Leonardo Da Vinci | Biography, Art, Paintings, Mona Lisa ... - Britannica

Early life, education, and career beginnings during the first Florentine period

Leonardo’s parents were unmarried at the time of his birth. His father, Ser Piero da Vinci, was a Florentine notary and landlord. His mother was possibly Caterina di Meo Lippi, a young peasant woman who may have been orphaned at a young age, though a few scholars have posited that she was an enslaved woman from Asia. Sometime after giving birth to Leonardo, Caterina married an artisan with whom she had four daughters and a son. Ser Piero also married, though he would not have additional surviving children until his third and fourth marriages.

Leonardo grew up on his father’s family’s estate, where he was treated as a “legitimate” son and received the usual elementary education of that day: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Leonardo did not seriously study Latin, the key language of traditional learning, until much later, when he acquired a working knowledge of it on his own. He also did not apply himself to higher mathematics—advanced geometry and arithmetic—until he was 30 years old, when he began to study it with diligent tenacity.

Apprenticeships

Leonardo’s artistic inclinations must have appeared early. When he was about 15, his father, who enjoyed a high reputation in the Florence community, apprenticed him to artist Andrea del Verrocchio. In Verrocchio’s renowned workshop Leonardo received a multifaceted training that included painting and sculpture as well as the technical-mechanical arts. He also worked in the next-door workshop of artist Antonio Pollaiuolo.

Leonardo’s remarkable talent, especially his keenness of observation and creative imagination, was already apparent in the angel he contributed to Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1470–75): Leonardo endowed the angel with natural movement, presented it with a relaxed demeanor, and gave it an enigmatic glance that acknowledges its surroundings while remaining inwardly directed. In Leonardo’s landscape segment in the same picture, he also found a new expression for what he called “nature experienced”: He reproduced the background forms in a hazy fashion as if through a veil of mist.

In 1472 Leonardo was accepted into the painters’ guild of Florence, but he remained in his teacher’s workshop for five more years, after which time he worked independently in Florence until 1481. There are a great many superb extant pen and pencil drawings from this period, including many technical sketches—for example, pumps, military weapons, mechanical apparatus—that offer evidence of Leonardo’s interest in and knowledge of technical matters even at the outset of his career.

Early independent works

The Benois Madonna

The many testimonials to Leonardo, ranging from Vasari to Peter Paul Rubens to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Eugène Delacroix, praise in particular the artist’s gift for expression—his ability to move beyond technique and narrative to convey an underlying sense of emotion. His early work reflects this talent, notably The Benois Madonna (1478–80). Leonardo succeeded in giving the traditional mother-and-child theme a new, unusually charming, and expressive mood by showing the child Jesus reaching, in a sweet and tender manner, for the flower in Mary’s hand.

Ginevra de’ Benci

Leonardo again resisted tradition in another early painting, the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci (c. 1474/78). Inspired by the dynamism of the portraits done by his Northern contemporaries, Leonardo broke with the customary profile portrait and portrayed the young woman in a three-quarter pose. In the unfinished St. Jerome (c. 1482) Leonardo’s mastery of gesture and facial expression gave the saint an unrivaled expression of transfigured sorrow. Moreover, Leonardo presented the emaciated body of the saint in a sobering light, imbuing it with a naturalism that stemmed from his early interest in anatomy.

Adoration of the Magi

The interplay of masterful technique and affective gesture is also the chief concern of Leonardo’s first large creation containing many figures, the unfinished Adoration of the Magi (c. 1482). Intended for the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto, the piece was also one of his first substantial commissions from the city of Florence. Although Leonardo abandoned the work before departing for Milan in 1482, the painting nonetheless affords rich insight into the master’s subtle methods. The various aspects of the scene are built up from the base with very delicate paper-thin layers of paint in sfumato (the smooth transition from light to shadow) relief. The main treatment of the Virgin and Child group and the secondary treatment of the surrounding groups are clearly set apart with a masterful sense of composition—the pyramid of the Virgin Mary and Magi is demarcated from the arc of the adoring followers. Yet thematically they are closely interconnected: The bearing and expression of the figures—most striking in the group of praying shepherds—depict many levels of profound amazement.