Leonardo da Vinci
From Philosopedia
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
The consummate Renaissance genius, the “love child of a peasant girl named Caterina and the respected notary Piero da Vinci, Leonardo was an architect, engineer, painter, musician, and sculptor.
No longer painting the ideal human being as an ascetic monk, he as well as Michelangelo constructed the universal man who enjoyed life and reveled in existence. As such he represents one of the greatest humanistic minds of all time. J. M. Robertson points out that Leonardo’s passion for knowledge “is not Christian and that his reiterated rejection of the principle of authority in science and in literature tells of a spirit which, howsoever it might practise reticence, cannot have been inwardly docile to either priesthood or tradition.”
In addition to Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, Leonardo painted exquisite examples of the human form. Like the spirit of the Renaissance itself, Kenneth MacLeish has written, “the mind of this man destined to become its living symbol was fashioned in the quickening spring of the Western world’s awakening from the shriveling darkness of the Middle Ages. He was free, as few human beings have ever been free, to become whatever his gifts might make of him. . . . A gracious person, pleasing if not loving, a singer, versifier, maker of marvelous illusions, he was both performer and showman. He devised puzzles and games, and jokes that made people ‘roar with laughter.’ He won the friendship of dukes and kings. Admirers called him ‘the Divine Leonardo’ and said he could do anything.”
Born a Tuscan, he left for Milan at the age of thirty and subsequently wandered to Florence and Rome before dying an expatriate in France. But many facts concerning his life are sketchy, and it was left to the 16th-century critic Giorgio Vasari to invent much of what currently is known about his life. Vasari, for example, described Leonardo as a paragon of physical and spiritual beauty, a man who bought caged birds for the sole purpose of setting them free. Vasari wrote that Leonardo died in the arms of King Francis I of France. Whether Vasari was objective or not, it is known that Leonardo was once imprisoned for two months, with four other Florentines (for sodomy with a seventeen-year-old boy). Also, Leonardo described his apprentice, Andrea Salaino [Salai], as “a thieving, lying glutton,” a lovely lad with curly blond hair and the disposition of a weasel. Leonardo and Salaino remained inseparable for twenty-five years. In his will, Leonardo left Salai, now a fat and coarsened grown-up, a bequest as well as a dowry for Salai’s sister.
Leonardo’s book, Treatise on Painting (1651), reveals him to have been an artist and scientist united in one personality.
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