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Leonardo da Vinci By Anthea Maria Camilleri
Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, engineer, scientist, mathematician and more. He was born in 1452 in a town called Vinci, near Florence in Italy. He doesn’t actually have a last name; “da Vinci” really just means “from Vinci.”
Although he’s best remembered today as a painter, he is well-known as a military engineer during his life, and he designed military technology for a number of leaders.
As a teenager, Leonardo was apprenticed to a famous sculptor and painter named Verrocchio. In Verrocchio’s painting “The Baptism of Christ” ,the kneeling angel at the left of the painting was painted by a 22-year-old Leonardo. The angel shows Leonardo’s incredible promise as a painter.
Leonardo didn’t produce a lot of his paintings, but his influence is still huge. Even if you don’t know all that much about art, you’re probably familiar with Leonardo’s “The Last Supper”, depicting (showing) Jesus’ final meal. And everyone knows the “Mona Lisa”, Now hanging in the Louvre museum in Paris, France.
The Mona Lisa show Leonardo’s mastery of two techniques: sfumato, in which colours are blended together skillfully to create a smoky effect and chiaroscuro, which uses contrasts of light and dark to create a three-dimensional effect.
Leonardo’s career as an artist led him to showinterest in human anatomy. His drawings of muscles, organs and bones have advanced our understanding of human physiology (the way the body works).
A lot of what we know about Leonardo comes from his notes and drawings, thousands of pages which still exist. Museums will often display a notebook, or codex, made up of these collected pages. They show Leonardo’s fascination not only in anatomy, but with stars and planets, animals, architecture, geography and fossils. They also show how deeply Leonardo observed the natural world to design mechanical wonders. To protect his work, Leonardo wrote in mirror script which was written upside down and backwards.
