding physical descriptions of the Euphrates river and the marvellous effects of sunset light on the Taurus range. No contemporary gives the least hint of Leonardo’s having travelled in the East; to the places he mentions he gives their classical and not their current Oriental names; the catastrophes he describes are unattested from any other source; he confuses the Taurus and the Caucasus; some of the phenomena he mentions are repeated from Aristotle and Ptolemy; and there seems little reason to doubt that these passages in his MSS. are merely his drafts of a projected geographical treatise or perhaps romance. He had a passion for geography and travellers’ tales, for descriptions of natural wonders and ruined cities, and was himself a practised fictitious narrator and fabulist, as other passages in his MSS. prove. Neither is the gap in the account of his doings after he first went to the court of Milan really so complete as has been represented. Ludovico was vehemently denounced and attacked during the earlier years of his usurpation, especially by the partisans of his sister-in-law Bona of Savoy, the mother of the rightful duke, young Gian Galeazzo. To repel these attacks he employed the talents of a number of court poets and artists, who in public recitation and pageant, in emblematic picture and banner and device, proclaimed the wisdom and kindness of his guardianship and the wickedness of his assailants. That Leonardo was among the artists thus employed is proved both by notes and projects among his MSS. and by allegoric sketches still extant. Several such sketches are at Christ Church, Oxford: one shows a horned hag or she-fiend urging her hounds to an attack on the state of Milan, and baffled by the Prudence and Justice of Il Moro (all this made clear by easily recognizable emblems). The allusion must almost certainly be to the attempted assassination of Ludovico by agents of the duchess Bona in 1484. Again, it must have been the pestilence decimating Milan in 1484-1485 which gave occasion to the projects submitted by Leonardo to Ludovico for breaking up the city and reconstructing it on improved sanitary principles. To 1485-1486 also appears to belong the inception of his elaborate though unfulfilled architectural plans for beautifying and strengthening the Castello, the great stronghold of the ruling power in the state. Very soon afterwards he must have begun work upon his plans and models, undertaken during an acute phase of the competition which the task had called forth between German and Italian architects, for another momentous enterprise, the completion of Milan cathedral. Extant records of payments made to him in connexion with these architectural plans extend from August 1487 to May 1490: in the upshot none of them was carried out. From the beginning of his residence with Ludovico his combination of unprecedented mechanical ingenuity with apt allegoric invention and courtly charm and eloquence had made him the directing spirit in all court ceremonies and festivities. On the occasion of the marriage of the young duke Gian Galeazzo with Isabella of Aragon in 1487, we find Leonardo devising all the mechanical and spectacular part of a masque of Paradise; and presently afterwards designing a bathing pavilion of unheard-of beauty and ingenuity for the young duchess. Meanwhile he was filling his note-books as busily as ever with the results of his studies in statics and dynamics, in human anatomy, geometry and the phenomena of light and shade. It is probable that from the first he had not forgotten his great task of the Sforza monument, with its attendant researches in equine movement and anatomy, and in the science and art of bronze casting on a great scale. The many existing sketches for the work (of which the chief collection is at Windsor) cannot be distinctly dated. In 1490, the seventh year of his residence at Milan, after some expressions of impatience on the part of his patron, he had all but got his model ready for display on the occasion of the marriage of Ludovico with Beatrice d’Este, but at the last moment was dissatisfied with what he had done and determined to begin all over again.
In the same year, 1490, Leonardo enjoyed some months of uninterrupted mathematical and physical research in the libraries and among the learned men of Pavia, whither he had been called to advise on some architectural difficulties concerning the cathedral. Here also the study of an ancient equestrian monument (the so-called Regisole, destroyed in 1796) gave him fresh ideas for his Francesco Sforza. In January 1491 a double Sforza-Este marriage (Ludovico Sforza himself with Beatrice d’Este, Alfonso d’Este with Anna Sforza the sister of Gian Galeazzo) again called forth his powers as a masque and pageant-master. For the next following years the ever-increasing gaiety and splendour of the Milanese court gave him continual employment in similar kinds, including the composition and recitation of jests, tales, fables and “prophecies” (i.e. moral and social satires and allegories cast in the future tense); among his MSS. occur the drafts of many such, some of them both profound and pungent. Meanwhile he was again at work upon the monument to Francesco Sforza, and this time to practical purpose. When ambassadors from Austria came to Milan towards the close of 1493 to escort the betrothed bride of their emperor Maximilian, Bianca Maria Sforza, away on her nuptial journey, the finished colossal model, 26 ft. high, was at last in its place for all to see in the courtyard of the Castello. Contemporary accounts attest the magnificence of the work and the enthusiasm it excited, but are not precise enough to enable us to judge to which of the two main groups of extant sketches its design corresponded. One of these groups shows the horse and rider in relatively tranquil march, in the manner of the Gattemalata monument put up fifty years before by Donatello at Padua and the Colleoni monument on which Verocchio was now engaged at Venice. Another group of sketches shows the horse galloping or rearing in violent action, in some instances in the act of trampling a fallen enemy. Neither is it possible to discriminate with certainty the sketches intended for the Sforza monument from others which Leonardo may have done in view of another and later commission for an equestrian statue, namely, that in honour of Ludovico’s great enemy, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio.