Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci, properly named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, was born on April 15, 1452, and died on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67.

When it comes to Leonardo da Vinci, the first thing that comes to mind is Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and Salvator Mundi, so people may think that Da Vinci was a painter or an artist. More than that, he was an inventor, medical scientist, biologist, geographer, sculptor, mathematician, philosopher, allegorist, musician, anatomist, geologist, botanist, writer, construction engineer, and military engineer.

He was known as the perfect representative of the Renaissance. Even today, there is no giant like him. He was an all-around genius unparalleled in human history.

Unfortunate Childhood and Young Fame

On April 15, 1452, Leonardo da Vinci was born in a small town called Vinci in Italy. His life was very rough. His mother was a peasant woman, and his father was a notary, but when Da Vinci was born, his parents were not married, which means that he was actually an illegitimate child. As a result, Da Vinci did not really have a surname, but rather the town of his birth, and his name means Leonardo of the town of Vinci.

Shortly after his birth, his father married a noble girl, and he followed his mother to live in the countryside. The illegitimate status also left the young Da Vinci without many playmates. However, life in the countryside was not monotonous, and he was very diligent and curious. He loved to catch birds and insects in nature and study them all the time. The flowers and plants on the roadside, the butterflies and dragonflies in the fields, all kinds of small insects, puppies raised at home, and the neighbor's horses all became Da Vinci's partners. When he was bored, he studied the rocks on the roadside, and at the age of five, his biological mother married another man, and he returned to his father, but he could not get rid of the title of an illegitimate son. His father was very busy with his work, so Da Vinci's stepmother was responsible for Da Vinci's care.

Da Vinci showed outstanding talent since he was a child. At the age of 5, Da Vinci was able to draw his mother's portrait on the beach from memory, and at the same time, he was able to write and compose music on the spot, singing to his own accompaniment.

At the age of 14, at his father's request, Da Vinci was apprenticed to the studio of the very famous Florentine master Andrea del Verrocchio, who was not only a painter and musician but also a master of goldsmithing, perspective, sculpture and wood carving. All of these gave Da Vinci a great influence. At the same time, there were frequent meetings of Italian humanists in the studio to discuss academic issues. 

In The Baptism of Jesus, created by 20-year-old Da Vinci with his teacher and his peers, only the angel in the lower-left corner has three-dimensional and lustrous eyes, far surpassing the figures depicted by his teacher and peers.

His earliest extant work, Annunciation, is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Although the composition of this painting was not innovative, the depiction of the background landscape was already attentive to the expression of an airy atmosphere.

A later work, Ginevra de' Benci (c. 1475), is housed in the National Gallery of Art and also departs from the tradition of 15th-century art's pursuit of clear lines by rendering his advocated perspective in backlit, sunset tones.

His Heyday in Painting

In 1482, Da Vinci moved to Milan at the invitation of the Duke of Milan. While working for the Duke, Da Vinci was assigned to do many chores in the castle, such as organizing banquets. During this time, he invented many incredible machines of his time in mechanical design. For example, he invented excavators, theater lighting, underwater breathing apparatus, giant bulls, multi-barrel machine guns, and so on. It seems that his previous painting skills had instead become his tools on the road to invention and design. In Milan, Da Vinci was invited by the church of San Francesco to paint the altarpiece Virgin of the Rocks. The painting is still a traditional subject, but the portrayal of the figures, the depth of the cave, and the realistic depiction of the flowers and plants among the rocks show a new level of smoky brushwork and artistic processing. 

The Last Supper was a stunning work of art he created during this period. Even the paint was invented by Da Vinci himself, a mixture of oil and tempera, rather than the wet fresco paint that was widely used in the Middle Ages. The paint was a mixture of organic matter, said to be eggs and milk, and was applied so thinly that the painting Last Supper began to peel badly from the humidity fifty years later, and the abbey took great pains to repair the painting several times. In the painting, there are 13 people in total. Except for Jesus, everyone shows was anxiously gesturing something. They were very nervous. Some people found that adding figures' hands and bread on the table could just form a musical score, and there is a place in this score where the music is out of tune. This out-of-tune happens to be where Judas is. This also shows that Da Vinci's musical talent was exceptional. He wanted to tell everyone who was a traitor through this.

In 1498, when France returned to the rule of Louis XII, Milan surrendered without a fight. Da Vinci then left Milan with his assistant Salaì and came to Venice. In Venice, Leonardo da Vinci was employed as a military engineer, so his manuscripts at this time began to emerge with a large number of military-related sketches. He also created a large number of weapons and military buildings for Venice. Later, due to war and other reasons, Da Vinci returned to his hometown Florence in 1500, and with the restoration of the republican system, the cultural atmosphere was once active, and outstanding figures such as Michelangelo and Raphael appeared in the painting world successively. Da Vinci's sketch of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne immediately caused a sensation, and its composition principle and painting method had a great influence on the art world. In this painting, the lines are rigid and soft, and Da Vinci was particularly good at using diagonal lines of different degrees of sparseness and density to express the subtle changes of light and shadow, and he based each of his works on sketches. At the same time, he began to concentrate on another world-famous masterpiece, Mona Lisa. If The Last Supper is the world's most famous religious painting, then Mona Lisa, created when Da Vinci was 51, is worthy of being the world's most famous and greatest portrait painting. The Mona Lisa is now collected in the Louvre, France, and is the treasure of the Louvre. Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa for more than ten years. With this painting alone, the art of oil painting has been pushed to a new height, and people now are still talking about the Mona Lisa's smile. 

Da Vinci was a symbol of human wisdom. He cherished the infinite ideal of the gods, trying to recreate the beauty of the world, measured the vastness, and explained the world's mysteries. His ambition was to discover everything, study everything, and create everything. His life was an unfinished path, the road was scattered with fragmentary pieces of sublime unfinished works, and on his deathbed, he heartbreakingly said, "I have never finished a single work in my life." 

In 1516, Da Vinci was invited to France and finally settled in Amboise.

In 1519, a generation of great masters came to an end at the age of 67. Da Vinci did not create many complete paintings in his life, but each one was monumental. When he died, he left behind a large number of manuscripts with notes on almost everything, from astronomy, geography, physics, and mathematics to biological anatomy and so on. His mind was incredible, and the contents of his manuscripts were particularly exaggerated, containing airplanes, parachutes, bicycles, bridges, submarines, parachutes, cameras, thermometers, roasters, textile machines, cranes, excavators, and so on. In addition, da Vinci had planned to apply solar energy and use concave mirrors to boil water, but most of the inventions were not realized in his lifetime. If there were prophets in this world, Leonardo da Vinci was definitely the prophet of prophets. He seemed to be the one who traveled through history and displaced time and space with just one person.

Music

Da Vinci first became known as a musician, not a painter and an inventor, and he played the lyre superbly and was able to compose, play and sing by himself. As a young man, he was known as a beautiful man in Florence, Italy.

Mirror Writing

It is said that Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other. Most of the words written in his manuscripts are reversed. If you want to understand the content of Da Vinci's manuscripts, you have to look in a mirror and see the reflection of the words in the mirror. To read the contents of Da Vinci's manuscripts, one has to look into a mirror and see the reflection of the words inside. After reviewing all the manuscripts he left behind, people found that Da Vinci could write with both hands and in both directions. So, why did Da Vinci write in this way? Many people speculate that, in fact, some of the research that Da Vinci conducted in his later years was not recognized by society.

Especially human anatomy, as people believed at that time that the human body was created by God and was sacred and inviolable. The anatomy of the human body was quite scary at that time, and it was very likely that the death penalty would be sentenced. Therefore, Da Vinci used this writing method to hide some of his research results.

Anatomy

Da Vinci also made great achievements in anatomy and physiology. It is said Da Vinci got the body of a dead old man by accident. After dissection, he discovered the structure of bones, muscles, blood vessels, and organs and also found that the old man died because of cirrhosis of the liver and constriction of blood vessels. He drew the earliest preserved diagram of the internal structure of the human body. His drawings of the structure of the human body are almost error-free, and their accuracy is comparable to today's scanning technology, with no difference in the position of bones, muscles and nerves. It could be said that Leonardo da Vinci was the founder of human anatomy. He was the first to draw the fetus in the womb, observed the connection of the visual nerves to the brain, and led the scientific study of fetal education. He was the first person in European history to study the function of the heart and the principles of blood circulation. He discovered the function of blood and believed that blood plays a role in metabolism in the human body. He said that blood constantly transforms the whole body, bringing nutrients to all parts of the body that it needs and then taking away wastes from the body. A set of cardiac repair theories had also been studied by him. Glass and ceramics were even envisaged by him for making hearts and eyes. Da Vinci discovered that the heart has four chambers and drew the heart valves. He believed that one of the causes of death in the elderly is arteriosclerosis, and the cause of arteriosclerosis is lack of exercise.

Later, the English William Harvey confirmed and developed these physiological results of Da Vinci. Da Vinci wrote manuscripts on Physiology, including human life and death, memory, intelligence, and desire.

Mathematics

Leonardo da Vinci was the first to use the addition and subtraction symbols and explored the law of the relationship between the areas of the regular hexahedron, the cylinder and the sphere in geometry. He also invented the famous Da Vinci Code. Da Vinci designed a cipher cylinder for secrecy work. To open the cipher cylinder, one must unlock a 5-digit code with 5 dials, each with 26 letters, and as many as 11881376 possible permutations as a code. First, he used a text image, then a combination lock. This was double protection. It could be seen that Da Vinci's advanced self-protection awareness was afraid that his research results would bring disaster to him at that time.

Military and Mechanical Engineering

Da Vinci's research and inventions also involved military and mechanical aspects. He invented flying machinery, helicopters, parachutes, machine guns, grenades, tanks, submarines, double-hulled warships, and cranes.

He also conducted a detailed study of the aerodynamics of bird flight, completing the 18-page manuscript on the flight of birds. Between 1483 and 1486, Leonardo da Vinci sketched a flying machine. It appears that the Renaissance genius could have pioneered the history of human flight long before the Wright brothers. Da Vinci proposed the prototype of Newton's third law of motion 300 years before Newton. Da Vinci always had an idea in his heart: as long as you have enough strength, you could fly. Known as the ancestor of the helicopter, he invented the helicopter and drew the earliest design blueprint of the helicopter. He also invented the first humanoid robot, and it was his first programmable mobile robot. This was a robot designed by Da Vinci in 1495, more than 500 years ago, and the exquisite mechanical operation was breathtaking. On April 26, 2008, in the western Swiss city of Payerne, 36-year-old Swiss Olivier Vietti-Teppa successfully jumped from a helicopter 600 meters above the ground using a pyramid-shaped parachute designed by Leonardo da Vinci.

Physics

Da Vinci discovered the concept of liquid pressure and proposed the principle of the communicating device. In the 15th century, he first began studying the theory of friction between objects, and he discovered the principle of inertia, later demonstrated by Galileo's experiments.

He believed that a projectile initially rises along an inclined straight line, makes a curved displacement under the mixed action of gravity and impulse, and finally, the impulse is exhausted and makes a vertical falling motion under the action of gravity.

He developed the lever principle and calculated the relationship between velocity and arm length in addition to deriving the relationship between the force acting and arm length. He also predicted the atomic principle of matter and described the power of atomic energy vividly. He determined the concept of force moment.

He studied the propagation of light and foresaw the Doppler Effect. Considering the speed of light to be finite, he designed and conducted the pinhole image experiment. He designed optical instruments based on the structure and function of the human eyes. In Meteorology, he discovered the phenomenon of refraction of the atmosphere. He preceded the Danish astronomer Brahe and was the first to explain why the sky is blue.

Architecture

Da Vinci designed bridges, churches, city streets, and urban buildings, in which he separated vehicular and pedestrian paths. It could be said that he invented the very first traffic rules.

When designing urban architecture, Da Vinci specified the height of houses and the width of streets. He designed and supervised the construction of Leonardo's Rivellino.

He designed the bridge with a single span of 240 meters, which was completed in Norway in 2001. The castle designed for the King of France is famous for its double spiral staircase and is considered one of the "wonders of the world". He developed design theories for urban sewers and domed buildings and wrote manuscripts on architecture.

Water Conservation

In order to remove the sediment, Da Vinci made a construction plan to dredge the Arno River and designed the Florence canal network. He designed and planned to link the River Loire with the Saône via canal and link Milan and Pavia via a canal. Some reservoirs, sluices, and dams built by him have facilitated farmland irrigation and promoted the development of agricultural production. Some water conservancy facilities are still functioning today.

Astronomy

Da Vinci held a negative view of the traditional geocentric model. He believed that the earth is not the center of the solar system, let alone the center of the universe, but a planet revolving around the sun, and the sun itself does not move.

He also believed the moon itself does not emit light, only reflects the brilliance of the sun. His views predate Copernican heliocentrism by 40 years.

Biology

Da Vinci was a pioneer of modern botany, describing the gravitropism and phototropism of plants. He wrote manuscripts on biology.

He discovered many plant phenomena and wrote manuscripts on viticulture and winemaking technology. He also conducted fossil research and was the first to propose that fossils are plants and animals that were once alive.

Geography and Geology

Da Vinci inferred that the earth had changed based on the fact that there were fossilized sea animals in the high mountains, deduced that the mountains in northern Italy used to be oceans, and outlined the basic theoretical framework of plate tectonics. He was the first to describe the phenomenon of soil erosion and wrote manuscripts on Geography.

Philosophy

Da Vinci advocated the empirical knowledge method. He believed that experiments and observations were the only sources of knowledge and respected facts. He wrote manuscripts on Philosophy.

However, most of his research and inventions remained at the stage of manuscripts, and the social environment at that time did not allow him to experiment and advocate his ideas on a large scale. However, even so, some studies have shown that such a large number of research results would take a person to work 24 hours a day without sleep and 74 years to complete the creation.

Timeline of Da Vinci

In 1452, Da Vinci was born in Vinci, near Florence.

In 1469, he entered the studio of Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio to study art, and he had since embarked on the road of art.

In 1472, he painted an angel in the left corner of the painting Baptism of Christ by his teacher, and his talent was beginning to emerge, and he was qualified to join the Florence Painters Guild.

In 1473, he left the studio of Verrocchio and became his teacher's assistant. He worked until 1476. During this period, his works included Arno Landscape.

In 1474, he created and published the oil painting The Annunciation.

In 1475, he published his initial creations and completed the canvas painting Madonna del Garofano.

In 1480, he opened his own studio.

In 1482, he moved to Milan and served under Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan.

In 1483, he was commissioned to complete the Virgin of the Rocks.

In 1489, he designed various items for the wedding of Gian Galeazzo Sforza, the nephew of the Grand Duke of Milan.

In 1490, he completed the prints and oil paintings Portrait of a Woman, La Belle Ferronnière, Madonna Litta and other works, and made Vitruvian Man according to the theory of Vitruvius.

In 1493, he devoted himself to making various studies and models of the bronze statue of Sforza on horseback.

In 1495 - 1497, he painted the fresco The Last Supper for the dining hall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

In 1499, he carried out studies of bridges.

In April 1499, he received a vineyard from Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. In October, French troops invaded Milan. In December, Da Vinci fled Milan.

In February 1500, while passing through Mantua on his way to Venice, he painted a sketch of Isabella d'Este.

In March 1500, he left Venice and returned to Florence.

In 1502, he served as a military engineer for Cesare Borgia, commander of the papal armies.

In 1503 - 1506, Da Vinci created the famous painting, Mona Lisa.

In 1506, he visited Milan again.

In 1513, he left Milan again and accepted the invitation of Pope Leo X to go to Rome.

In 1516, he lived in France.

On May 2, 1519, he died at Clos Lucé at the age of 67.