Leonardo da Vinci – The Renaissance Man

In 1466 Leonardo’s father apprenticed him to Verocchio, the most talented Florentine artist of his day. The workshop produced altarpieces and religious paintings as well as large bronze and marble sculptures. Leonardo started by mixing colors, but Verocchio soon realized that his apprentice possessed extraordinary talents and let him paint an angel in one of his works. Legend has it that Verocchio, realizing that Leonardo’s angel was so much better than anything he painted, never painted again. 

By 1478 Leonardo had set up his own studio. A Florentine monastery commissioned him to paint The Adoration of the Magi, which he never finished because in 1482 he offered his services to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. Leonardo worked for the Duke not as an artist, but as an engineer. He built portable bridges, cannons, catapults and other war machines. Some of his inventions, like a sketch for a tank, would only be produced in our time. He recorded all of his ideas in notebooks which today are in the world’s most important museums. He also prepared pageants for special occasions, and built a model for an enormous equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, Ludovico’s father, which was destroyed by the French when they reoccupied Milan in 1498.

The most important of Leonardo’s paintings from this period were The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper, a mural painted on the walls of a monastery outside Milan. Unfortunately, Leonardo’s love of experiment sometimes produced disastrous results and the technique he used on this mural led to the paint flaking off barely 20 years after it was completed, making it the subject of unending restoration attempts.

When the French overthrew Duke Ludovico and invaded Milan in 1498, Leonardo fled for Venice with his assistant, Il Salaino.

In 1502 Leonardo returned to Florence and went to work for the infamous Duke Cesare Borgia as his chief engineer and architect. It is during this period that Leonardo met Caterina Sforza, widely speculated to have been the model for his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. Leonardo took the painting with him on all his journeys and it stayed with him till the end of his life. In his will, he bequeathed the painting to his assistant.

Leonardo returned to Milan in 1506, and in 1507 was appointed court painter to the King of France. He left Milan for Rome in 1514 and in 1516 he went to work for King François I at the Court of France in Amboise. In France, Leonardo worked on hydrological studies.

François I loved and admired Leonardo, and gave him a manor house next to the royal residence at the Chateau d’Amboise and a generous pension. Leonardo lived in France for three years and died there on May 2, 1519. It is said that King François I held Leonardo’s head as he was dying and some twenty years later was quoted as saying: ‘No man ever lived who had learned as much about sculpture, painting, and architecture, but still more than that, he was a very great philosopher.’

You can find a wide collection of Leonardo da Vinci paint by number patterns at the Segmation web site.  These patterns may be viewed, painted, and printed using SegPlay™PC a fun, computerized paint-by-numbers program for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

About the Author

Mark Feldman is President of
SegTech, a company devoted to a wonderful Image Segmentation technology called Segmation.

Segmation – The Art of Pieceful Imaging

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