Leonardo+da+Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci Will Clark 8B **  Biography   **   **  Early Life  ** Leonardo Da Vinci was born in the year 1452, on April 15th, in the village of Vinci, in Italy. His mother was a peasant called Caterina, and his father was a Lawyer named Ser Piero Da Vinci. He was labelled “illegitimate”, because his father had been forbidden to marry Caterina. The family name of Vinci is the town name in which Leonardo was born in. His earliest memory, apparently, was of a hawk which landed on the side of his cradle. He took this as a sign to mean that he was one day meant to fly, which is where his fascination of flight came from. He took this as a positive sign, rather than developing a phobia of birds. To quote, Leonardo himself said, “It comes to me almost like a dream, the first recollection of my infancy. I was in my cradle and a great hawk flew down to me. It opened my mouth with its tail and its feathers struck me several times inside my lips. That bird seems to me now to have pointed me to my destiny.” His early schooling was mainly something called “Abacus School”- which was centred on basic mathematics. He also was educated in Latin, geometry and reading and writing Italian, which obviously had an impression on him, as he later wrote his notes in Italian and not Latin. As well as that, he was a brilliant pupil in art, and he impressed his dad a lot; so much so that his dad managed to sell some of his work to a collector, and got him apprenticed to an artesian, a job that was looked down upon at the time by many other professions. Today’s equivalent of an artist would probably be a tailor or a butcher. ** Apprenticeship  ** In 1466, aged fourteen, he was taken to Florence to be apprenticed to one of the finest artists, Andrea Del Verrocchio, who accepted him as soon as he saw one of Leonardo’s drawings. At the early stage of his apprenticeship, he learned lots of different kinds of art- painting, sculpting and casting bronze, to name a few. His first great piece of art was the painting “Baptism of Christ”. Leonardo painted only the angel on the left, whilst his master painted the rest. Upon seeing the magnificence of the angel's facial expression that Leonardo had painted, Verrocchio vowed to never paint again. The young Leonardo had already surpassed his teacher. Throughout the rest of his life, he would keep on painting masterpieces. ** Artist  ** In 1472, at the age of twenty, he joined The Painter’s Guild of Florence, which meant that he was no longer an apprentice, but a fully-fledged artist- even though he didn’t set up his own workshop, which he could have done easily, but stayed working with Verrocchio, possibly out of fondness. Over the next four years, he painted and drew several more pieces of art, before he finally joined “The Guild of St. Luke”, for artists and doctors, and he got his own workshop and apprentices. He created several more pieces of art over the next few years, including “The Benois Madonna” and “The Annunciation”. Then he proceeded to create a lyre in the shape of a horse’s head. Then he closed his workshop, and offered the lyre to the Duke of Milan to try and get a job as an engineer, which he received and was underpaid for. ** Engineer and Artist  ** His first jobs were to create a central heating and drainage system, which he excelled at, and to plan great parties, where he entertained the guests with odd mechanical devices, before going back to painting. Many years later, in 1495, he created a robotic knight that moved by strings and pulleys and was directed by a puppeteer, most likely Leonardo himself. Also in this year, his mother died, and he began his sketches for what is perhaps his best painting ever- The Last Supper. After several more artworks, he built one of his first flying machines, at the age of 43- some sort of hanglider. The flight was unsuccessful. Just a couple of years later, he completed “The Last Supper”, one of the greatest masterpieces of all time, before fleeing Milan in 1500 when the French army invaded and settled down again in Venice. Leonardo offered the Venetian councillors (the power lords of the city) his invention of an army that can walk on the seabed and drill holes under invading warships, at the time when the Turkish army was approaching. Afterward, the Turkish army turned away, and Leonardo wasn’t taken seriously