Leonardo da Vonci

Leonardo da Vinci

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2007

Leonardo da Vinci was not only the greatest artist of his time , but may be considered also the best symbol of its scientific aspirations . No other man ever combined the artistic and scientific ideals as intimately as did Leonardo . Besides , Leonardo was not a humanist , but a craftsman The rare excellence of his accomplishments was due primarily to his genius , but it was due also to his innocence . He never knew much Latin and in Verrocchio 's bottega his mind was not

smothered with pseudo-knowledge and empty phrases but was left free to develop along its own bent

Leonardo da Vinci was regarded , even by his contemporaries , as an astonishing virtuoso , and to the men of the sixteenth century he seemed to have been the last of the primitives , or the first of the generation active around 1500 which they regarded as the culmination of the whole process of the Renaissance . Frequently Leonardo , Raphael , and Michelangelo are taken together in these terms , but it is important to remember that Leonardo was born in 1452 and was therefore at work long before the others , who are usually thought of as his contemporaries . The only real parallel is with Bramante , who was slightly older and whose friendship with Leonardo in Milan in the 1480s and 1490s was probably decisive for many aspects of Milanese art around 1500 . Leonardo has always been famous because of the fantastic range of his genius he was not only one of the greatest artists in an age of great artists , but he was probably the best anatomist in the world and a natural scientist almost without a peer in many branches of knowledge such as botany geology , and even the beginnings of aeronautics . Nevertheless , his thousands of notes and drawings on these and other subjects have only been rediscovered and evaluated comparatively recently , and to many of his contemporaries Leonardo must have seemed a strange man who wasted his time on extravagant projects that never came to anything . There are barely some fifteen pictures by him , and some of these are damaged beyond repair . He began life as a perfectly traditional apprentice in the shop of the painter and sculptor Verrocchio , and the first account of his precocious genius is that he painted the left-hand angel in the Baptism by Verrocchio , and that as a result Verrocchio swore that he would give up painting . It is certainly true that Verrocchio did concentrate on sculpture from this time on , and that the picture of the Baptism is clearly executed by two very different hands , and even then not entirely finished it is therefore reasonable to assume that Verrocchio decided to employ Leonardo as the principal painter in the firm . It is not certain when this took place , but Leonardo became a Master in the Guild of Painters in 1472 and was living in Verrocchio 's house in 1476 when an anonymous accusation of homosexuality was made against him . The accusation...