Leonardo da vinci biography essay contest 2017
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A new biography celebrates the great artist’s more scientific innovations.Illustration by Tamara Shopsin; engraving from Hulton Archive / Getty
In Renaissance Florence, a number of designated boxes placed throughout the city allowed citizens to make anonymous denunciations of various moral crimes—in 1461, for example, the artist-monk Filippo Lippi was accused of fathering a child with a nun. But the crime that the government was really trying to control was sodomy, so notoriously prevalent that contemporary German slang for a homosexual was Florenzer. The common nature of the offense did not erase the threat of serious consequences. In 1476, Leonardo da Vinci, on the verge of his twenty-fourth birthday, was named as one of four men who had practiced “such wickedness” with the seventeen-year-old apprentice of a local goldsmith. There is little doubt that Leonardo was arrested. Although any time he may have spent in jail was brief, and the case was dismissed, two months later, for lack of corroborating witnesses, he had plenty of time to ponder the possible legal punishments: a large fine, public humiliation, exile, burning at the stake. It is impossible to know if this experience affected the artist’s habit, later cited as a mark of his character, of buying caged birds f
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rochemamabolo
Leonardo da Vinci was a genius. But not a genius in the sense that he was a Master Artist, which he was, but in the sense that he was an engineer far more than an artist.
Leonardo viewed science as his foundation and the rest followed. He saw his scientific exploits as something that nourished his art.
According to him, without his thirst for science, his art would not be prominent.
He didn’t see himself as an artist.
Despite his remarkable artistic talent, Leonardo barely thought of himself as a painter. When he was about 30 years old, he applied for a job with the ruler of Milan. After listing interests from military engineering to science to designing sets for plays, he included almost as an afterthought, “I can also paint.”
Leonardo was an outlier, in many ways: illegitimate, vegetarian, flamboyant in dress [with a preference for pink], erratic in his work habits, astute self-promotor, self taught, no formal education, left-handed, gay, easily distracted, hardly finished his works, if he did finish them, he hardly published nor delivered his works.
Writing a biography of someone who lived in the 1400s with such clarity and detail has to be a very difficult, an almost impossible job, but Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Job, Albert Einst