An outstanding Italian artist, scientist, engineer and anatomist, one of the prominent representatives of the art and science of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 in the village of Anchiano, near the town of Vinci.

In addition to world-famous paintings and sculptures, Leonardo left behind manuscripts in many areas of knowledge. He studied mathematics, hydromechanics, geology and physical geography, meteorology, chemistry, astronomy, botany, as well as human and animal anatomy and physiology.

Despite the fact that everyone knows some of Leonardo's masterpieces, such as La Gioconda, little-known facts of his life and work can be cited. For example, that Leonardo's mother was a simple peasant woman, he was educated at home, played the lyre masterfully, was the first to explain why the sky is blue and the moon is so bright, was ambidexterous and suffered from dyslexia.

1. Leonardo was born into the family of a wealthy notary and landowner Piero da Vinci, his mother was a simple peasant woman Katerina. He received a good education at home, but he lacked the systematic study of Greek and Latin.

2. He masterfully played the lyre. When Leonardo's case was considered in the court of Milan, he appeared there precisely as a musician, and not as an artist or inventor.

4. According to one theory, Mona Lisa smiles from the realization of her secret to all pregnancy.

5. According to another version, Gioconda was entertained by musicians and clowns while she posed for the artist.

6. There is another theory, according to which, "Mona Lisa" is a self-portrait of Leonardo.

7. Leonardo, apparently, did not leave a single self-portrait that could be unambiguously attributed to him. Scientists have doubted that Leonardo's famous self-portrait of sanguine (traditionally dated 1512-1515), depicting him in old age, is such. It is believed that perhaps this is just a study of the head of the apostle for the "Last Supper". Doubts that this is a self-portrait of the artist have been expressed since the 19th century, the last of which was recently expressed by one of the largest experts on Leonardo, Professor Pietro Marani.

8. Scientists from the University of Amsterdam and specialists from the United States, having studied the mysterious smile of the Gioconda with the help of a new computer program, unraveled its composition: according to them, it contains 83% happiness, 9% neglect, 6% fear and 2% anger.

9. Bill Gates bought the Codex Leicester, a collection of works by Leonardo da Vinci, for $30 million in 1994. It has been on display at the Seattle Museum of Art since 2003.

10. Leonardo loved the water: he developed instructions for scuba diving, invented and described the diving apparatus, the breathing apparatus for scuba diving. All the inventions of Leonardo formed the basis of modern underwater equipment.

11. Leonardo was the first to explain why the sky is blue. In the book "On Painting" he wrote: "The blue of the sky is due to the thickness of the illuminated particles of air, which is located between the Earth and the blackness above."

12. Observations of the moon in the phase of the growing crescent led Leonardo to one of the important scientific discoveries - the researcher found that sunlight is reflected from the Earth and returns to the moon in the form of secondary illumination.

13. Leonardo was ambidexterous - he was equally good at right and left hands. He suffered from dyslexia (impaired reading ability) - this ailment, called "word blindness", is associated with reduced brain activity in a certain area of ​​​​the left hemisphere. As you know, Leonardo wrote in a mirror way.

14. Recently, the Louvre spent $5.5 million to move the famous masterpiece of the artist "La Gioconda" from the general room to a hall specially equipped for it. Two-thirds of the State Hall, which occupies a total area of ​​840 square meters, was assigned to the Gioconda. The huge room was rebuilt as a gallery, on the far wall of which now hangs the famous creation of Leonardo. The reconstruction, which was carried out according to the project of the Peruvian architect Lorenzo Piqueras, lasted about four years.

The decision to relocate the Mona Lisa to a separate room was made by the administration of the Louvre due to the fact that in the same place, surrounded by other paintings by Italian painters, this masterpiece was lost, and the public had to queue to see the famous painting.

15. In August 2003, Leonardo da Vinci's $50 million painting "Madonna with a Spindle" was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland. The masterpiece disappeared from the home of one of Scotland's richest landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch. The FBI last November released a list of the 10 most notorious crimes in the field of art, including this robbery.

16. Leonardo left designs for a submarine, a propeller, a tank, a loom, a ball bearing, and flying machines.

17. In December 2000, the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas in South Africa descended from a height of 3 thousand meters from a balloon on a parachute made according to a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci. The Discover website writes about this fact.

18. Leonardo was the first painter to dismember corpses in order to understand the location and structure of muscles.

19. A big fan of word games, Leonardo left a long list of synonyms for the male penis in the Codex Arundel.

20. Being engaged in the construction of canals, Leonardo da Vinci made an observation that later entered geology under his name as a theoretical principle for recognizing the time of formation of the earth's layers. He came to the conclusion that the Earth is much older than the Bible believed.

Leonardo da Vinci was born in the town of Vinci (or near it), located west of Florence, on April 15, 1452. He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a peasant girl, was brought up in his father's house and, being the son of an educated person, received a thorough primary education.

1467 - at the age of 15, Leonardo went as an apprentice to one of the leading masters of the Early Renaissance in Florence, Andrea del Verrocchio; 1472 - joined the guild of artists, studied the basics of drawing and other necessary disciplines; 1476 - so he worked in the workshop of Verrocchio, apparently in collaboration with the master himself.

By 1480, Leonardo already had large orders, but after 2 years he moved to Milan. In a letter to the ruler of Milan, Lodovico Sforza, he presented himself as an engineer, military expert and artist. The years he spent in Milan were filled with various pursuits. Leonardo da Vinci painted several paintings and the famous fresco "The Last Supper" and began to diligently and seriously keep his notes. The Leonardo whom we recognize from his notes is a design architect (creator of innovative plans that were never carried out), an anatomist, a hydraulician, an inventor of mechanisms, a designer of scenery for court performances, a writer of riddles, puzzles and fables for the entertainment of the court, musician and art theorist.

1499 - after the expulsion of Lodovico Sforza from Milan by the French, Leonardo leaves for Venice, visits Mantua along the way, where he participates in the construction of defensive structures, then returns to Florence. In those days, he was so fascinated by mathematics that he did not want to think about picking up a brush. For 12 years, Leonardo constantly moved from city to city, working for the famous in Romagna, designing defensive structures (never built) for Piombino.

In Florence he enters into a rivalry with Michelangelo; this rivalry culminated in the huge battle compositions that the two artists painted for the Palazzo della Signoria (also Palazzo Vecchio). Then Leonardo conceived a second equestrian monument, which, like the first, was never created. Throughout all these years, he continues to fill out his notebooks. They reflect his ideas relating to a variety of subjects. This is the theory and practice of painting, anatomy, mathematics and even the flight of birds. 1513 - as in 1499, his patrons are expelled from Milan ...

Leonardo leaves for Rome, where he spends 3 years under the auspices of the Medici. Depressed and distressed by the lack of material for anatomical research, he engages in experiments that lead nowhere.

The kings of France, first Louis XII, then Francis I, admired the works of the Italian Renaissance, especially Leonardo's The Last Supper. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that in 1516 Francis I, well aware of the versatile talents of Leonardo, invites him to the court, which was then located in the Amboise castle in the Loire Valley. As the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini wrote, despite the fact that the Florentine worked on hydraulic projects and plans for a new royal palace, his main occupation was the honorary position of court sage and adviser.

Fascinated by the idea of ​​creating an aircraft, the Florentine initially developed the simplest apparatus (Dedalus and Icarus) based on wings. His new idea is an airplane with full control. But it was not possible to bring the idea to life due to the lack of a motor. Also, the famous idea of ​​​​the scientist is a device with vertical takeoff and landing.

Studying the laws of fluids and hydraulics in general, Leonardo made a great contribution to the theory of locks, sewer ports, testing ideas in practice.

Famous paintings by Leonardo - "La Gioconda", "Last Supper", "Madonna with an Ermine", and many others. Leonardo was demanding and precise in everything he did. Even before painting, he insisted on a complete study of the object before starting.

Leonardo's manuscripts are priceless. They were fully published only in the XIX-XX centuries. In his notes, Leonardo da Vinci noted not just reflections, but supplemented them with drawings, drawings, and descriptions.

Leonardo da Vinci was talented in many areas, he made a significant contribution to the history of architecture, art, and physics.

Leonardo da Vinci died in Amboise on May 2, 1519; his paintings by this time were usually distributed to private collections, and the notes lay in various collections, almost in complete oblivion, for several more centuries.

Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci encrypted a lot so that his ideas would be revealed gradually, as humanity could “ripen” to them. He wrote with his left hand and in very small letters, from right to left, so that the text looked as if in a mirror image. He spoke in riddles, made metaphorical prophecies, and liked to compose puzzles. Leonardo da Vinci did not sign his works, but they have identification marks. For example, if you take a closer look at the paintings, you can find a symbolic bird taking off. Apparently, there are a lot of such signs, therefore one or another of his hidden “brainchildren” is unexpectedly found on famous canvases, after centuries. So, for example, it was with the Benois Madonna, which for a long time, as a home icon, itinerant actors carried with them.

Leonard discovered the scattering principle (or sfumato). The objects on his canvases have no clear boundaries: everything, as in life, is blurry, penetrates one into another, which means it breathes, lives, awakens fantasy. To master this principle, he advised to practice: look at the stains on the walls that appear from dampness, ashes, clouds or dirt. He deliberately smoked the room where he worked in order to look for images in clubs.

Thanks to the sfumato effect, a flickering smile of the Gioconda appeared: depending on the focus of the gaze, it seems to the viewer that the Gioconda smiles either gently, or, as it were, ominously. The second miracle of the "Mona Lisa" is that she is "alive". Over the centuries, her smile changes, the corners of her lips rise higher. In the same way, the Master mixed the knowledge of various sciences, because his inventions find more and more applications over time. From the treatise on light and shadow come the beginnings of the sciences of penetrating power, oscillatory motion, and the propagation of waves. All of his 120 books have been distributed around the world and are gradually being revealed to mankind.

Leonardo da Vinci preferred the method of analogy to all others. Approximation of analogy is an advantage over the accuracy of a syllogism, when a third inevitably follows from two conclusions. But the more bizarre the analogy, the further the conclusions from it extend. Take, for example, the famous illustration of da Vinci, which proves the proportionality of the human body. A human figure with outstretched arms and spread legs fits into a circle, and with closed legs and raised arms - into a square. This "mill" gave impetus to various conclusions. Leonardo was the only one who created designs for churches in which the altar is placed in the middle (symbolizing the human navel), and the worshipers are evenly around. This church plan in the form of an octahedron served as another invention of genius - a ball bearing.

The Florentine liked to use contraposto, which creates the illusion of movement. Everyone who saw his sculpture of a giant horse in Corte Vecchio involuntarily changed their gait to a more relaxed one.

Leonardo was never in a hurry to finish a work, because unfinishedness is an essential quality of life. Finish means kill! The slowness of the Florentine was the talk of the town, he could make two or three strokes and retire for many days from the city, for example, to improve the valleys of Lombardy or was engaged in the creation of an apparatus for walking on water. Almost every one of his significant works is "work in progress". The master had a special composition, with the help of which he seemed to specially make “windows of incompleteness” on the finished painting. Apparently, in this way he left a place where life itself could intervene and correct something ...

He masterfully played the lyre. When the case of Leonardo was heard in the court of Milan, he appeared there precisely as a musician, and not as an artist or inventor.

There is a version that Leonardo da Vinci was a homosexual. When the artist was studying in Verrocchio's workshop, he was accused of harassing a boy who posed for him. The court acquitted him.

According to one version, Gioconda smiles from the realization of her secret for all pregnancy.

According to another, Mona Lisa is entertained by musicians and clowns while she posed for the artist.

There is another assumption, according to which, "Mona Lisa" is a self-portrait of Leonardo.

Leonardo da Vinci, apparently, did not leave a single self-portrait that could be unambiguously attributed to him. Experts doubt that Leonardo's famous sanguine self-portrait (traditionally dated 1512-1515), showing him in his old age, is such. It is believed that this is probably only a study of the head of the apostle for the "Last Supper". Doubts that this is a self-portrait of the artist began to be expressed in the 19th century, the last of which was recently expressed by one of the largest experts on Leonardo da Vinci, Professor Pietro Marani.

Scientists at the University of Amsterdam and American researchers, having studied the mysterious smile of Mona Lisa using a new computer program, unraveled its composition: according to them, it contains 83 percent happiness, 9 percent neglect, 6 percent fear and 2 percent anger.

Leonardo loved water: he developed instructions for scuba diving, he invented and described a device for scuba diving, a breathing apparatus for scuba diving. All the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci formed the basis of modern underwater equipment.

Leonardo was the first painter to dissect corpses in order to understand the location and structure of muscles.

Observations of the Moon in the phase of the growing crescent led the researcher to one of the important scientific discoveries - Leonardo da Vinci established that sunlight is reflected from our planet and returns to the moon in the form of secondary illumination.

The Florentine was ambidexterous - he was equally good with his right and left hands. He suffered from dyslexia (impaired reading ability) - this ailment, called "word blindness", is associated with reduced brain activity in a certain area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe left hemisphere. A well-known fact, Leonardo wrote in a mirror way.

Relatively recently, the Louvre spent 5.5 million dollars to outweigh the most famous masterpiece of the artist "La Gioconda" from the general room to a specially equipped room for it. Two thirds of the State Hall, which occupies a total area of ​​840 sq. m. The huge room was rebuilt as a gallery, on the far wall of which now hangs the famous creation of the great Leonardo. The reconstruction, which was carried out according to the project of the Peruvian architect Lorenzo Piqueras, lasted about 4 years. The decision to move the Mona Lisa to a separate room was made by the administration of the Louvre due to the fact that in the same place, surrounded by other paintings by Italian masters, this masterpiece was lost, and the public was forced to queue to see the famous painting.

2003, August - the canvas of the great Leonardo worth $ 50 million "Madonna with a spindle" was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland. The masterpiece was stolen from the home of one of Scotland's richest landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch.

It is believed that Leonardo was a vegetarian (Andrea Corsali, in a letter to Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici, compares him to a Hindu who did not eat meat). The phrase often attributed to Leonardo “If a person strives for freedom, why does he keep birds and animals in cages? .. man is truly the king of animals, because he cruelly exterminates them. We live by killing others. We are walking graveyards! Even at an early age I refused meat” is taken from the English translation of Dmitry Merezhkovsky’s novel “The Resurrected Gods. Leonardo da Vinci".

Leonardo da Vinci designed the submarine, the propeller, the tank, the loom, the ball bearing, and the flying machines.

Building canals, Leonardo made an observation that later entered geology under his name as a theoretical principle for recognizing the time of formation of the earth's layers. He came to the conclusion that our planet is much older than indicated in the Bible.

Among da Vinci's hobbies were even cooking and serving art. In Milan for thirteen years he was the manager of court feasts. He invented several culinary devices that facilitate the work of cooks. The original dish "from Leonardo" - thinly sliced ​​stew, with vegetables laid on top - was very popular at court feasts.

In the books of Terry Pratchett there is a character whose name is Leonard, the prototype of which was Leonardo da Vinci. Pratchett's Leonard writes from right to left, invents various machines, engages in alchemy, paints pictures (the most famous is the portrait of Mona Ogg)

A considerable number of Leonardo's manuscripts were first published by the curator of the Ambrosian Library, Carlo Amoretti.

Italian scientists have made a statement about the sensational discovery. According to them, discovered an early self-portrait of Leonardo. The discovery belongs to the journalist Piero Angela.

The circle of interests of Leonardo da Vinci was so diverse that he entered world history not only as a famous painter, but also as an excellent connoisseur of anatomy, an inquisitive engineer and inventor, and most importantly, an outstanding scientist, far ahead of the time in which he lived.

His biography is filled with bright and significant events, and the discoveries are still relevant, so let's turn to his life and tell interesting facts about Leonardo da Vinci.

Birth

Leonardo spent the first years of his life here.

Leonardo was born in the very middle of April 1452 in the small Italian village of Anchiano. His father is a wealthy notary, and his mother is a simple peasant woman named Katerina. Being illegitimate, he had no difficulty, since in Italy at that time there was no distinction between children born in the family and out of wedlock.

mother image

When the boy was 3 years old, his father left Leonardo's mother Caterina and married a rich woman. He took Leonardo with him. Separation from his mother left its mark on all subsequent work and life of an outstanding master. For the rest of his life, the artist tried to recreate the image of the mother in his works.

Musician talent

With the help of teachers, Leonardo easily mastered musical literacy, played the lyre superbly. It is interesting that when he appeared before the court in Milan, in court records he appears precisely as a musician.

Education

The father had enough money for Leonardo to receive an excellent education at home, but the boy lacked solid knowledge, especially in languages, Latin and Greek. In his youth, Leonardo more than made up for these gaps in education.

Circle of interests

It is difficult to outline the circle of interests of an enthusiastic person. In addition to painting, he selflessly engaged in mathematics, natural science, anatomy, and biology. Constantly conducted experiments, and tried to get to the bottom of the essence, questioning any knowledge of the past.

Rules of etiquette

Maybe the father, or maybe the stepmother, instilled in the boy the rules of etiquette, and Leonardo, among other virtues, skillfully mastered the art of serving.

The beginning of a career as a painter

One of the first independent works of the master was the painting of the painting "The Annunciation" around 1472. Even then, he began to use oil paints, which was an innovation for painting of that time.

The image of the Madonna

In 1478, Leonardo presented to everyone his own workshop, where there were many sketches of the image of the Madonna. It was in this way that he was fascinated all his life, but many canvases were never completed.

Mystery of the Mona Lisa

For many decades, scientists have been struggling with the mysterious smile of Mona Lisa. There is even a suggestion that she is pregnant, and this secret makes her smile so mysteriously.

Many agree that while posing, she was entertained by musicians and clowns, and Leonardo managed to capture that touching moment of admiration for the girl's skill of actors and musicians.

Modern technologies

The level of technological development in the 21st century helped Dutch scientists and their colleagues from the United States to unravel the composition of the popularity of the mysterious smile of the Mona Lisa. Using a special computer program, they found that she is 83% happy, 9% neglected, 6% testify that the woman is afraid of something, and the remaining 2% is anger.

self-portrait

There is also an opinion that Gioconda is not just a drawing of a beautiful woman, but a self-portrait of a master. Although it is doubtful that the famous anatomical drawing by Leonardo, presumably written between 1512-1515, is an image of a scientist and painter in old age.

Perhaps, and many scientists and bibliographers of the Italian agree on this, this is just a sketch of the head of the apostle for writing Leonardo's "Last Supper".

cartoons

In addition to serious canvases, the artist often painted comic cartoons exposing the vices and shortcomings of the then Italian society, and by itself became the founder of such a genre as caricature.

Water

Leonardo grew up and lived in Italy, so he loved the sea very much. Many of his researches and inventions are connected with the water element. Many of his developments formed the basis of modern types of equipment for underwater research.

The color of the sky

Many of us wonder why the sky is blue, but the Italian is the first person to explain this natural phenomenon in detail. You can read about this in his imperishable work "On Painting". It was his definition that later found its way into textbooks on natural history.

Heritage

The great Italian master left us in memory not only masterpieces of art, but also many inventions. Drawings of a self-propelled cart, a submarine, aircraft were found in his notes, he invented the bearing, the first design of an underwater breathing apparatus, and even designed a prototype tank.

Abilities and ailments

It is now that scientists have proven that creative people are equally proficient with both their right and left hands. So, Leonardo da Vinci was an ambidexter. At the same time, he had dyslexia. This disease, popularly called "verbal blindness", is associated with impaired reading.

Because of this, Leonardo made his notes mirrored, as there was reduced activity in a certain area of ​​​​the left hemisphere of the brain of an outstanding person.

Armament

Upon arrival in Milan in 1482, he wanted to enter the service of Lodovico Sforza to make weapons, but was refused. He wrote down all his ideas about weapons and sent them in letters to the king. He improved the mechanisms of existing guns and invented completely new types of weapons. For example, he was the first to come up with a machine gun model.

First order and trial

The artist received his first order for artistic painting of the altar in 1483, and worked on it for 3 years. But something else is interesting. After the execution of the order, litigation took place for 25 years, since Leonardo was not paid for the work.

Anatomy

The artist was the first among the great painters to dismember human bodies in order to study their structure. In addition, detailed descriptions of human organs and the structure of all muscles remained in his notes.

But we note that he dismembered the corpses not secretly, but had official permission from the authorities for this.

Rumors

Perhaps, for the sake of today's European values, rumors have recently spread that the great master was a homosexual. There is no direct evidence of this, but Leonardo was accused of harassing the boys who worked for him as models.

Needed Invention

We are already so accustomed to the things that surround us that we do not think about their origin. So, scissors, in their modern form, were designed by Leonardo da Vinci.

Vision

It is a well-known fact that at the end of his life his right hand was taken away, but perhaps Leonardo still had problems with his eyesight. Maybe that's why a drawing of a prototype contact lens appeared in his notes, which appeared only in the 20th century.

teacher

The great painter and scientist brought up many talented students. But besides this, he managed to generalize his pedagogical experience, and compiled some practical advice for the training of artists and sculptors.

arch bridges

The idea to build bridges with arches belongs to Leonardo da Vinci, and today such a design is a common thing in the construction of bridge structures.

Moon

Another hobby of the scientist was the heavenly bodies. Long observations of the Earth's satellite led him one day to the great discovery that the light from the Sun, falling on the earth's surface, is reflected from it, and returns to the Moon, highlighting it.

At the end of the year 200, the British extreme sports enthusiast Andrian Nicholas, while in South Africa, descended from a height of 3 thousand meters on a parachute design made according to the drawings of the great inventor. Note that Andrian did not jump from an airplane, but from a balloon. And as you know, it was according to Leonardo's notes that this aircraft was designed.

Linguistic ability

Leonardo da Vinci loved to play with words from a young age, and his Arundel Code notes contain a huge list of synonyms for the word penis.

Age of the Earth

During the development of the ideal city project, Leonardo took part in the construction of canals. It was this occupation that allowed him to determine the time of formation of the geological layers of the Earth. This principle entered geological science under his name, and the scientist himself stated that the age of Mother Earth is much older than the church teaches, citing data from the Bible as proof.

Lost Legacy

In the photo: The place where Leonardo da Vinci is buried

A great man, many centuries ahead of his time, died on May 2, 1519 in the castle of Clos Luce. Unfortunately, a large number of his creations and records have not been preserved, and only a small part of his masterpieces of painting and scientific notes have come down to us.

Memory

More than one generation of people sacredly keep the memory of this talented and purposeful person. At the Roman airport named after him, there is a giant sculpture of a scientist, and Leonardo holds a model helicopter in his hands.

Perhaps contemporaries call people like Leonardo "eccentrics", but without such eccentrics, many discoveries in various fields of human activity would simply be impossible.

The life of a purposeful and enthusiastic person is always full of many interesting events, and therefore the facts from his biography are enough for more than one book. We have tried to present the most interesting of them.

The great thinker, artist and inventor, whom our contemporaries know as Leonardo da Vinci, was born in the village of Anchiano, not far from the Italian city of Florence, in April 1452. Few people know that Leonardo da Vinci, whose life is widely covered in historical literature, was the illegitimate offspring of the notary Piero. His relationship with a young peasant woman was not legalized, and the boy spent the first years of his life with his mother. However, there were no children in the father's family, and the notary adopted (according to other sources, adopted) Leonardo.

At the same time, the “universal man” (Homo universalis) of the Renaissance did not have a surname, and the prefix “da Vinci” in his name, translated from the Florentine dialect of Italian, indicates that Leonardo comes from the city of Vinci, which today merged with Tuscany.

Little is known about the childhood of the great Italian, except that he did not receive a systematic education, but was educated at home. However, artistic talents showed up quite early.

The first artistic experiments of Leonardo

Information about the first artistic experiments of Leonardo da Vinci are semi-legendary, semi-real. One of the first biographers of Leonard, the Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari tells how the boy, who showed his artistic talents only in home drawing, was instructed to decorate a wooden shield. Leonardo, well acquainted with the myths of ancient Greece, decided to transform this item into the shield of Perseus. In order to make the head of the Gorgon Medusa look natural, mummified lizards, bats (bats) and snakes were used for decoration, as well as dried grasshoppers, caterpillars and beetles. The father, seeing the finished souvenir, was horrified and refused to give it to the customer, replacing it with another product decorated with ornaments. An indirect confirmation of this legend is the fact that Piero, the father of the young inventor, received one hundred Florentine ducats. According to legend, the "shield of Medusa" was given as a gift to the Medici family.

A reliable fact is the arrival in 1466 of a fourteen-year-old teenager as an assistant in the workshop of Verrocchio, where he acquired the initial technical skills, mastered the basics of painting and studied the humanities. After completing his studies, a twenty-year-old youth receives the qualification of a master and starts working in the Guild of St. Luke.

In 1472, the artist Andrea del Verrocchio was commissioned to paint The Baptism of Christ. Since Andrea was the owner of an art workshop, he entrusted the painting of minor characters and landscapes on this canvas to his students. Leonardo got the drawing of the head of one of the angels, and the master painted the second one himself. However, the work done by the young apprentice was so superior to the images of the artist himself that Andrea del Verrocchio never again took paint and brush in his hands.

After finishing work on The Baptism of Christ, Leonardo begins to work on the world-famous canvases The Annunciation and Madonna Benois (Madonna with a Flower).

Interesting facts from the life of the great master

The further life of Leonardo da Vinci is well researched, however, events little known to the general public also happened in it. Interesting facts about Leonardo da Vinci are partly speculation based on his lifestyle and the statements of the artist, but some of them are documented.

Some contemporaries condemned the artist for non-traditional sexual orientation, which later researchers of da Vinci's life and work rejected - talent cannot be combined with homosexuality. However, in 1476, the court of the Florentine Republic considered the case of sodomy, which flourished in the del Verrocchio workshop, among the defendants of which was the twenty-four-year-old Leonardo. All the defendants were acquitted, however, some researchers of his work see the artist's homosexual inclinations in some works.

According to the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci, it was established that he suffered or consciously acquired through training ambidexterity - the ability to write equally well with the right and left hand. Some doctors believe that the artist was left-handed, and learned to work fully with his right hand in his youth. This is evidenced by the better possession of the left hand. At the same time, “left-handed” texts are written from right to left, and they can only be read with the help of a mirror. Some researchers of the creative heritage of the great Italian believe that he did it deliberately, and “left-handed” writing is one of the encryption methods.

Despite the fact that Leonardo from a young age was vegetarian, he was fond of cooking according to his own recipes and serving feasts. This allowed him in the Milan period of his life to “earn extra money” as a manager and master of ceremonies at court feasts. Despite the refusal of meat food, the signature dish "from Leonardo", where thin pieces of meat were covered on top with a layer of stewed vegetables, was very popular with the nobility of Milan.

Despite the sociability of the artist, many friends and acquaintances, information about the personal life of Leonardo da Vinci is rather scarce and contradictory. He was neither married nor engaged. He was associated with Cecilia Gallerani Maria Sforza, the mistress of the Duke of Milan Lodovico. It is this woman that is depicted in the portrait by the great painter “Lady with an Ermine”. Some researchers, based on the memoirs of Giorgio Vasari, do not exclude the connection of the Italian master with the boys who were chosen by the artist to paint nudes.

In 1516, Leonardo da Vinci agrees to the proposal of the King of France, Francis I, to take the place of the first court painter. When signing the contract, Leonardo insisted that the phrase be added to the text that the court painter has "the freedom to dream, think and create." Unfortunately, the French period of the artist's life did not give the world any outstanding paintings or interesting inventions. Basically, he was engaged in organizing the work of court painters, and his creations include the project of a two-way spiral flight of stairs in the castle of Chambord.

Two years before his death, the great artist's right hand was paralyzed. Homo universalis died on May 2, 1519, having written a will ten days before his death. According to legend, on his deathbed on his last journey, he was escorted by the King of France, Francis I. This is briefly all about Leonardo da Vinci, from whose life more than one generation of biographers and researchers will study.