FREE ESSAY ON LEONARDO DA VINCI

LEONARDO DA VINCI

Leonardo DA Vinci (1452-1519), Florentine artist, one of the great masters of high
Renaissance, celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His
profound love of knowledge and research was the keynote of both his scientific and
artistic endeavors. His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of
Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies,
particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics. He anticipated many of the
developments of modern science.
Leonardo was born in the small town of Vinci, in Tuscany, near Florence. He was the son
of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid- 1460s the family settled
in Florence, where Leonardo was given the best education that Italy could offered. He
rapidly advanced socially and intellectually. About 1466 he was the apprentice of Andrea
del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. In Verrocchio's
workshop Leonardo was introduced to painting and sculpture in marble and bronze. In 1472
he was entered in the painters guild of Florence, and in 1476 he was still considered
Verrocchios assistant. In 1478 Leonardo became an independent master. His first
commission, to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the plazzo vecchio, the Florentine
town hall, was never executed.
The period of Italian art in which Leonardo DA Vinci lived is called high Renaissance. In
the course of the fifteenth century a long chain of early Renaissance artists, mainly of
Florentine decent, had concentrated on a visual as well as theoretical conquest of
nature. Their work formed the basis for a great idealistic style, which began to emerge
from about 1490 onwards and was nearing its end at the time of Raphael?s death in 1520.
It was given fullest expression during the decade 1500 to 1510, and the names of
Leonardo, Michelangelou, Raphael, Bramante, Giorgone and Titian, round which legions of
minor stars of considerable brilliance revolve, indicate its climax. Modern interpreters
have excentially analyzed the truly classical qualities of this style which combine, like
Greek art of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, a spiritual and formal dignity, harmony
and equipoise never before or after equaled in the history of post-classical art. It is
easier to describe this phenomenon than to explained it. But while older writers regarded
it mainly and too simply as a revival of the pagan art of antiquity, more recent studies
have begun to throw light on the complexities of the style by investigating the
intentions of its creators. 
In this essay I am going to focus on some aspects of Leonardo?s life in order to analyze
the things that took him to invent and become one of the most famous artist in history.
This was the period in history known as the Renaissance, when after hundreds of
superstitions and slavery; finally appear the renovations of the study of the sciences.
Europe had abandoned the dark ages and the feudal system was left behind. New schools
were opened and the people were lefting the countryside in favor to the cities. For these
changes was why the beautiful Florence City was full of artists and merchandisers. 
The Renaissance penetrated Verrochio?s work shop, were the painting and the sculpture
were going hand by hand with the orfebry, the confection of delicated mechanical objects
and musical instruments, and were all ready existent works were repaired. The elemental
engineer was the basic part of an artist work. As an student of the work shop, Leonardo
acquire this magnificent abilities with the paint art and the sculpture, familiarizaising
with a wide range of tools like lifting, transporting and digging. Later on Leonardo
would use this knowledge like a starting point for his numerous ideas and inventions.
When he went to Milan that in that time was a city-state situated at the north of
Florence, was being threatened by their enemies and Leonardo wanted to put in practice
all his fantastic designs in benefit of the city. In a letter send to Francisco Sforza,
Milan governor, Leonardo offered him his abilities to construct canons, catapults, war
ships, digging tunnels under the enemy lines, grave drainages and methods for climbing
castle brick walls. As well as for defending Milan Leonardo also wanted to make that city
a pretty city such as Florence. 
It was the time in which he was living in that took him to invent all this fantastic
devices to give the society problems a solution. 
Leonardo was always busy in making plan sketching for military inventions, such as;
missiles, bombs, tanks and fortresses. He didn't had any opportunity to finish the mayor
parts of his ideas, but he was a big precursor in his time period. The tank, for example
wasn't use until the First World War, almost 450 years after Leonardo had designed his
armored vehicle.
When Leonardo died, he left more than 5000 pages of notes and drawings. He writed his
notes in a kind of inverted letter or secret maybe because he was protecting from the
church because in that time, the Renaissance was a period of full study, and the church
still had a lot of power. Most of the things Leonardo writed were against the church.
All this manuscripts reveal a man ahead of his time in every branch of science then
known. 
He always tried to develop marvelous inventions to give the society technical progress
and a more complete control over nature.
All his interest in a wide range of scientific and technical problems, the exceptional
quality of the sketches he drew to solve the society problems in that time. He achieved
all this by constant ignorance about what scientists and engineers accomplish before and
during his lifetime. This ignorance help leonardo?s bright intelligence think in things
that were very sophisticated in that time, but if we take a closer look into this
inventions and relate them with the machines we have today we would find out that they
are the same because they are design and constructed parting from the same basic
structure Leonardo designed 500 years ago.
Leonardo had a lot of interest in a lot of science branches in order to give a full
explanation of how the human body, animals, botany and engineering works and their
properties. He achieved all this by the precise and perfect observation of the nature
that surrounded him. This observation can be found out in Leonardo?s paintings that shows
a full knowledge of arquitecture engineering. The paintings for Leonardo were an artistic
and scientific exercise.
Another thing that interested a lot to Leonardo was the capability to fly. His notebook
about the bird's flight, is a full study about bats and birds.
Leonardo dedicated a long time trying to invent a way in which the humans could fly like
birds. All his designs failed because they had undulated wings and not rigid ones that
characterized the modern airplane, and also because they lacked some modern motive force,
but his drawings show that Leonardo had thinked the right way, and if he had just put a
little more effort maybe he would be able to put someone in the sky. 
In conclusion we can say that the Renaissance was a period in which men only started to
find out and re-find out the world that surrounded them. There were artists, musicians,
scientifics, arquitecs, mathematicians, engineers, inventors and philosophers, but only
Leonardo DA Vinci was all of them in one person. 
This period was the full ideology that took Leonardo to invent, because in that moment
everybody was thinking in developing things which give a hand to men over nature.
Also we can say that maybe Leonardo was a clairvoyant that view things centuries ahead of
his time, that formed an accurate picture of what the twentieth century city would look
like and anticipated such things as textile manufacturing, the harnessing of waterways
and steam, and modern warfare complete with machine guns, assault tanks, submarines, and
flying machines. All this turned Leonardo into the most astonishing precursor and most
prolific inventor of all time.