Renaissance
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Italian High Renaissance painter.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is the defining figure of the High Renaissance and the age's fullest embodiment of the artist as universal intellect. Born near Vinci in Tuscany and trained in Florence in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, he spent his most productive years at the Milanese court of Ludovico Sforza before later periods in Florence, Rome, and finally France, where he died in the service of King Francis I. Painter, anatomist, engineer, and tireless observer, he left more pages of notebooks than finished paintings.
As a painter he is inseparable from two techniques he carried to their limit: sfumato, the smoke-like blending of tone 'without lines or borders' that gives the Mona Lisa its shifting expression, and a subtle chiaroscuro that lets a face emerge from thought itself. He absorbed the oil technique that had spread south from the Netherlands and rebuilt it around near-invisible glazes laid over years. His finished works are famously few — the Mona Lisa, the ruined Last Supper, the Lady with an Ermine — because for Leonardo the picture was, in his phrase, 'cosa mentale', a thing of the mind.
His notebooks, compiled after his death into the Treatise on Painting and later edited by scholars such as Jean Paul Richter, preserve his conviction that painting is a science of observation equal to poetry and superior to the other arts in its grasp of the visible world. The Vitruvian Man, his study of human proportion after the Roman architect Vitruvius, has become the emblem of that fusion of art and measurement.
The words the record keeps using: inquisitive, subtle, enigmatic, luminous, analytical, graceful, restless.
At a glance
- Lived 1452–1519
- Origin Italian (Florentine)
- Worked in Florence, Milan
- Era Renaissance
- Movements High Renaissance
- Mediums Fresco, Oil on panel
- Techniques Sfumato, Chiaroscuro, Linear perspective, Atmospheric perspective
Works in the archive
- Lady with an Ermine (Cecilia Gallerani), 1489 (Czartoryski Museum, Kraków)
A portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Leonardo's patron Ludovico Sforza, holding an ermine — an emblem of purity and a punning allusion to the duke, whom a Greek word for the animal evokes. The sitter turns… - Vitruvian Man, 1490 (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice)
A pen-and-ink study in which a male figure is inscribed simultaneously in a circle and a square, illustrating the proportions of the human body set out by the Roman architect Vitruvius. Leonardo's own mirror-script… - The Last Supper, 1495 (Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan)
Leonardo's monumental mural for the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, capturing the instant after Christ announces that one of the twelve will betray him. Because Leonardo painted it experimentally in tempera and… - Mona Lisa (La Gioconda), 1503 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
The most famous portrait in the world, of a Florentine woman generally identified as Lisa del Giocondo, worked and reworked by Leonardo over more than a decade. Its fame rests on the elusive expression of the mouth and…
What was said
Leonardo held that painting is 'cosa mentale' — a mental, intellectual pursuit and a science of observation — the equal of poetry rather than a mere manual craft.
He argued that the eye is the window of the soul and the noblest of the senses, and that the painter must grasp the causes of everything he sets down, painting from understanding rather than rote.
Leonardo instructed that lights and shadows should be blended without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke — the working principle behind his sfumato.
What would Leonardo make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Leonardo da Vinci", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Leonardo · Keep a life moment the way Leonardo would · Pictures made after Leonardo