Leonardo da Vinci was born 550 years ago and was an important exponent of the Italian Renaissance. There are many unexamined aspects of his life.
In Becoming Da Vinci, author Mike Rankford fills in these gaps with a lot of reasonable imagination, and that's what sets this book apart from other da Vinci biographies. My favorite part of the book is also the speculative part of da Vinci's life, which goes into history without being too arbitrary. In the author's pen, Da Vinci was a genius who dared to think and do nothing.
In the days when Leonardo da Vinci lived, people's lives were still very obscure. The mirror they used would not be invented until 100 years later, and Newton would not discover gravity until 200 years later. The average life expectancy of people is forty years, and most people don't even have the concept of time. They don't understand or care about the times they are in. All inventions are rare, people rarely see art, and superb art will bring them great impact. In this way, leonardo da Vinci came to the forefront of the times.
On 15 April 1452, Leonardo da Vinci was born in an Italian town called "Vinci", under the florentine republic of the Medici family. His father, Serrei Piero, was a legal notary, and his mother, Katrina, was a peasant woman, and he was an illegitimate child.
His father worked as a notary in Florence, and leonardo da Vinci grew up with his grandparents, and his uncle also gave him great influence, and his uncle gave his inheritance to Leonardo da Vinci. As a child, leonardo da Vinci was full of curiosity about the world, which can also be called naughty. He once fell off a rock, nearly drowned in a stream, and was kicked by a mule into the weeds 6 meters away.
Leonardo da Vinci was a left-handed man who had learned to write the Tuscan dialect from the right to the point where he could not only write in the opposite direction, but also in a mirror, and his words could only be read normally through a mirror. He kept a diary every day. The text on the diary is mirrored and written backwards, and all his notebooks are written from the last page forward. According to experts, this way of writing backwards proves that he has severe dyslexia.
At the age of 15, due to the death of his grandfather and stepmother, his father Piero took him to Florence, and his childhood ended.
Leonardo da Vinci became an apprentice to the painter André del Verrocchio. During this time, there is a story about the shield: a sharecropper near Finch had a small round shield of wood and wanted to find a Florentine artist to decorate it for him. He found Da Vinci's father, Piero, who gave the task to Da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci spent months spelling out a very ugly and terrifying monster pattern with all kinds of strange animals, and the picture was bizarre and looked chilling. Piero greatly appreciated da Vinci's brilliant ideas. He bought a new small shield for the countryman, and then sold the shield drawn by Da Vinci to a merchant for 100 ducats. The merchant sold it to the Duke of Milan for 300 ducats.
Within five years, da Vinci's painting skills had matured, and in 1472 he became a member of the Florentine Painters' Guild. Out of caution, da Vinci did not immediately open his own studio or publish his early works. Before he was 30 years old, only a few paintings and a few sketches survived.
Ginevera de Banchi, Collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C
Guinevera de Banchi is the first portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, in which the perfect control of the foreground and background is shown, and if you look closely, you will find that there is tulle in the clothes and a gap of about one centimeter with the clasp on the chest, which is the artistic superiority of Leonardo da Vinci. Since then, he has developed his own style.
In 1478, he moved out of Verrocchio's studio and set himself up. For the next 4 years, leonardo da Vinci achieved little.
Our Lady of the Rocks, 1483-1486, collection of the Louvre, Paris, France
When Leonardo da Vinci was 30 years old, he came to Milan. His first official commission there was an altarpiece, The Virgin of the Rocks. In 1483 he completed the painting, which was very peculiar, unique, and beautiful, but not at all what the client wanted. The monks refused to accept the painting and stopped paying the fee. During this time, he was actually working odd jobs for the Duke of Ludovico, while looking for possible directions other than painting. During this time he drew many wonderful designs of machines and weapons, dissecting many strange animals that he could find.
The Woman with the Silver Sable on board oil painting 54.8 × width 40.3 cm from the collection of the Krakochatsky Museum
When leonardo da Vinci was between the ages of 33 and 37, he painted a strange and wonderful oil painting, The Woman with the Silver Sable, which featured the mistress of the Duke of Ludovico. This is an unquestionable masterpiece. You can see the woman's eyes in the painting turning, and you can see the strength of the fingers. Leonardo da Vinci gave the woman's beauty immortality. At the same time, he also accepted the task of making a bronze statue for the Duke's father, but after ten years, the bronze statue was not completed. At this time, he left behind a large number of manuscripts, including the famous work on the proportions of the human body, the Vitruvius Man.
At the age of 40, leonardo da Vinci remained an obscure court craftsman. He often had some whimsical ideas, most of the time unrelated to art. "Success" was still out of his favor at this point.
At the age of 43, the Duke of Ludovico commissioned him to paint a large fresco, The Last Supper. Moisture on the walls was the biggest obstacle, and leonardo da Vinci created a pigment called "oily tempera" that took 4 years to complete. The Last Supper was an unprecedented success, and the work became a favorite of the public.
Madame Philoniere, 1490-1496, oil on canvas, collection of the Louvre, Paris
At the same time, Leonardo da Vinci painted a portrait of another lover of Ludovico, Madame Feronier, demonstrating his skill in depicting intricate costumes and mysterious expressions.
On 2 September 1499, Ludovico escaped from Milan. On 6 October, King Louis XII of France led an army into the city. He saw the mural "The Last Supper" and liked it so much that he was going to peel it off or dig the wall out. But being told that doing so would destroy the painting. The angry king had to leave the painting in place.
Aerial view of the city of Imola
At the end of December of that year, at the age of 48, Leonardo da Vinci left Milan with his apprentices and close friends, who passed through Venice and returned to Florence in April 1500. At this time, he began working for Caesar Borgia as a military construction engineer. He had drawn a bird's-eye view of Imola's city, which was so close to the GPS map we commonly use on our phones today, it's hard to imagine how Da Vinci came up 500 years ago.
Da Vinci followed Caesar through several massacres. He finally couldn't stand it, and in 1503 he left Caesar's forces and returned to Rome. From this point on, he stopped cutting his hair and became a vegetarian. Soon he was back in Florence. Beginning in 1504, he created the mural The Battle of Anguiari, but this painting realistically depicts the scene of the battle. Leonardo da Vinci lived through war, and war disgusted him. The mural was ultimately unfinished.
The Battle of Angeli, a parody of Peter Paul Rubens
In 1506, at the age of 54, leonardo da Vinci wanted to leave Florence for Milan, in order to complete the original "Madonna of the Rocks", because of this painting, he and his brother had a payment dispute. The consul Sodelini initially did not allow him to leave Florence because his frescoes were not yet complete. After paying 150 ducats, in May of that year, he arrived in Milan. He lived there for a year and completed Madonna ii.
The difference between the two "Madonna of the Rocks" is not very big, and people still can't understand why Da Vinci can go to Milan to complete "Our Lady of the Rocks", but he can't finish the war scenes in the frescoes, and perhaps even Da Vinci himself can't say clearly.
Our Lady of the Rocks II, 1495-1508, Collection of the National Gallery, London
During his time in Milan, leonardo da Vinci also squeezed out time to paint a painting of the Madonna by the Spinning Wheel. The painting caused a great sensation in France. Although the cliffs in the background feel threatening, this makes the face of the Virgin in the painting more holy, and the love of mother and child seems to be within reach.
In April 1507, da Vinci designed the welcome ceremony for King Louis XII of France, and his musical Orfeo was staged. Leonardo da Vinci designed what seemed to be the ultimate "special effect" at the time. All this shows how well Leonardo da Vinci was in Milan and how much he wanted to stay in Milan.
Our Lady by the Spinning Wheel
In 1507, his previous years of efforts paid off, but not artistically. The Duke of Ludovico gave him a vineyard as his original salary, while the King of France gave him the canal's "right to water" (taxation). He settled the flounderine affairs and stayed in Milan. While in Florence, idle, he dissected corpses in the basement of a hospital.
In 1502, while leonardo da Vinci was still in Florence, he began painting the Mona Lisa, which he was still modifying until 1508. In fact, there are at least three more versions of the painting. After leonardo da Vinci was 56 years old, he began to plan later works such as "The Savior" and "St. John the Baptist". In addition to painting, he continued to design other things he was interested in, such as water clocks, automatic timers, etc. He studied astronomy, geography, hydraulics, etc.
At the University of Pavia, da Vinci conducted research with Professor of Anatomy Torre. He drew on his notes a large number of exquisite anatomy of human organs. Later, Torre died of the plague, and the notes of leonardo da Vinci were locked in boxes and never published. Thirty years later, the Belgian Vesalius published his own anatomical illustration The Structure of the Human Body, ushering in modern medicine.
Portraits painted in red chalk, painted between circa 1512 and 1515, are widely regarded as the original Leonardo da Vinci self-portraits
In 1513, Da Vinci was 61 years old. He lived on the estate and painted the famous self-portrait in red pencil chalk, and the Mona Lisa wasn't finished yet. In that year, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I invaded northern Italy and drove the French out of Milan. He was invited by Giuliano de' Medici to Rome. However, he had nothing to do in Rome.
In 1516, at the age of 64, Giuliano died, and he followed the advice of King François I of France and set out for Amboise, France. Three years later, at the age of 67, he died here, and he carried the Mona Lisa with him, and he never painted her eyebrows. By this time, Magellan's fleet had just set sail.
"The Savior," sold for $450 million in 2017, setting a record for the highest auction price for a single work of art.
Now, in terms of the price of his work, Leonardo da Vinci is undoubtedly the most accomplished artist in the world, and there is no one. Leonardo da Vinci's paintings are rare and valuable. On November 15, 2017, "The Savior" was sold for $450 million, including fees, equivalent to $475.4 million today. The buyer was the Abu Dhabi Culture and Tourism Authority, and the actual buyer was Saudi Prince Farhan. It is the highest-priced work of art ever auctioned and the only private collection of da Vinci's work. The most valuable work in the world is the Mona Lisa, which has not been auctioned for a long time and has become a truly priceless treasure, which is currently in the Collection of the Louvre in France.
Da Vinci took a long time to complete each work, so long that it could last for several years, not counting a number of works that were not finalized. Leonardo da Vinci was a very self-aware man who always wanted to go his own way. We say that Leonardo da Vinci is a genius, and there are so many things about Leonardo da Vinci that are difficult for us to understand and even more unable to enter his heart. When Da Vinci examines his self-portraits, when da Vinci gazes at the Mona Lisa, perhaps he sees a strange world, a world that ordinary people can't see.
Mike Rankford, the author of this book, uses "Becoming Da Vinci" to tell the reader that there is only one Da Vinci in the world, and only Da Vinci can become Da Vinci.