Research Paper

In
English IV
Submitted to:
Teacher’s Name:
Ma’am Segundina
Ozoa
Submitted By:
Iv – blanco
 Edsel Mapili
 Lorie Mae Laranjo
 Marf Danielle
Cimafranca
 Shaira Damaso
 Princess Mae Sy

“THE LIFE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI AS AN ARTIST”

Thesis Statement: One of the greatest Renaissance Artist was Leonardo da

Vinci (VIHN chee).
I. Introduction

This research paper is entitled “The Life of Leonardo da Vinci”. Leonardo was best
known for The Monalisa, a portrait of a strangely smiling young woman of Florence,
and The Last Supper, a wall painting of Jesus’ last meal with his disciplines. He was a
man of so many accomplishments and in so many areas of human endeavour that his
like has rarely been seen in human history.

Leonardo da Vinci, was one of the greatest painters and most versatile geniuses in
history. He was one of the key figures of the Renaissance Period, a great cultural
movement that had begun in Italy in the 1300’s. He is an Italian painter, sculptor,
architect, musician, engineer, and scientist. He lived in a town near Vinci, not far from
Tuscani. The versatility and creative power of Leonardo mark him as a supreme
example of a Renaissance genius. It is depicted in his drawings, with scientific precision
and consummate artistry, subjects ranging from flying machines to caricatures; he also
executed intricate anatomical studies of people, animals, and plants. The richness and
originality of intellect expressed in his notebooks reveal one of the greatest minds of
all time.

Leonardo, as he is almost always called, was trained to be a painter. But his

interests and achievements spread into an astonishing variety of fields that are now
considered scientific specialties. Leonardo studied anatomy, astronomy, botany,
geology, geometry, and optics, and he designed machines and drew plans for hundreds
of inventions.
Because Leonardo excelled in such an amazing number of areas of human
knowledge, he is often called a universal genius. However, he had little interest in
literature, history, or religion. He formulated a few scientific laws, but he never
developed his ideas systematically. Leonardo was most of all an excellent observer. He
concerned himself with what the eye could see, rather that with purely abstract
concepts.

A. Background of the subject

Da Vinci was one of the great creative minds of the Italian Renaissance, and
hugely influential as an artist and sculptor but also immensely talented as an engineer,
scientist and inventor.
 Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci, the
illegitimate son of a local lawyer. He was apprenticed to the sculptor and painter
Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence and in 1478 became an independent master. In
about 1483, he moved to Milan to work for the ruling Sforza family as an engineer,
sculptor, painter and architect. From 1495 to 1497 he produced a mural of 'The Last
Supper' in the refectory of the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.

Da Vinci was in Milan until the city was invaded by the French in 1499 and the
Sforza family was forced to flee. He may have visited Venice before returning to
Florence. During his time in Florence, he painted several portraits, but the only one
that survived was the famous 'Mona Lisa' (1503-1506).

In 1506, Da Vinci returned to Milan, remaining there until 1513. This was
followed by three years based in Rome. In 1517, at the invitation of the French King
Francis I, Leonardo moved to the Château of Cloux, near Amboise in France, where
he died on May 2, 1519.

The fame of Da Vinci's surviving paintings has meant that he has been regarded
primarily as an artist, but the thousands of surviving pages of his notebooks reveal the
most eclectic and brilliant of minds. He wrote and drew on subjects including geology,
anatomy (which he studied in order to paint the human form more accurately), flight,
gravity and optics, often flitting from subject to subject on a single page, and writing
in left-handed mirror script. He 'invented' the bicycle, airplane, helicopter, and
parachute some 500 years ahead of their time.

If all this work had been published in an intelligible form, Da Vinci's place as a
pioneering scientist would have been beyond dispute. Yet his true genius was not as a
scientist or an artist, but as a combination of the two: an 'artist-engineer'. His
painting was scientific, based on a deep understanding of the workings of the human
body and the physics of light and shade. His science was expressed through art, and his
drawings and diagrams show what he meant, and how he understood the world to
work.

B. Reasons for choosing the subject

Leonardo Da Vinci is an artist known during Renaissance Period. He is one of the
master artists of his period. His been famous because of his amazing paintings like the
most known ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘The Last Supper’ . We chose this topic as our subject
because, we want to know more about Da Vinci’s life in Milan and in Florence. We
also want to know his life before his artworks became famous. To know more about
his artworks. His amazing ideas in making his artworks and sculptures. To learn how
Da Vinci was motivated to do such works. How he handled things in some instances.
We want to know also about how he handled his life being an artist. And the
inventions you have never known about

C. Definition of terms

1. Life – “the existence of an individual human being or animal.”

2. Artist – “a person who produces paintings or drawings as a profession or
hobby; a person engaged in one or more of any of activities related to creating art,
practicing the arts, and or demonstrating an art.” [1]

II. Contents

A. LEONARDO DA VINCI’s Life

“The term Renaissance was coined to describe the genius of Leonardo Da Vinci.
He was a man of so many areas of human endeavour that his like has rarely been seen
in human history. Casual patrons of the arts know him as the painter of ‘La Gioconda’,
more commonly called the ‘Mona Lisa’, and of the exquisite ‘Last Supper’, painted on
the wall of the dining hall in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy.
These paintings alone would have assured him enduring fame as an artist, but they
should not obscure the fact that he was also a sculptor, an architect, and a man of
science who did serious investigations into the natural and physical sciences,
mathematics, mechanics, and engineering. More than 300 years before flying
machines were perfected, Leonardo devised plans for prototypes of an airplane and a
helicopter. His extensive studies of human anatomy were portrayed in anatomical
drawings, which were among the most significant achievements of Renaissance science.
High remarkable illustrations of the human body elevated drawing into a means of
scientific investigation and exposition and provided the basic principles for modern
scientific illustration.[2]”

1 Britannica World Language Dictionaty, p.54 and p. 239

2 “Leonardo da Vinci”, Compton’s Encyclopedia,
1995 ed. Vol.13, p. 132.

“Leonardo was born in the small Tuscan town of Vinci in 1452, the illegitimate
son of a Florentine notary and a peasant girl. He was taken into his father’s childless
household and seems to have had an uneventful upbringing. He did not receive a
humanistic education but was apprenticed at an early age, probably in 1467, to the
painter-sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. In 1472 Leonardo completed his
apprenticeship and entered the painter’s guild in Florence; he continued, however, to
work closely with his master for about five more years, thus assuming major
responsibility in one of the leading workshops of Florence.
About 1472 Leonardo did an angel and the vaporous landscape in Verricchio’s
Baptism of Christ, the first certain biographer Giorgio Vasari recounts that Verricchio,
dismayed at the precocious ability of his young assistant, gave up painting altogether.
A less dramatic but more probable version of this tale is that Verrocchio discovered a
talent capable of handling the painting chores in the studio and so turned his own
efforts to the problems of sculpture.
The first ten years of Leonardo’s career were devoted largely to painting,
culminating in the great but unfinished Adoration of the Magi. As early as 1473 a
major feature of Leonardo’s thought and art became clear, a strict reliance upon an
observation of nature. A drawing of the Arno Valley done in August of that year is
not only one of the first pure landscapes done since antiquity but is an accurate record
of the actual topography of Tuscany. Concurrently, however, the artist’s search for
ideal form, based upon simple geometric principles of composition, was pursued in a
small number of pictures.” [3]

1. First Service in Milan

“In 1482 Leonardo was hired by the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, to be artist
and engineer in residence. In this capacity he was constantly kept busy as a painter and
sculptor, though many if his paintings and all of his sculptures remained unfinished.
He was also frequently consulted by workmen in the fields of architecture,
fortifications, and weaponry; and he served as a hydraulic and mechanical engineer. It
was while he was in Milan that the full versatility of his genius began to unfold, and
the full range of his interests in the world of mankind and nature in general became
evident. Through his remarkable ability to understand what he saw, he determined to
compose a unified theory of the world and to illustrate it in a series of voluminous
notebooks. Unfortunately his relentless pursuit of scientific knowledge forced him to
leave unfinished many of his planned artistic creations. Today they are known
primarily from drawings in the notebooks.”[4]
3“Leonardo da Vinci”, Collier’s Encyclopedia,

1967 ed. Vol.14, p. 506.

4“Leonardo da Vinci”, Compton’s Encyclopedia,
1995 ed. Vol.13, p. 132.\

“In his 17 years in Milan, Leonardo completed only six paintings: two portraits, the
‘Last Supper’, two versions of ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’, and a decorative ceiling
painting in the Castillo Sforzesco. Other commissioned paintings either were not done
or have disappeared.”
2. Return to Florence
“Ludovico Sforza was driven from power by a French army in 149. At the end of
the year, or early in 1500, Leonardo returned to his home city after visits to Mantua
and Venice. After his long distance, he was received as an honored and reowned
artist.”[5]
“The famous angel contributed by Leonardo to Verricchio’s Baptism of Christ was
the young artist’s first documented painting. Other examples of Leonardo’s activity in
Verricchio’s workshop are the Annunciation; the beautiful portrait Ginevra Benci; and
the Madonna with a Carnation. Although these paintings are rather traditional, they
include details, such as the curling hair of Ginevra, that could have been conceived and
painted only by Leonardo.
Other, slightly later works, such as the so-called Benois Madonna and the
unfinished saint Jerome, already show two hallmarks of Leonardo’s mature style;
contrapposto, or twisting movement; and CHIAROSCURO, or emphatic modelling in
light and shape. The unfinished Adoration og the Magi is the most important of all
the early paintings. In it Leonardo displays for the first time in his method of
organizing figures into a pyramid shape, so that interest is focused on the principal
subject- in this case,the child held by his mother and adored by the three kings and
their retinue.”[6]
3. Second stay in Milan
“In May 1506 Charles d’ Amboise, governor of Milan for the king of France,
invited Leonardo to return to the city. His work in painting and sculpture over the
next seven years remained mostly in the planning stage--in sketches that he drew but
that never became paintings or statues--but his scientific work flourished. He
continued his notebooks with observations and drawings of human anatomy, optics,
mechanics, and botanical studies.”
4. Last Years
“During the years 1513 to 1516, Leonardo was in Rome at the invitation of Cardinal
Giuliano de’ Medici, brother of Pope Leo X. Some of the greatest artists of the time
were at work in Rome for the church. Donato Bramante s building St. Peters Basilica;
Michelangelo was working on the tomb of Pope Julius; and Raphael was painting the
rooms of the pope’s apartments.”[7]
5“Ibid, pp. 132-133.
6“Leonardo da Vinci”, Academic American Encyclopedia,

1998 ed. Vol.12, pp. 289.

7”LEONARDO DA VINCI”,Op. Cit., p. 133

“Leonardo, on the other hand, was not kept busy. He executed a map of the
Pontine Marshes near Rome, suggesting that perhaps he was involve in a planned
reclamation project. He also did some sketches for a Medici residence in Florence that
was never built. Otherwise he was lonely and unoccupied. Thus in 1516, at the age of
65, he accepted an invitation from Francis I, king of France, to leave Italy and work for
him.
 Leonardo spent the last three years of his life in the palace of Cloux, near the
king’s residence at Amboise, near Tours. He was given the title of “first painter,
architect, and mechanic of the King” and given freedom of action in what he wanted
to do. His duties were few. He virtually abandoned painting to concentrate on his
scientific studies. He finish the final drafts of his treatise on painting and work on the
study of anatomy. He also did a variety of sketches, including ‘Visions of the End of
the World’, that testified to his undiminished ability as an artist.
On May 2, 1519, Leonardo died at Cloux and was buried in the palace church.
During the French Revolution the church, along with many other national
monuments, was devastated and eventually was torn down. The whereabouts of
Leonardo’s remains is no longer known.”[8]

B. LEONARDO’S LEGACY

1. The Notebooks
“After his arrival in Milan, Leonardo began to keep quantities of drawings and
written notes, an accumulation that numbered thousands of sheets by the time of his
death. Some of these have survived as single pieces of paper; others were gathered in
small notebooks, each of which the artist use over a period of a year or two. The
majority of the sheets were assembled in various binders by Leonardo’s heirs. The
most important is the famous Codice Atlantico in Milan, which consists of of some
4,000 sheets of various sizes and from different periods of Leonardo’s life. The
Treatise on Painting, sometimes said to be an autograph work of Leonardo, is actually
a synthesis of his ideas on art, assembled by later hand.
The content of the notebooks is immensely varied. Leonardo drew and described
natural phenomena with dispassionate precision, described imaginary voyages to the
Orient, recorded enigmatic fables and prophecies, and scribbled his shopping lists.
These heterogeneous material reveals a man with a compulsion to record all that he
learned and read. It also shows Leonardo’s a version to synthesis and the statement of
general principles, for his frequently brilliant ideas are rarely developed at length.
Rather than pursue a problem in depth, he preferred to move on to new challenges.”[9]
8“Leonardo da Vinci”, Compton’s Encyclopedia,

1995 ed. Vol.13, pp. 132-133.

9“Leonardo da Vinci”, Collier’s Encyclopedia,

1967 ed. Vol.14, p. 508.

“Leonardo wrote in mirror writing, which reads from right to left across to page.
Usually this is explained as his method of hiding thoughts from prying eyes. However,
many of these thoughts are not controversial, and only a mirror is required to read
them. Leonardo was left-handed, and comfortable way for a left-hander to write is
from right to left. Probably, then, Leonardo’s fascinating idiosyncrasy is the result of
an earl acquired habit unchecked by formal schooling.”
2. Paintings
“Leonardo’s first major commission was the Adoration of the Magi, painted in
1481- 1482 for the monksof San Donato a Scopeto. It consists of only an
underpainting, a monochromatic rendering in brown, that was placed on the wooden
panel before the other colors were to be applied. Even the under painting is unfinished,
however, having been left by Leonardo at the time of his departure for Milan.
Taking a subject that earlier had been an excuse for decorative pageantry,
Leonardo created a scene of sacred solemnity. The Virgin and Child are seated in the
center of the picture, surrounded by a circle of worshipers. The problem of
maintaining clarity and order in a picture where a crowd of people is represented is
solved by subjecting them to a simple geometric organization. A triangle whose apex
is at the head of the Virgin describes the central motif upon the surface of the picture,
while a segment of a circle rings her in depth. Motifs that fascinated Leonardo all of his
life appear in the crowd: the contrast of the beautiful youth and the old man, the
enigmatic gesture of the raised index finger. Behind the foreground stretches a strange
landscape with a ruin, the arena for a battle of horsemen. This field of conflict and
discord seems to symbolize the pagan world, while the lucid geometry of the
foreground suggests in contrast the new era of grace under Christ.
The Madonna of the Rocks was commissioned by the Confraternity of the
Immaculate Conception in 1483. The kneeling Virgin watches over the Christ Child
and the adoring infant St. John, while an angel looks outward and points at John. The
figures are placed close to the picture plane and ordered in a board triangle. While this
grouping is unequivocally lucid, the picture is hardly an image of classical simplicity.
The figurers are bathed in a smoky light, and behind them extends a fantastic world of
serrated rocks, where mists rise from the slow-moving waters. A cavern has replaced
the shed, which is traditional in such scenes, and the sun has departed to leave a
twilight world. All about grow various flowers and plants, whose shapes and very
turning to the sun have been recorded by the Leonardo in the minutest detail. At the
same moment he seeks geometric simplicity and the microscopic rendition of
individual living things. This picture, is a watershed both in Leonardo’s development
and in the transition from the art of the Early Renaissance to that of the High
Renaissance.”[10]
10“Ibid, p. 509.

“By 1947, when the Last Supper was nearing completion at the monastery Santa
Maria delle Grazie, Leonardo had turned conclusively toward the noble art of which he,
Raphael, and Michelangelo were the chief exponents. His artistic problem at the
monastery was one in illusionism: to open out the end of the end wall of a large
monastic dining hall so that it happened to extend to include a high table with Christ
and his apostles, a daily reminder to the monks of the significance of their vocation.
In addition, Leonardo wished to infuse life and dramatic impact into a scene that
traditionally had been handled in a rather dull and static manner.

The significant cloud as it rises into the atmosphere. The total impression of the
mural. Had it been finished, would probably have been just the opposite of the Last
Supper: while the latter stresses clarity, sculptural forms, and stability, the battle scene
would evoked a sense of confusion, atmospheric effects, and strong movement. In all
of these qualities it was a harbinger of the dynamic art of the baroque age.

The Mona Lisa, a portrait of the wife of a Florentine merchant, is Leonardo’s

most famous picture. The 16th century viewed her as a miracle of naturalistic painting,
and only later did critics see in her the symbol of a baffling enigma. Here Leonardo
invented a classic type of portrait pose that has been used ever since. The body is cut at
the waist and seen at a three-quarter angle, while the head is turned toward the viewer..
The addition of the hands serves the dual purpose of giving the characterization
more force and of “closing” the picture at the bottom by means of an oval formed by
the arms and hands. The picture has aged badly, and today must be seen through veil
of varnish, but it is unlikely that there was ever a time when an air of mystery did not
hang about it. The famous smile of the Mona Lisa is strange and inscrutable, but
surely no stranger than her seemingly asymmetrical head, the flaccid and pneumatic
hands, and above all the inhospitable primordial world of rock that lies in the misty
distance.”[11]

11“Leonardo da Vinci”, Collier’s Encyclopedia,

1967 ed. Vol.14, p. 509.
3. Drawings
“It is in the drawings that Leonardo the artist and Leonardo the scientist meet, for
in both capacities he reveals a sense of awe and feeling for beauty before the endless
variety of creation. Whereas earlier painters had made drawings as preparatory steps
toward a finished picture, Leonardo saw that beyond this drawings were a primary tool
in the acquisition of knowledge based upon experience. As scientific reports, his
drawings complement his written work, for they frequently reveal observations too
subtle to express accurately in words.
Like his predecessors, Leonardo made many drawings as studies for finished
paintings. These treat such problems as the sketching of preliminary compositional
ideas the rendition of space in perspective, and studies of the human figure, typically
in nude. But most of his drawings were done independently of paintings, and in them
he explored a range of subjects far wider than that conventionally permitted the
Renaissance painter. Cases in point are Leonardo’s famous studies of grotesque heads
and his many pure landscapes, a category of subject that in Renaissance painting was
relegated to backgrounds. Throughout these drawings runs a common theme,
Leonardo’s fascination with energy and motion, be it the wind-bent rain of a
mountain thunderstorm or the form of a charging horse.
At first Leonardo preferred to use pen or silverpoint and modelled forms by
means of straight parallel lines. By the end of the century he sought more sculptural
effects through the use of cross-hatching and by bending the modelling lines to
follow the curved surfaces. In his last years he turned to the less precise medium of soft
black chalk.”[12]
C. Leonardo’s Importance
“Leonardo had one of the greatest scientific minds of the Italian Renaissance. He
wanted to know the workings of what he saw in nature. Many of his inventions and
scientific ideas were centuries ahead of his time. For example, he was the first person to
study the flight of birds scientifically. Leonardo’s importance to art was even greater
than his importance to science. He had a strong influence on many leading artist,
including Raphael and Michelangelo. Leonardo’s balanced compositions and idealized
figures became standard features of later Renaissance art. Painters also tried to imitate
Leonardo’s knowledge of perspective and anatomy, and his accurate observations of
nature.
What most impresses people today is the wide range of Leonardo’s talent and
achievements. He turned his attention to many subjects and mastered nearly all. His
inventiveness, versatility, and wide-ranging intellectual and curiosity have made
Leonardo a symbol of the Renaissance Spirit.”[13]

12“Ibid.,
p. 509.
13“Leonardo da Vinci”, World Book 2001,
2001 ed. Vol.12, p. 201.

D. Research

“Leonardo got his start as an artist around 1469, when his father apprenticed him
to the fabled workshop of Verocchio. Verocchio's specialty was perspective, which
artists had only recently begun to get the hang of, and Leonardo quickly mastered its
challenges. In fact, Leonardo quickly surpassed Verocchio, and by the time he was in
his early twenties he was downright famous.
Renaissance Italy was centuries away from our culture of photographs and cinema, but
Leonardo nevertheless sought a universal language in painting. With perspective and
other realistic elements, Leonardo tried to create faithful renditions of life. In a culture
previously dominated by highly figurative and downright strange religious paintings,
Leonardo's desire to paint things realistically was bold and fresh. This call to objectivity
became the standard for painters who followed in the 16th century.
No slouch when it came to the techniques of the day, Leonardo went beyond his
teaching by making a scientific study of light and shadow in nature. It dawned on him
that objects were not comprised of outlines, but were actually three-dimensional
bodies defined by light and shadow. Known as chiaroscuro, this technique gave his
paintings the soft, lifelike quality that made older paintings look cartoony and flat. He
also saw that an object's detail and color changed as it receded in the distance. This
technique, called sfumato, was originally developed by Flemish and Venetian painters,
but of course Super-Genius Leonardo transformed it into a powerful tool for creating
atmosphere and depth.
Ever the perfectionist, Leonardo turned to science in the quest to improve his
artwork. His study of nature and anatomy emerged in his stunningly realistic paintings,
and his dissections of the human body paved the way for remarkably accurate figures.
He was the first artist to study the physical proportions of men, women and children
and to use these studies to determine the "ideal" human figure. Unlike many of his
contemporaries -- Michelangelo for example -- he didn't get carried away and paint
ludicrously muscular bodies, which he referred to as "bags of nuts."
All in all, Leonardo believed that the artist must know not just the rules of perspective,
but all the laws of nature. The eye, he believed, was the perfect instrument for learning
these laws, and the artist the perfect person to illustrate them.”[14]

[14]http://legacy.mos.org/LEONARDO/artist.html

III. Conclusion

We are inspired by the great painters of the world because they bring such joy to
our lives and the lives of other people with their beautiful masterpieces and Leonardo
Da Vinci was one man that was a great inspiration to many other artists and enthusiast
throughout the years.

Leonardo was an amazing and such a visionary man. Truly one of the greatest
mind of all time. He is noted as being the first Renaissance man. considered by many
to be one of the most brilliant minds of the era and many of his works were
groundbreaking in terms of their use of perspective, chiaroscuro, and sfumato. His art
work speaks to people and he was one of the first people to actually use lighting and
background effects to put a person's focus on the person in the paintings.

IV. Recommendation

Leonardo da Vinci’s works and other knowledge are yet to be discovered so, we
recommend readers to research more information if our research is not sufficient for
the reader’s expectations.

V. Bibliography

Britannica World Language Dictionary. United States of America:

International Copyright Union, 1995.

http://legacy.mos.org/LEONARDO/artist.html

“Leonardo da Vinci”’, Academic American Encyclopedia, 1998 ed.,vol.12.

“Leonardo da Vinci”, Collier’s Encyclopedia, 1967 ed.,vol.14.

“Leonardo da Vinci”, Compton’s Encyclopedia, 1995 ed.,vol.13.

“Leonardo da Vinci”, The New Book of Knowledge, 2007 ed.,vol.11.

“Leonardo da Vinci’, World Book 2001, 2001 ed.,vol.12.

 “The Life of
Leonardo Da Vinci
As an Artist”

Submitted by:
Edsel Mapili
Marf Danielle Cimafranca
Princess Mae Sy
Lorie Mae Laranjo
Shaira Joy Damaso
IV-Blanco
Submitted to:
Mrs. Segundina Ozoa