Biography of Da Vinci. Message about Leonardo da Vinci

During the Renaissance there were many brilliant sculptors, artists, musicians, and inventors. Leonardo da Vinci stands out against their background. He created musical instruments, he owned many engineering inventions, painted paintings, sculptures and much more.

His external characteristics are also amazing: tall height, angelic appearance and extraordinary strength. Let's get acquainted with the genius Leonardo da Vinci; a short biography will tell about his main achievements.

Biography facts

He was born near Florence in the small town of Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a famous and wealthy notary. His mother is an ordinary peasant woman. Since the father had no other children, at the age of 4 he took little Leonardo to live with him. The boy demonstrated his extraordinary intelligence and friendly character from a very early age, and he quickly became a favorite in the family.

To understand how the genius of Leonardo da Vinci developed, a brief biography can be presented as follows:

1. At the age of 14 he entered Verrocchio's workshop, where he studied drawing and sculpture.
2. In 1480 he moved to Milan, where he founded the Academy of Arts.
3. In 1499, he left Milan and began moving from city to city, where he built defensive structures. During this same period, his famous rivalry with Michelangelo began.
4. Since 1513 he has been working in Rome. Under Francis I, he becomes a court sage.

Leonardo died in 1519. As he believed, nothing he started was ever completed.

Creative path

The work of Leonardo da Vinci, whose brief biography was outlined above, can be divided into three stages.

1. Early period. Many works of the great painter were unfinished, such as the “Adoration of the Magi” for the monastery of San Donato. During this period, the paintings “Benois Madonna” and “Annunciation” were painted. Despite his young age, the painter already demonstrated high skill in his paintings.
2. Leonardo's mature period of creativity took place in Milan, where he planned to make a career as an engineer. The most popular work written at this time was The Last Supper, and at the same time he began work on the Mona Lisa.
3. In the late period of creativity, the painting “John the Baptist” and a series of drawings “The Flood” were created.

Painting always complemented science for Leonardo da Vinci, as he sought to capture reality.

Inventions

A short biography cannot fully convey Leonardo da Vinci's contribution to science. However, we can note the most famous and valuable discoveries of the scientist.

1. He made his greatest contribution to mechanics, as can be seen from his many drawings. Leonardo da Vinci studied the fall of a body, the centers of gravity of pyramids and much more.
2. He invented a car made of wood, which was driven by two springs. The car mechanism was equipped with a brake.
3. He came up with a spacesuit, fins and a submarine, as well as a way to dive to depth without using a spacesuit with a special gas mixture.
4. The study of dragonfly flight has led to the creation of several variants of wings for humans. The experiments were unsuccessful. However, then the scientist came up with a parachute.
5. He was involved in developments in the military industry. One of his proposals was chariots with cannons. He came up with a prototype of an armadillo and a tank.
6. Leonardo da Vinci made many developments in construction. Arch bridges, drainage machines and cranes are all his inventions.

There is no man like Leonardo da Vinci in history. That is why many consider him an alien from other worlds.

Five secrets of da Vinci

Today, many scientists are still puzzling over the legacy left by the great man of the past era. Although it’s not worth calling Leonardo da Vinci that way, he predicted a lot, and foresaw even more, creating his unique masterpieces and amazing with his breadth of knowledge and thought. We offer you five secrets of the great Master that help lift the veil of secrecy over his works.

Encryption

The master encrypted a lot in order not to present ideas openly, but to wait a little until humanity “ripened and grew up” to them. Equally good with both hands, da Vinci wrote with his left hand, in the smallest font, and even from right to left, and often in mirror image. Riddles, metaphors, puzzles - this is what is found on every line, in every work. Never signing his works, the Master left his marks, visible only to an attentive researcher. For example, after many centuries, scientists discovered that by looking closely at his paintings, you can find a symbol of a bird taking off. Or the famous “Benois Madonna,” found among traveling actors who carried the canvas as a home icon.

Sfumato

The idea of ​​dispersion also belongs to the great mystifier. Take a closer look at the canvases, all the objects do not reveal clear edges, just like in life: the smooth flow of one image into another, blurriness, dispersion - everything breathes, lives, awakening fantasies and thoughts. By the way, the Master often advised practicing such vision, peering into water stains, mud deposits or piles of ash. Often he deliberately fumigated his work areas with smoke in order to see in the clubs what was hidden beyond the reasonable eye.

Look at the famous painting - the smile of the “Mona Lisa” from different angles, sometimes tender, sometimes slightly arrogant and even predatory. The knowledge gained through the study of many sciences gave the Master the opportunity to invent perfect mechanisms that are becoming available only now. For example, this is the effect of wave propagation, the penetrating power of light, oscillatory motion... and many things still need to be analyzed not even by us, but by our descendants.

Analogies

Analogies are the main thing in all the works of the Master. The advantage over accuracy, when a third follows from two conclusions of the mind, is the inevitability of any analogy. And Da Vinci still has no equal in his whimsicality and drawing absolutely mind-blowing parallels. One way or another, all of his works have some ideas that are not consistent with each other: the famous “golden ratio” illustration is one of them. With limbs spread and apart, a person fits into a circle, with his arms closed into a square, and with his arms slightly raised into a cross. It was this kind of “mill” that gave the Florentine magician the idea of ​​​​creating churches, where the altar was placed exactly in the middle, and the worshipers stood in a circle. By the way, engineers liked this same idea - this is how the ball bearing was born.

Contrapposto

The definition denotes the opposition of opposites and the creation of a certain type of movement. An example is the sculpture of a huge horse in Corte Vecchio. There, the animal’s legs are positioned precisely in the contrapposto style, forming a visual understanding of the movement.

Incompleteness

This is perhaps one of the Master’s favorite “tricks”. None of his works are finite. To complete is to kill, and da Vinci loved every one of his creations. Slow and meticulous, the hoaxer of all times could take a couple of brush strokes and go to the valleys of Lombardy to improve the landscapes there, switch to creating the next masterpiece device, or something else. Many works turned out to be spoiled by time, fire or water, but each of the creations, at least meaning something, was and is “unfinished”. By the way, it is interesting that even after the damage, Leonardo da Vinci never corrected his paintings. Having created his own paint, the artist even deliberately left a “window of incompleteness,” believing that life itself would make the necessary adjustments.

What was art before Leonardo da Vinci? Born among the rich, it fully reflected their interests, their worldview, their views on man and the world. The works of art were based on religious ideas and themes: affirmation of those views on the world that the church taught, depiction of scenes from sacred history, instilling in people a sense of reverence, admiration for the “divine” and consciousness of their own insignificance. The dominant theme also determined the form. Naturally, the image of the “saints” was very far from the images of real living people, therefore, schemes, artificiality, and staticity dominated in art. The people in these paintings were a kind of caricature of living people, the landscape is fantastic, the colors are pale and inexpressive. True, even before Leonardo, his predecessors, including his teacher Andrea Verrocchio, were no longer satisfied with the template and tried to create new images. They had already begun the search for new methods of depiction, began to study the laws of perspective, and thought a lot about the problems of achieving expressiveness in the image.

However, these searches for something new did not yield great results, primarily because these artists did not have a sufficiently clear idea of ​​the essence and tasks of art and knowledge of the laws of painting. That is why they fell again into schematism, then into naturalism, which is equally dangerous for genuine art, copying individual phenomena of reality. The significance of the revolution made by Leonardo da Vinci in art and in particular in painting is determined primarily by the fact that he was the first to clearly, clearly and definitely establish the essence and tasks of art. Art should be deeply life-like and realistic. It must come from a deep, careful study of reality and nature. It must be deeply truthful, must depict reality as it is, without any artificiality or falsehood. Reality, nature is beautiful in itself and does not need any embellishment. The artist must carefully study nature, but not to blindly imitate it, not to simply copy it, but in order to create works, having understood the laws of nature, the laws of reality; strictly comply with these laws. To create new values, values ​​of the real world - this is the purpose of art. This explains Leonardo's desire to connect art and science. Instead of simple, casual observation, he considered it necessary to systematically, persistently study the subject. It is known that Leonardo never parted with the album and wrote drawings and sketches in it.

They say that he loved to walk through the streets, squares, markets, noting everything interesting - people’s poses, faces, their expressions. Leonardo's second requirement for painting is the requirement for the truthfulness of the image, its vitality. The artist must strive for the most accurate representation of reality in all its richness. At the center of the world stands a living, thinking, feeling person. It is he who must be depicted in all the richness of his feelings, experiences and actions. For this purpose, it was Leonardo who studied human anatomy and physiology; for this purpose, as they say, he gathered peasants he knew in his workshop and, treating them, told them funny stories in order to see how people laugh, how the same event causes people have different impressions. If before Leonardo there was no real man in painting, now he has become dominant in the art of the Renaissance. Hundreds of Leonardo's drawings provide a gigantic gallery of types of people, their faces, and parts of their bodies. Man in all the diversity of his feelings and actions is the task of artistic depiction. And this is the strength and charm of Leonardo’s painting. Forced by the conditions of the time to paint pictures mainly on religious subjects, because his customers were the church, feudal lords and rich merchants, Leonardo powerfully subordinates these traditional subjects to his genius and creates works of universal significance. The Madonnas painted by Leonardo are, first of all, an image of one of the deeply human feelings - the feeling of motherhood, the boundless love of a mother for her baby, admiration and admiration for him. All his Madonnas are young, blooming women full of life, all the babies in his paintings are healthy, full-cheeked, playful boys, in whom there is not an ounce of “holiness.”

His apostles in The Last Supper are living people of different ages, social status, and different characters; in appearance they are Milanese artisans, peasants, and intellectuals. Striving for truth, the artist must be able to generalize what he finds individual and must create the typical. Therefore, even when painting portraits of certain historically known people, such as Mona Lisa Gioconda, the wife of a bankrupt aristocrat, Florentine merchant Francesco del Gioconda, Leonardo gives them, along with individual portrait features, a typical feature common to many people. That is why the portraits he painted survived the people depicted in them for many centuries. Leonardo was the first who not only carefully and carefully studied the laws of painting, but also formulated them. He deeply, like no one before him, studied the laws of perspective, the placement of light and shadow. He needed all this to achieve the highest expressiveness of the picture, in order to, as he said, “become equal to nature.” For the first time, it was in the works of Leonardo that the painting as such lost its static character and became a window into the world. When you look at his painting, the feeling of what was painted, enclosed in a frame, is lost and it seems that you are looking through an open window, revealing to the viewer something new, something they have never seen. Demanding the expressiveness of the painting, Leonardo resolutely opposed the formal play of colors, against the enthusiasm for form at the expense of content, against what so clearly characterizes decadent art.

For Leonardo, form is only the shell of the idea that the artist must convey to the viewer. Leonardo pays a lot of attention to the problems of the composition of the picture, the problems of placement of figures, and individual details. Hence his favorite composition of placing figures in a triangle - the simplest geometric harmonic figure - a composition that allows the viewer to embrace the whole picture as a whole. Expressiveness, truthfulness, accessibility - these are the laws of real, truly folk art formulated by Leonardo da Vinci, laws that he himself embodied in his brilliant works. Already in his first major painting, “Madonna with a Flower,” Leonardo showed in practice what the principles of art he professed meant. What is striking about this picture is, first of all, its composition, the surprisingly harmonious distribution of all the elements of the picture that make up a single whole. The image of a young mother with a cheerful child in her arms is deeply realistic. The directly felt deep blue of the Italian sky through the window slot is incredibly skillfully conveyed. Already in this picture, Leonardo demonstrated the principle of his art - realism, the depiction of a person in the deepest accordance with his true nature, the depiction of not an abstract scheme, which was what medieval ascetic art taught and did, namely a living, feeling person.

These principles are even more clearly expressed in Leonardo’s second major painting, “The Adoration of the Magi” from 1481, in which what is significant is not the religious plot, but the masterful depiction of people, each of whom has their own, individual face, their own pose, expressing their own feeling and mood. Life truth is the law of Leonardo’s painting. The fullest possible disclosure of a person’s inner life is its goal. In “The Last Supper” the composition is brought to perfection: despite the large number of figures - 13, their placement is strictly calculated so that they all as a whole represent a kind of unity, full of great internal content. The picture is very dynamic: some terrible news communicated by Jesus struck his disciples, each of them reacts to it in their own way, hence the huge variety of expressions of inner feelings on the faces of the apostles. Compositional perfection is complemented by an unusually masterful use of colors, harmony of light and shadows. The expressiveness of the painting reaches its perfection thanks to the extraordinary variety of not only facial expressions, but the position of each of the twenty-six hands drawn in the picture.

This recording by Leonardo himself tells us about the careful preliminary work that he carried out before painting the picture. Everything in it is thought out to the smallest detail: poses, facial expressions; even details such as an overturned bowl or knife; all this in its sum forms a single whole. The richness of colors in this painting is combined with a subtle use of chiaroscuro, which emphasizes the significance of the event depicted in the painting. The subtlety of perspective, the transmission of air and color make this painting a masterpiece of world art. Leonardo successfully solved many problems facing artists at that time and opened the way for the further development of art. By the power of his genius, Leonardo overcame the medieval traditions that weighed heavily on art, broke them and discarded them; he was able to push the narrow boundaries that limited the creative power of the artist by the then ruling clique of churchmen, and show, instead of the hackneyed gospel stencil scene, a huge, purely human drama, show living people with their passions, feelings, experiences. And in this picture the great, life-affirming optimism of the artist and thinker Leonardo again manifested itself.

Over the years of his wanderings, Leonardo painted many more paintings that received well-deserved world fame and recognition. In "La Gioconda" a deeply vital and typical image is given. It is this deep vitality, the unusually relief rendering of facial features, individual details, and costume, combined with a masterfully painted landscape, that gives this picture special expressiveness. Everything about her—from the mysterious half-smile playing on her face to her calmly folded hands—speaks of great inner content, of the great spiritual life of this woman. Leonardo's desire to convey the inner world in the external manifestations of mental movements is especially fully expressed here. An interesting painting by Leonardo is “The Battle of Anghiari”, depicting the battle of cavalry and infantry. As in his other paintings, Leonardo sought here to show a variety of faces, figures and poses. Dozens of people depicted by the artist create a complete impression of the picture precisely because they are all subordinated to a single idea underlying it. It was a desire to show the rise of all man’s strength in battle, the tension of all his feelings, brought together to achieve victory.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Italian: Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci). Born on April 15, 1452 in the village of Anchiano, near the town of Vinci, near Florence - died on May 2, 1519, Clos Luce castle, near Amboise, Touraine, France. Italian artist (painter, sculptor, architect) and scientist (anatomist, naturalist), inventor, writer, one of the largest representatives of the art of the High Renaissance.

Leonardo da Vinci is a vivid example of a “universal man” (lat. homo universalis).

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in the village of Anchiano near the small town of Vinci, not far from Florence at “three o’clock in the morning,” that is, at 22:30 according to modern time. A noteworthy entry in the diary of Leonardo’s grandfather, Antonio da Vinci (1372-1468) (literal translation): “On Saturday, at three o’clock in the morning on April 15, my grandson, the son of my son Piero, was born. The boy was named Leonardo. He was baptized by Father Piero di Bartolomeo."

His parents were the 25-year-old notary Pierrot (1427-1504) and his lover, the peasant woman Katerina. Leonardo spent the first years of his life with his mother. His father soon married a rich and noble girl, but this marriage turned out to be childless, and Piero took his three-year-old son to be raised. Separated from his mother, Leonardo spent his whole life trying to recreate her image in his masterpieces. At that time he lived with his grandfather. In Italy at that time, illegitimate children were treated almost as legal heirs. Many influential people of the city of Vinci took part in the further fate of Leonardo. When Leonardo was 13 years old, his stepmother died in childbirth. The father remarried - and again soon became a widower. He lived to be 77 years old, was married four times and had 12 children. The father tried to introduce Leonardo to the family profession, but to no avail: the son was not interested in the laws of society.

Leonardo did not have a surname in the modern sense; "da Vinci" simply means "(originally) from the town of Vinci." His full name is Italian. Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, that is, “Leonardo, son of Mr. Piero from Vinci.”

In his Lives of the Most Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Vasari says that once a peasant he knew asked Father Leonardo to find an artist to paint a round wooden shield. Ser Pierrot gave the shield to his son. Leonardo decided to depict the head of the gorgon Medusa, and in order for the image of the monster to make the right impression on the audience, he used lizards, snakes, grasshoppers, caterpillars, bats and “other creatures” as subjects, “from a variety of which, combining them in different ways, he created the monster very disgusting and terrible, which poisoned with its breath and ignited the air.” The result exceeded his expectations: when Leonardo showed the finished work to his father, he was scared. The son told him: “This work serves the purpose for which it was made. So take it and give it away, for this is the effect that is expected from works of art.” Ser Piero did not give Leonardo's work to the peasant: he received another shield, bought from a junk dealer. Father Leonardo sold the shield of Medusa in Florence, receiving one hundred ducats for it. According to legend, this shield passed to the Medici family, and when it was lost, the sovereign owners of Florence were expelled from the city by the rebellious people. Many years later, Cardinal del Monte commissioned a painting of Caravaggio's Gorgon Medusa. The new talisman was presented to Ferdinand I de' Medici in honor of his son's marriage.

In 1466 Leonardo da Vinci entered Verrocchio's workshop as an apprentice artist. Verrocchio's workshop was located in the intellectual center of what was then Italy, the city of Florence, which allowed Leonardo to study the humanities, as well as acquire some technical skills. He studied drawing, chemistry, metallurgy, working with metal, plaster and leather. In addition, the young apprentice was engaged in drawing, sculpture and modeling. In addition to Leonardo, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Agnolo di Polo studied in the workshop, Botticelli worked, and such famous masters as Ghirlandaio and others often visited. Subsequently, even when Leonardo’s father hires him to work in his workshop, he continues to collaborate with Verrocchio .

In 1473, at the age of 20, Leonardo da Vinci qualified as a master at the Guild of St. Luke.

In the 15th century, ideas about the revival of ancient ideals were in the air. At the Florence Academy, the best minds in Italy created the theory of new art. Creative youth spent time in lively discussions. Leonardo remained aloof from his busy social life and rarely left his studio. He had no time for theoretical disputes: he improved his skills. One day Verrocchio received an order for the painting “The Baptism of Christ” and commissioned Leonardo to paint one of the two angels. This was a common practice in art workshops of that time: the teacher created a picture together with student assistants. The most talented and diligent were entrusted with the execution of an entire fragment. Two Angels, painted by Leonardo and Verrocchio, clearly demonstrated the superiority of the student over the teacher. As Vasari writes, the amazed Verrocchio abandoned his brush and never returned to painting.

In 1472-1477 Leonardo worked on: “The Baptism of Christ”, “The Annunciation”, “Madonna with a Vase”.

In the second half of the 70s, the “Madonna with a Flower” (“Benois Madonna”) was created.

At the age of 24, Leonardo and three other young men were put on trial on false, anonymous charges of sodomy. They were acquitted. Very little is known about his life after this event, but it is likely (there are documents) that he had his own workshop in Florence in 1476-1481.

In 1481, da Vinci completed the first large order in his life - the altar image “The Adoration of the Magi” (not completed) for the monastery of San Donato a Sisto, located near Florence. In the same year, work began on the painting “Saint Jerome”.

In 1482, Leonardo, being, according to Vasari, a very talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo de' Medici sent him to Milan as a peacemaker to Lodovico Moro, and sent the lyre with him as a gift. At the same time, work began on the equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza.

Leonardo had many friends and students. As for love relationships, there is no reliable information on this matter, since Leonardo carefully hid this side of his life. He was not married; there is no reliable information about his affairs with women. According to some versions, Leonardo had a relationship with Cecilia Gallerani, a favorite of Lodovico Moro, with whom he painted his famous painting “The Lady with an Ermine.” A number of authors, following the words of Vasari, suggest intimate relationships with young men, including students (Salai), others believe that, despite the painter’s homosexuality, relationships with students were not intimate.

Leonardo was present at the meeting of King Francis I with Pope Leo X in Bologna on December 19, 1515. In 1513-1516 Leonardo lived in the Belvedere and worked on the painting “John the Baptist”.

Francis commissioned a master to construct a mechanical lion capable of walking, from whose chest a bouquet of lilies would appear. Perhaps this lion greeted the king in Lyon or was used during negotiations with the pope.

In 1516, Leonardo accepted the invitation of the French king and settled in his castle of Clos-Lucé, where Francis I spent his childhood, not far from the royal castle of Amboise. In his official capacity as the first royal artist, engineer and architect, Leonardo received an annual annuity of one thousand ecus. Never before in Italy did Leonardo have the title of engineer. Leonardo was not the first Italian master who, by the grace of the French king, received “freedom to dream, think and create” - before him, Andrea Solario and Fra Giovanni Giocondo shared a similar honor.

In France, Leonardo almost did not draw, but was masterfully involved in organizing court festivities, planning a new palace in Romorantan with a planned change in the river bed, designing a canal between the Loire and the Saone, and the main two-way spiral staircase in the Chateau de Chambord. Two years before his death, the master’s right hand became numb, and he could hardly move without assistance. 67-year-old Leonardo spent the third year of his life in Amboise in bed. On April 23, 1519, he left a will, and on May 2, he died surrounded by his students and his masterpieces in Clos-Luce.

According to Vasari, da Vinci died in the arms of King Francis I, his close friend. This unreliable, but widespread legend in France is reflected in the paintings of Ingres, Angelika Kaufman and many other painters. Leonardo da Vinci was buried at Amboise Castle. The inscription was engraved on the tombstone: “Within the walls of this monastery lie the ashes of Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest artist, engineer and architect of the French kingdom.”

The main heir was Leonardo's student and friend Francesco Melzi, who for the next 50 years remained the main manager of the master's inheritance, which included, in addition to paintings, tools, a library and at least 50 thousand original documents on various topics, of which only a third has survived to this day. Another student of Salai and a servant each received half of Leonardo's vineyards.

Our contemporaries know Leonardo primarily as an artist. In addition, it is possible that da Vinci could also have been a sculptor: researchers from the University of Perugia - Giancarlo Gentilini and Carlo Sisi - claim that the terracotta head they found in 1990 is the only sculptural work of Leonardo da Vinci that has come down to us.

However, da Vinci himself, at different periods of his life, considered himself primarily an engineer or scientist. He did not devote much time to fine art and worked rather slowly. Therefore, Leonardo’s artistic heritage is not large in quantity, and a number of his works have been lost or severely damaged. However, his contribution to world artistic culture is extremely important even against the background of the cohort of geniuses that the Italian Renaissance produced. Thanks to his works, the art of painting moved to a qualitatively new stage of its development.

The Renaissance artists who preceded Leonardo decisively rejected many of the conventions of medieval art. This was a movement towards realism and much had already been achieved in the study of perspective, anatomy, and greater freedom in compositional solutions. But in terms of painting, working with paint, the artists were still quite conventional and constrained. The line in the picture clearly outlined the object, and the image had the appearance of a painted drawing.

The most conventional was the landscape, which played a secondary role. Leonardo realized and embodied a new painting technique. His line has the right to be blurry, because that’s how we see it. He realized the phenomenon of light scattering in the air and the appearance of sfumato - a haze between the viewer and the depicted object, which softens color contrasts and lines. As a result, realism in painting moved to a qualitatively new level.

His only invention that received recognition during his lifetime was a wheel lock for a pistol (started with a key). At the beginning, the wheeled pistol was not very widespread, but by the middle of the 16th century it had gained popularity among the nobles, especially among the cavalry, which was even reflected in the design of the armor, namely: Maximilian armor for the sake of firing pistols began to be made with gloves instead of mittens. The wheel lock for a pistol, invented by Leonardo da Vinci, was so perfect that it continued to be found in the 19th century.

Leonardo da Vinci was interested in the problems of flight. In Milan, he made many drawings and studied the flight mechanism of birds of various breeds and bats. In addition to observations, he also conducted experiments, but they were all unsuccessful. Leonardo really wanted to build a flying machine. He said: “He who knows everything can do everything. If only you could find out, you’ll have wings!”

At first, Leonardo developed the problem of flight using wings driven by human muscle power: the idea of ​​​​the simplest apparatus of Daedalus and Icarus. But then he came up with the idea of ​​​​building such an apparatus to which a person should not be attached, but should maintain complete freedom in order to control it; The apparatus must set itself in motion by its own force. This is essentially the idea of ​​an airplane. Leonardo da Vinci worked on a vertical take-off and landing apparatus. Leonardo planned to place a system of retractable staircases on the vertical “ornitottero”. Nature served as an example for him: “look at the stone swift, which sat on the ground and cannot take off because of its short legs; and when he is in flight, pull out the ladder, as shown in the second image from above... this is how you take off from the plane; these stairs serve as legs...” Regarding landing, he wrote: “These hooks (concave wedges) which are attached to the base of the ladders serve the same purpose as the tips of the toes of the person who jumps on them, without his whole body being shaken by it, as if he was jumping on his heels.” Leonardo da Vinci proposed the first design of a telescope with two lenses (now known as the Kepler telescope). In the manuscript of the Codex Atlanticus, page 190a, there is an entry: “Make glasses (ochiali) for the eyes so that you can see the moon large.”

Leonardo da Vinci may have first formulated the simplest form of the law of conservation of mass for the movement of fluids when describing the flow of a river, but due to vagueness of the wording and doubts about its authenticity, this statement has been criticized.

During his life, Leonardo da Vinci made thousands of notes and drawings on anatomy, but did not publish his work. While dissecting the bodies of people and animals, he accurately conveyed the structure of the skeleton and internal organs, including small details. According to clinical anatomy professor Peter Abrams, da Vinci's scientific work was 300 years ahead of its time and in many ways superior to the famous Gray's Anatomy.

Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci:

Parachute
Wheel lock
Bike
Tank
Lightweight portable bridges for the army
Spotlight
Catapult
Robot
Two-lens telescope.

The creator of “The Last Supper” and “La Gioconda” also showed himself as a thinker, early realizing the need for theoretical justification of artistic practice: “Those who devote themselves to practice without knowledge are like a sailor setting off on a journey without a rudder and compass... practice should always be based on good knowledge of theory."

Demanding from the artist an in-depth study of the objects depicted, Leonardo da Vinci recorded all his observations in a notebook, which he constantly carried with him. The result was a kind of intimate diary, the like of which is not found in all world literature. Drawings, drawings and sketches are accompanied here by brief notes on issues of perspective, architecture, music, natural science, military engineering and the like; all this is sprinkled with various sayings, philosophical reasoning, allegories, anecdotes, fables. Taken together, the entries in these 120 books provide materials for an extensive encyclopedia. However, he did not strive to publish his thoughts and even resorted to secret writing; a complete decipherment of his notes has not yet been completed.

Recognizing experience as the only criterion of truth and opposing the method of observation and induction to abstract speculation, Leonardo da Vinci not only in words, but in deeds deals a mortal blow to medieval scholasticism with its predilection for abstract logical formulas and deduction. For Leonardo da Vinci, speaking well means thinking correctly, that is, thinking independently, like the ancients, who did not recognize any authorities. So Leonardo da Vinci comes to deny not only scholasticism, this echo of feudal-medieval culture, but also humanism, a product of still fragile bourgeois thought, frozen in superstitious admiration for the authority of the ancients.

Denying book learning, declaring the task of science (as well as art) to be the knowledge of things, Leonardo da Vinci anticipates Montaigne's attacks on literary scholars and opens the era of a new science a hundred years before Galileo and Bacon.

The enormous literary heritage of Leonardo da Vinci has survived to this day in a chaotic form, in manuscripts written with his left hand. Although Leonardo da Vinci did not print a single line from them, in his notes he constantly addressed an imaginary reader and throughout the last years of his life he did not abandon the thought of publishing his works.

After the death of Leonardo da Vinci, his friend and student Francesco Melzi selected from them passages related to painting, from which the “Treatise on Painting” (Trattato della pittura, 1st ed., 1651) was subsequently compiled. The handwritten legacy of Leonardo da Vinci was published in its entirety only in the 19th-20th centuries. In addition to its enormous scientific and historical significance, it also has artistic value due to its concise, energetic style and unusually clear language.

Living in the heyday of humanism, when the Italian language was considered secondary compared to Latin, Leonardo da Vinci delighted his contemporaries with the beauty and expressiveness of his speech (according to legend, he was a good improviser), but did not consider himself a writer and wrote as he spoke; his prose is therefore an example of the colloquial language of the 15th century intelligentsia, and this saved it in general from the artificiality and eloquence inherent in the prose of the humanists, although in some passages of the didactic writings of Leonardo da Vinci we find echoes of the pathos of the humanistic style.

Even in the least “poetic” fragments by design, Leonardo da Vinci’s style is distinguished by its vivid imagery; Thus, his “Treatise on Painting” is equipped with magnificent descriptions (for example, the famous description of the flood), amazing with the skill of verbal transmission of pictorial and plastic images. Along with descriptions in which one can feel the manner of an artist-painter, Leonardo da Vinci gives in his manuscripts many examples of narrative prose: fables, facets (joking stories), aphorisms, allegories, prophecies. In fables and facets, Leonardo stands on the level of the prose writers of the 14th century with their simple-minded practical morality; and some of its facets are indistinguishable from Sacchetti’s short stories.

Allegories and prophecies are more fantastic in nature: in the first, Leonardo da Vinci uses the techniques of medieval encyclopedias and bestiaries; the latter are in the nature of humorous riddles, distinguished by brightness and precision of phraseology and imbued with caustic, almost Voltairean irony, directed at the famous preacher Girolamo Savonarola. Finally, in the aphorisms of Leonardo da Vinci his philosophy of nature, his thoughts about the inner essence of things are expressed in epigrammatic form. Fiction had a purely utilitarian, auxiliary meaning for him.

To date, about 7,000 pages of Leonardo’s diaries have survived, located in various collections. At first, the priceless notes belonged to the master's favorite student, Francesco Melzi, but when he died, the manuscripts disappeared. Individual fragments began to “emerge” at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. At first they did not meet with enough interest. Numerous owners did not even suspect what kind of treasure fell into their hands. But when scientists established the authorship, it turned out that the barn books, and art history essays, and anatomical sketches, and strange drawings, and studies on geology, architecture, hydraulics, geometry, military fortifications, philosophy, optics, and drawing techniques were the fruit of one person. All entries in Leonardo's diaries are made in a mirror image.

The following students came out of Leonardo's workshop: "Leonardeschi"): Ambrogio de Predis, Giovanni Boltraffio, Francesco Melzi, Andrea Solario, Giampetrino, Bernardino Luini, Cesare da Sesto.

In 1485, after a terrible plague epidemic in Milan, Leonardo proposed to the authorities a project for an ideal city with certain parameters, layout and sewer system. The Duke of Milan, Lodovico Sforza, rejected the project. Centuries passed, and the authorities of London recognized Leonardo's plan as the perfect basis for the further development of the city. In modern Norway there is an active bridge designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Tests of parachutes and hang gliders made according to the master’s sketches confirmed that only the imperfection of materials did not allow him to take to the skies. At the Roman airport named after Leonardo da Vinci, there is a gigantic statue of the scientist with a model of a helicopter in his hands, stretching into the sky. “He who is directed towards a star does not turn around,” wrote Leonardo.

Leonardo, apparently, did not leave a single self-portrait that could be unambiguously attributed to him. Scientists have doubted that the famous self-portrait of Leonardo's sanguine (traditionally dated 1512-1515), depicting him in old age, is such. It is believed that perhaps this is just a study of the head of the apostle for the Last Supper. Doubts that this is a self-portrait of the artist have been expressed since the 19th century, the latest to be expressed recently by one of the leading experts on Leonardo, Professor Pietro Marani. But recently, Italian scientists announced a sensational discovery. They claim that an early self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci has been discovered. The discovery belongs to the journalist Piero Angela.

He played the lyre masterfully. When Leonardo's case was heard in the Milan court, he appeared there precisely as a musician, and not as an artist or inventor. Leonardo was the first to explain why the sky is blue. In the book “On Painting” he wrote: “The blueness of the sky is due to the thickness of illuminated air particles, which is located between the Earth and the blackness above.”

Leonardo was ambidextrous - he was equally good with his right and left hands. They even say that he could write different texts with different hands at the same time. However, he wrote most of his works with his left hand from right to left.

It is believed that da Vinci was a vegetarian (Andrea Corsali, in a letter to Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici, compares Leonardo to an Indian who did not eat meat).

The phrase often attributed to da Vinci: “If a person strives for freedom, why does he keep birds and animals in cages? .. man is truly the king of animals, because he cruelly exterminates them. We live by killing others. We are walking cemeteries! Even at an early age, I gave up meat” is taken from the English translation of Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s novel “Resurrected Gods. Leonardo da Vinci."

Leonardo wrote in his famous diaries from right to left in mirror image. Many people think that in this way he wanted to make his research secret. Perhaps this is true. According to another version, mirror handwriting was his individual feature (there is even evidence that it was easier for him to write this way than in a normal way); There is even a concept of “Leonardo’s handwriting.”

Leonardo's hobbies even included cooking and the art of serving. In Milan, for 13 years he was the manager of court feasts. He invented several culinary devices to make the work of cooks easier. Leonardo's original dish - thinly sliced ​​stewed meat with vegetables placed on top - was very popular at court feasts.

An outstanding Italian artist, scientist, engineer and anatomist, one of the prominent representatives of art and science of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 in the village of Anchiano, near the city of Vinci.

In addition to world-famous paintings and sculptures, Leonardo left behind manuscripts on many areas of knowledge. He studied mathematics, fluid mechanics, geology and physical geography, meteorology, chemistry, astronomy, botany, as well as the anatomy and physiology of humans and animals.

Despite the fact that some of Leonardo’s masterpieces, for example “La Gioconda,” are known to everyone, little-known facts of his life and work can also be cited. For example, that Leonardo’s mother was a simple peasant woman, he was educated at home, played the lyre masterfully, was the first to explain why the sky is blue and the moon is so bright, he was ambidextrous and suffered from dyslexia.

1. Leonardo was born into the family of a wealthy notary and landowner Piero da Vinci; his mother was a simple peasant woman, Katerina. He received a good education at home, but he lacked systematic studies in Greek and Latin.

2. He played the lyre masterfully. When Leonardo's case was heard in the Milan court, he appeared there precisely as a musician, and not as an artist or inventor.

4. According to one theory, Mona Lisa smiles from the realization of her secret pregnancy.

5. According to another version, Gioconda was entertained by musicians and clowns while she posed for the artist.

6. There is another theory according to which the Mona Lisa is a self-portrait of Leonardo.

7. Leonardo, apparently, did not leave a single self-portrait that could be unambiguously attributed to him. Scientists have doubted that the famous self-portrait of Leonardo's sanguine (traditionally dated 1512-1515), depicting him in old age, is such. It is believed that perhaps this is just a study of the head of the apostle for the Last Supper. Doubts that this is a self-portrait of the artist have been expressed since the 19th century, the latest to be expressed recently by one of the leading experts on Leonardo, Professor Pietro Marani.

8. Scientists at the University of Amsterdam and specialists from the USA, having studied the mysterious smile of Gioconda using a new computer program, unraveled its composition: according to them, it contains 83% happiness, 9% disdain, 6% fear and 2% anger.

9. Bill Gates bought Codex Leicester, a collection of works by Leonardo da Vinci, for $30 million in 1994. Since 2003 it has been on display at the Seattle Art Museum.

10. Leonardo loved water: he developed instructions for underwater diving, invented and described a device for underwater diving, a breathing apparatus for scuba diving. All of Leonardo's inventions formed the basis of modern underwater equipment.

11. Leonardo was the first to explain why the sky is blue. In the book “On Painting” he wrote: “The blueness of the sky is due to the thickness of illuminated air particles, which is located between the Earth and the blackness above.”

12. Observations of the moon in the waxing crescent phase led Leonardo to one of the important scientific discoveries - the researcher found that sunlight is reflected from the Earth and returns to the moon in the form of secondary illumination.

13. Leonardo was ambidextrous - he was equally good with his right and left hands. He suffered from dyslexia (impaired reading ability) - this ailment, called “word blindness,” is associated with reduced brain activity in a certain area of ​​​​the left hemisphere. As you know, Leonardo wrote in a mirror way.

14. The Louvre recently spent $5.5 million to move the artist’s famous masterpiece “La Gioconda” from the general public to a room specially equipped for it. Two-thirds of the State Hall, occupying a total area of ​​840 square meters, was allocated for La Gioconda. The huge room was rebuilt into a gallery, on the far wall of which Leonardo’s famous creation now hangs. The reconstruction, which was carried out according to the design of the Peruvian architect Lorenzo Piqueras, lasted about four years.

The decision to move the “Mona Lisa” to a separate room was made by the administration of the Louvre due to the fact that in its original place, surrounded by other paintings by Italian painters, this masterpiece was lost, and the public had to stand in line to see the famous painting.

15. In August 2003, a painting by the great Leonardo da Vinci worth $50 million, “Madonna of the Spindle,” was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland. The masterpiece disappeared from the home of one of Scotland's richest landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch. Last November, the FBI released a list of the 10 most notorious art crimes, which included this robbery.

16. Leonardo left designs for a submarine, a propeller, a tank, a loom, a ball bearing and flying cars.

17. In December 2000, British parachutist Adrian Nicholas in South Africa descended from a height of 3 thousand meters from a hot air balloon using a parachute made according to a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. The Discover website writes about this fact.

18. Leonardo was the first of the painters to dismember corpses in order to understand the location and structure of muscles.

19. A great fan of word games, Leonardo left in the Codex Arundel a long list of synonyms for the male penis.

20. While building canals, Leonardo da Vinci made an observation, which later entered geology under his name as a theoretical principle for recognizing the time of formation of the earth's layers. He came to the conclusion that the Earth is much older than the Bible believed.

Relates primarily Leonardo da Vinci(1452-1519). He was not only a brilliant painter, sculptor and architect, but also a great scientist, engineer and inventor. In terms of scale, versatility and complexity of personality, no one can compare with him.

Fate was not very kind to Leonardo. Being the illegitimate son of a notary and a simple peasant woman, he had great difficulty in achieving a worthy place in life. We can say that he remained largely misunderstood and unrecognized by his time. In Florence, the birthplace of his first successes, the Medici treated him quite warily, valuing him mainly as a musician who made unusual instruments.

The authorities of Milan, in turn, perceived him very restrainedly, seeing in him an engineer and a skilled organizer of holidays. In Rome, Pope Leo X also kept him at a distance, entrusting him with draining the swamps. In the last years of his life, at the invitation of the French king, Leonardo left for France, where he died.

Leonardo da Vinci indeed, while remaining a genius of the Renaissance, belonged not only to his time, but also to the past and the future. In many ways, he did not accept the Platonic humanism that prevailed in Italy, reproaching Plato for being abstractly theoretical. Of course, Leonardo's art was the highest embodiment of the ideals of humanism. However, as a scientist, Aristotelian empiricism was much closer to him, and with it he was transported to the 13th century, to the late Middle Ages, when Aristotle was the ruler of thoughts.

It was then that the spirit of scientific experiment was born, to the establishment and development of which Leonardo made a decisive contribution. At the same time, again as a scientist and thinker, he was centuries ahead of his time. Leonardo developed a system of thinking that would become widespread after the Renaissance, in modern times. Many of his ideas and technical projects are plans for an airplane, helicopter, tank, parachute, etc. - will be implemented only in the 19th-20th centuries.

Based on the facts that Leonardo was an illegitimate son, that he created few works, that he worked slowly and for a long time, that many of his works remained unfinished, that among his students there were no highly talented ones, etc., Freud interprets his work through the prism Oedipus complex.

However, these facts can be explained differently. The fact is that in art Leonardo behaved like experimenter. Creativity for him acted as an endless search and solution to ever new problems. In this he was significantly different from Michelangelo, who already saw a future finished statue in a solid block of marble, the creation of which simply required removing and cutting off everything superfluous and unnecessary. Leonardo was in constant creative search. He constantly experimented in everything - be it chiaroscuro, the famous haze on his canvases, colors or simply the composition of paints. This is evidenced by his numerous sketches, sketches and drawings, in which he seems to be testing various human poses, facial expressions, etc. Sometimes the experiment failed. In particular, the composition of the paints for “The Last Supper” turned out to be unsuccessful.

In each work, Leonardo solved some complex problem. When this solution was found, he was no longer interested in bringing the canvas to completion. In this sense, the experimental scientist in him took precedence over the artist. Here he was again ahead of the development of painting by centuries. Only in the second half of the 19th century. French impressionism embarked on the path of a similar experiment, which led art to modernism and the avant-garde.

Leonardo avoided everything that was motionless and frozen. He loved movement, action, life. He was attracted by the changing, sliding, form-decomposing light. He watched the behavior of water, wind and light as if spellbound. He advised his students to paint a landscape with water and wind, at sunrise and sunset. He looked at the world through the eyes of Heraclitus, through his famous formula: “Everything flows, everything changes.”

In his works he sought to express a transitional, changing state. This is exactly how the mysterious and strange half-smile of his famous "Mona Lisa". Thanks to this, the entire facial expression becomes elusive and changing, strange and mysterious.

In the works of Leonardo da Vinci, the two important trends. which will determine the subsequent development of Western culture. One of them comes from literature and art, from humanitarian knowledge. It rests on language, on knowledge of ancient culture, on intuition, inspiration and imagination. The second comes from scientific knowledge of nature. It rests on perception and observation, on mathematics. It is characterized by objectivity, rigor and accuracy, discipline of mind and knowledge, analysis and experiment, experimental testing of knowledge.

In Leonardo, both of these tendencies still coexist peacefully. Not only is there no conflict or confrontation between them, but... on the contrary, there is a happy union. Leonardo emphasizes that “experience is the common mother of art and science.” The artist in him is inseparable from the scientist and science. For him, art takes the place of philosophy and science. He considers thinking and drawing as two ways of understanding reality., allowing you to analyze and understand it. Starting from the elements thus discovered, he carries out a new synthesis, which is at the same time a creative process, which in one case leads to a work of art, and in the other to a scientific discovery. Leonardo emphasizes that art and science are identical in nature. They have a common method and common goals. They are based on the same creative process. However, already in the next - XVII - century the paths of art and science will diverge. The balance between them will be disrupted in favor of science.

Leonardo da Vinci created in different types and genres of art, but it was painting.

One of Leonardo's earliest paintings is the Madonna of the Flower, or Benois Madonna. Already here the artist acts as a true innovator. He overcomes the framework of the traditional plot and gives the image a broader, universal meaning, which is maternal joy and love. In this work, many features of the artist’s art were clearly manifested: a clear composition of figures and volume of forms, a desire for brevity and generalization, psychological expressiveness.

The continuation of the theme started was the painting “Madonna Litta”, where another feature of the artist’s work was clearly revealed - a play on contrasts. The theme was completed with the painting “Madonna in the Grotto,” which speaks of the master’s complete creative maturity. This canvas is marked by an ideal compositional solution, thanks to which the depicted figures of the Madonna, Christ and angels merge with the landscape into a single whole, endowed with calm balance and harmony.

One of the peaks of Leonardo's creativity is fresco "The Last Supper" in the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie. This work amazes not only with its overall composition, but also with its accuracy. Leonardo not only conveys the psychological state of the apostles, but does so at the moment when it reaches a critical point, turns into a psychological explosion and conflict. This explosion is caused by the words of Christ: “One of you will betray me.”

In this work, Leonardo made full use of the technique of specific comparison of figures, thanks to which each character appears as a unique individuality and personality. The calm look of Christ further emphasizes the excited state of the other characters. The beautiful face of John contrasts with the distorted fear, the predatory profile of Judas, etc. When creating this canvas, the artist used linear and aerial perspective.

The second peak of Leonardo's creativity was the famous portrait of Mona Lisa, or "Gioconda". This work marked the beginning of the genre of psychological portrait in European art. When creating it, the great master brilliantly used the entire arsenal of means of artistic expression: sharp contrasts and soft halftones, frozen stillness and general fluidity and variability. subtle psychological nuances and transitions. The entire genius of Leonardo lies in the amazingly lively look of Mona Lisa, her mysterious and enigmatic smile, the mystical haze covering the landscape. This work is one of the rarest masterpieces of art.

While in France, Leonardo moved away from artistic practice. He is analyzing and systematizing his notes on art, and is planning to write a book about painting. But he did not have time to complete this work either. Nevertheless, the records he left are of great theoretical and practical importance. In them he reveals the foundations of a new, realistic art. Leonardo comprehends and summarizes his creative experience, reflects on the enormous importance of anatomy and knowledge about the proportions of the human body for painting. He emphasizes the importance of not only linear, but also aerial perspective. Leonardo first expresses the idea of ​​the relativity of the concept of beauty.

Other scientists believe that the issue lies in the peculiarities of the author’s artistic style. Allegedly, Leonardo applied paints in such a special way that the face of Mona Lisa is constantly changing.

Many insist that the artist depicted himself in a female form on the canvas, which is why such a strange effect was obtained. One scientist even discovered symptoms of idiocy in Mona Lisa, citing disproportionate fingers and lack of flexibility in her hand. But, according to the British doctor Kenneth Keel, the portrait conveys the peaceful state of a pregnant woman.

There is also a version that the artist, who was allegedly bisexual, painted his student and assistant Gian Giacomo Caprotti, who was next to him for 26 years. This version is supported by the fact that Leonardo da Vinci left this painting as an inheritance when he died in 1519.

They say... ...that the great artist owes his death to the model of Mona Lisa. That many hours of grueling sessions with her exhausted the great master, since the model herself turned out to be a bio-vampire. They still talk about this today. As soon as the picture was painted, the great artist was gone.

6) When creating the fresco “The Last Supper,” Leonardo da Vinci searched for ideal models for a very long time. Jesus must embody Good, and Judas, who decided to betray him at this meal, is Evil.

Leonardo da Vinci interrupted his work many times, going in search of sitters. One day, while listening to a church choir, he saw a perfect image of Christ in one of the young singers and, inviting him to his workshop, made several sketches and studies from him.

Three years have passed. The Last Supper was almost completed, but Leonardo never found a suitable model for Judas. The cardinal, who was in charge of painting the cathedral, hurried the artist, demanding that the fresco be completed as soon as possible.

And then, after a long search, the artist saw a man lying in a gutter - young, but prematurely decrepit, dirty, drunk and ragged. There was no longer time for sketches, and Leonardo ordered his assistants to take him straight to the cathedral. With great difficulty they dragged him there and put him on his feet. The man did not really understand what was happening and where he was, but Leonardo da Vinci captured on canvas the face of a man mired in sins. When he finished his work, the beggar, who by this time had already come to his senses a little, approached the canvas and shouted:

– I’ve already seen this picture before!

- When? - Leonardo was surprised. – Three years ago, before I lost everything. At that time, when I sang in the choir, and my life was full of dreams, some artist painted Christ from me...

7) Leonardo had the gift of foresight. In 1494, he made a series of notes that paint pictures of the world to come, many of them have already come true, and others are coming true now.

“People will talk to each other from the most distant countries and answer each other” - we are undoubtedly talking about the telephone here.

“People will walk and not move, they will talk to someone who is not there, they will hear someone who does not speak” - television, tape recording, sound reproduction.

“You will see yourself falling from great heights without any harm to you” - obviously skydiving.

8) But Leonardo da Vinci also has mysteries that baffle researchers. Maybe you can solve them?

“People will throw away from their own homes the supplies that were meant to keep them alive.”

"The majority of the male race will not be allowed to reproduce, since their testicles will be taken away."

Do you want to learn even more about Da Vinci and bring his ideas to life?