Leonardo Da Vinci was born in 1452 in a Tuscan village, and died in 1519. Da Vinci’s father was convinced his young son would be a great artist, and he sought an apprenticeship for him with the influential artist, Andrea Del Verrocchio. Beginning as a teenager, Da Vinci studied under Del Verrocchio, along with other young artists, for more than a decade. Del Verrocchio insisted his students study anatomy, which would allow Leonardo to develop a strong foundation for his future works.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s talents are a supreme example of what can be achieved when the right and left hemispheres of the brain are balanced and integrated. Da Vinci was a highly creative artist, but also a very logical and precise engineer and scientist.
The Mona Lisa is both a beautiful work of art, showcasing Da Vinci’s skill with paint and his artistic eye, and also an almost perfectly realistic study of human physiology and technical detail. While some artists are lucky to arrive at amazing works by the sheer inspiration of their skill as an artist, Da Vinci had both this inspiration and a meticulous brain for planning the mathematical details and proportions of his works. The results are deeply moving works where even the extra details, such as the landscape in the background of the Mona Lisa, add their weight to the painting as a whole.Painting techniques
Leonardo Da Vinci is well known for the technique of sfumato, which is a method of laying down paint in layers of glaze, interpreting the light and shadows the painter sees (known as chiaroscuro), rather than using lines to portray edges. This gives the impression that the subject continues beyond what can be seen. Leonardo learnt his skills through many hours of studying light falling on different objects in the studio, and making copious notes about his observations and perceptions.
The sfumato technique is easy to see in the Mona Lisa, which has been “sculpted” in tones of darker and lighter colours, even around her eyes where many painters might use a line to suggest the eyelid against the eyeball. Instead, Da Vinci suggests flesh that is three-dimensional in appearance, and leaves us wondering whether the Mona Lisa can move her life-like eyes and mouth when we’re not looking.
Scientific and engineering designs
Although Leonardo preferred painting to sculpture, he owed many of his engineering designs to the basic challenges of sculpting he learnt in Del Verrocchio’s studio, in particular moving and piecing together large works. Many of Leonardo’s designs were commissions for stage props and mechanisms for plays performed at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza in Milan.
Codices
Historians estimate that Leonardo wrote almost twenty thousand pages of notes on everything from scientific commentary, vocabulary, geology, botany, and anatomy, to his ideas on art and the artist. He believed, as an artist, he should be able to capture a tiny slice of creation, and therefore had to understand intimately each part of what he included in a painting. He became fixated on studying the tendons of the human arm so that he could understand its range of movement and his interpretation of it in an artwork.
Unfortunately, Leonardo’s endless requirement for perfect knowledge of every facet of his subject stifled many of his later attempts to paint, because he believed he would expose his lack of knowledge. The result of his obsession with knowledge is that he created only about twenty paintings, and failed to complete many of his ambitious commissions.
If Leonardo Da Vinci’s artwork inspires you to try his techniques for yourself, you'll benefit from Draw Like Da Vinci - Masterclass by Susan Dorothea White and Leonardo Da Vinci : The Complete Paintings by Pietro C. Marani.
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