Italian renaissance artist, inventor, engineer, sculptor and painter, he was truly a universal genius. He invented engines of war and built bridges and chariots as an engineer in the science of artillery and sieges. Leonardo experimented in oft-repeated attempts to build an airplane. He left examples of his talents as a scientist, architect, musician, mathematician, teacher and businessman. He designed sewers and palaces, built stables and chapels, dug latrines and raised fountains, dissected corpses and painted angels, identified ten different varieties of noses in profile and envisioned a utopian bordello. In his “Notebooks,” he drew cartoonist prototypes of not only the airplane but the submarine, helicopter, machine gun and tank. As a sculptor and painter, he was unparalleled in his brilliance. Though he rarely finished a work of art, his work embodied beauty, grace and might.
The son of a wealthy notary and a peasant mother, he was stigmatized by his illegitimate birth. As a teenager, he joined his dad in Florence but his status as a bastard barred him from joining guilds that would have led him into a conventional career. The Renaissance had begun, fueled by a new merchant class anxious to patronize the arts, as well as a desire to repair the damage from centuries of war and the decimation of the plague. Leonardo was apprenticed as a studio boy to the painter Verrocchio, who was a leading metal smith, painter and sculptor in Florence. There Leonardo became familiar with the production of religious and more secular paintings as well as sculpture. In 1472, he joined the painter’s guild of Florence, and by age 26 he had become an independent master. A homosexual, he was charged with sodomy on April 9, 1476 OS in Florence. The humiliation of this public denouncement was a factor in his decision to leave Florence, beginning his celebrated career shuttling back and forth between various eminent patrons. In 1482, he earned the attention of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, when he wrote that he could build portable bridges and bombardments, make cannons and other war machines of the day, build ships, and sculpt using a variety of materials. In the Duke’s service, he became a principal engineer and architect for many of the Duke’s military operations and, in 1502, after the Sforzas were driven out of Milan, Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia as his chief architect and engineer, overseeing work on the fortresses of the papal territories in central Italy. In 1503, he was one of a commission of artists to choose the proper location for the magnificent statue by Michelangelo, simply entitled “David.” These were some of his glorious years when he painted his “Mona Lisa.” In 1507 he was named court painter to King Louis XII of France, then residing in Milan, and over the next six years, Leonardo traveled frequently between Milan and Florence, continuing his engineering projects. In 1509 became associated with mathematician Luca Pacioli in proving the Divine Proportion. From 1514 to 1516, Leonardo lived in Rome in service to Pope Leo X, conducting many scientific experiments. In 1516, he journeyed to France where, for the rest of his life, he remained in the service of King Francis I.
With his boundless curiosity, Leonardo anticipated many discoveries of modern times and was responsible for innovations in geology, meteorology and hydraulics. He left a number of homoerotic drawings and surrounded himself with a seraglio of androgynous protégés. It has been said that Leonardo encoded his paintings with symbols of his heretical beliefs and that one of the reasons so few paintings remain is that he destroyed them or did not complete them for fear that his heresy would be uncovered. With his reputation as a trickster, the famous Shroud of Turin has been sometimes attributed to his hand. All in all, he produced a relatively small number of paintings, among them such masterpieces as “The Last Supper,” a mural now in a Milan monastery, “The Adoration of the Magi,” unfinished, in the Uffizi Museum in Florence, and “The Mona Lisa,” the enigmatic portrait hanging in the Louvre in Paris. The great genius died on 2 May 1519 OS at age 67 in Castle Cloux, France.
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