Leonardo da Vinci – Biography

The Florentine period (1452-1482)

It is surprising to note how a substantial scarcity of reliable biographical data is available on Leonardo. Despite the enormous mass of manuscripts and drawings that remained a precious legacy, there are few attestations of this period, few letters, and very few drawings or paintings that are certainly dated. It is, therefore, impossible to reconstruct the years of his adolescence, and it is extremely difficult to retrace the early training stages. The natural son of the lawyer Pietro d’Antonio and a certain Caterina, Leonardo was born near Vinci on 15 April 1452. His mother, a peasant woman, had not bothered to marry the child’s father. Just in the year, Leonardo was born, his father married a 16-year-old woman of his class, and Caterina had to make do with a farmer’s husband. Caterina “handed over” little Leonardo to Piero and his new wife so that the boy grew up in the comforts of a semi-aristocratic family, even without maternal affection. In that environment of his childhood, he acquired a taste for fine clothing and an aversion to women. Near Vinci, he attended the neighborhood school, devoted himself passionately to mathematics, music, and drawing, and cheered up his father by singing and playing the lute.

In 1469 his father Pietro, who had become rich, bought many possessions, transported the family to Florence, married four wives, one after the other, and gave Leonardo seven brothers and sisters. Appointed notary of the Signoria of Florence, he moved to Tuscan with his family. Leonardo, then seventeen years old, entered Andrea Verrocchio’s workshop as an apprentice, where he remained for about eight years, first assimilating the fundamental conquests of the Florentine Renaissance, then borrowing from the master a more accentuated fluency in the composition, finally opposing, in harmony with his nature and inclination, the intellectual schematisms, the linearity and the harshness of forms characteristic of certain Florentine painting of the second half of the century. The whole world of culture knows the story told by Giorgio Vasari about the angel painted by Leonardo on the left side of Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ and the amazement of the master before the beauty of the figure, so much so that he abandoned painting to devote himself to sculpture. This abdication is probably only a post-mortem legend, given that Verrocchio composed other paintings afterward. Perhaps during that period of apprenticeship, Leonardo painted the Annunciation, which is now in the Louvre, where the angel is clumsy, and the Madonna has an attitude of surprise and fright. He could hardly have learned the pardon from Verrocchio. Leonardo in his master’s workshop at the age of twenty. In that year (1472), he was admitted to belonging to the Compagnia di San Luca, an association made up mainly of pharmacists, doctors, and artists, headquartered in the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Here Leonardo found the opportunity to study both internal and external anatomy.

It is generally very difficult to define the precise responsibility of the artist in the works that came out of Verrocchio’s workshop (given the typical organization of the work, which envisaged close collaboration between the students). In that case, there can be no doubt instead for the drawing representing a landscape of the Val d ‘Arno (located in the Cabinet of Drawings and Prints, Florence), Leonardo’s oldest dated work, based on an autograph annotation dated August 5, 1473. One year after enrollment in the guild of painters, the artist shows a new way of approaching nature: reality is as it appears to him; the atmosphere, no longer perfectly transparent, acts as a filter between sight and image, consequently changing the optical perception. The drawing, made by the twenty-one-year-old artist, already prefigures his interest, then cultivated and deepened throughout his life, in the phenomena of nature and his conception of art as a tool for investigating them.

Even the first “pictorial” essay traditionally assigned by critics to the young Leonardo fully confirms this inclination: the boyish face of the angel painted on the left of the table attributed to Verrocchio with the participation of the young Leonardo, representing the Baptism of Christ is modeled with an ‘extreme delicacy of chromatic nuances; the features seem to soften due to the effect of the light which softens the contours, but at the same time it gives life to the effects of very tender nuances in the rendering of the flesh and extreme lightness in the hair that flows fluffy. The Landscape in the background, echoing the valley of the Uffizi drawing on the Landscape of the Val d’Arno, is similarly enveloped in an atmospheric space that seems to want to blend in an impasto. Of shape, color, and light, the different elements of nature in a cosmic synthesis.

Still strongly linked to the teachings of Andrea Verrocchio is the polychrome Annunciation in the Uffizi, which still denotes the artist’s immaturity. If the overall setting of the scene refers to a compositional module already in use and reveals the weight of certain academic schemes, the extraordinary chromatic and luminous quality of the image, the meticulous attention to the elements of the world of nature, the extreme sensitivity with which the landscape beyond the fence is rendered, give the painting a peculiarity and charm that are already fully Leonardesque. Subsequent works show, to an increasingly marked extent, the progressive establishment in the artist’s mind of a conception of painting as an ideal expression of his scientific knowledge and the evolution of his style, therefore constantly following that of his thought.

A week before he turned twenty-four, Leonardo and three other young men were called before the assembled Florentine Signoria to answer for the accusation of having had homosexual relations. The investigation ended in nothing. On June 7, 1456, the accusation was repeated. The Assembly had Leonardo imprisoned for a short time, released him, acquitted him for lack of evidence, or probably enjoyed some powerful support. A year after the accusation, he was offered a studio in the Medici gardens, and he accepted. In 1478, the Signoria asked him to paint an altarpiece in the Chapel of San Bernardo in Palazzo Vecchio. It is unknown why he did not fulfill the task, which he took over from Ghirlandaio; Filippino Lippi finished the latter’s work.
Nonetheless, the Signoria gave him (and Botticelli) another assignment: painting the portrait of two men hanged for the Pazzi conspiracy against Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici. Leonardo was interested in everything. Every position and attitude of the human body, every expression on a face, young or old, the organs and movements of animals and plants, the swaying of the grain in the fields up to the flight of birds, the erosions and elevations of the mountains that occurred through various cycles, the currents of the waters and the expiration of the winds, the variations of the weather and the gradations of the atmosphere, the inexhaustible variety of the celestial bodies, all this appeared to him of boundless beauty. Constantly returning to these subjects never diminished the wonder and mystery they contained for him. He filled page after page with his observations of themselves and with drawings reproducing their varied forms.