Leonardo da Vinci,
His Life and Times
by Godfrey Harris

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most intriguing men in history—an ordinary man who did extraordinary things. He was, at once, an accomplished artist, designer, engineer, philosopher and scientist—in short, he was the very embodiment of what we now think of as a Renaissance Man.

But how did this one individual come to accomplish
so many things in so many fields?
Why this man at this time in human history?

Early childhood influences
No one, of course, is quite sure, but Leonardo's overwhelming desire to succeed seems to have been driven by forces greater than his insatiable curiosity and enormous imagination. One theory holds that his childhood was filled with such personal doubts and family uncertainties that he did everything in his power throughout his life to ensure that he would not be forgotten or ignored, that his work and efforts would receive the respect and attention he thought it and he deserved.

Leonardo may well have done wondrous things because of the type of life he was forced to lead given the difficult circumstances of his early years. After all, Leonardo had to face the fact that he was born in 1452 as the illegitimate son of a prominent Florentine notary. At an early age he was taken from his mother's Tuscan village to grow up in his father's house in Vinci. When Ser Pierro da Vinci's third wife bore Leonardo's father a second, but legitimate, son. Leonardo was automatically disinherited from the family fortune and was on his own.

Limitations to his future professional prospects
As a child born out of wedlock, Leonardo would be denied the right to enter a profession, obtain a position at the university, or gain social access to the royal courts. On top of this, Leonardo was determinedly left-handed in an era when people were taught that left-handedness was literally sinister: a tool of the devil and something to be avoided. Leonardo dealt with this by perversely writing from right to left, and backwards. Was this to avoid smudging the writing or, as some believe, to keep prying eyes from readily reading his ideas? Or was it merely Leonardo's way to draw attention to his ideas, his sketches, and himself?

Early artistic experiences aided his future success
Because of Leonardo's low status and poor prospects in society, his father hoped that the boy's great interest and obvious talent for drawing might qualify him for an apprenticeship. It did. Popular artisan, Andrea del Verrocchio, headed one of Florence's leading craft studios, where everything from furniture to religious objects, from portraits to frescoes were made for the city's aristocracy and wealthy merchants.

An apprenticeship to one of Florence's leading artists would give Leonardo the training and experience that could serve him well in the future—as well as help him rise above the circumstances of his birth.

Leonardo served as Verrocchio's assistant for nearly nine years and during this time learned a number of different crafts. He was given the honor of providing an angel in the corner of a painting that became known as the Baptism of Christ. Legend has it that Leonardo's contribution to that painting was so extraordinary in execution that Verrocchio himself pledged never to paint anything else ever again.

Leonardo's extraordinary talents were enhanced
In the atmosphere of Verracchio's all-male studio, Leonardo's left handedness may well have been embraced for the authority it gave his brush strokes; moreoever, his physical beauty was most certainly welcomed by some of the artisans who worked there. Because of his acceptance in the studio and its relative safety from the harsher attitudes of the outsIde world, Leonardo did not hesitate to take great risks in his work and his thinking. These intellectual, artistic, and personal risks clearly provided satisfying rewards that may well have been the stimulus for the great advances that he would later make and that we marvel at today.

In his desire for attention and recognition, he also showed an unbridled willingness to do whatever was asked of him to gain the approval of his patrons and their friends. We never think of him as such, but in modern terms his desire to please helped Leonardo to become a superb event planner, a skilled costume designer, a brilliant lighting technician, a resourceful impresario, and an accomplished musician.

Leonardo proposed weapons of war
When Milan was faced with the threat of invasion by the French in the late 1490s, Leonardo volunteered to develop machines and engineering strategies to assist Duke Ludovico Sforza in repelling the foe. Many of the machines Da Vinci sketched and described—for war or for engineering purposes—were probably never built because they required too much money, too much scarce materiel, or too many experiments to perfect their use or performance.

A man of many talents
Perhaps because of his insatiable curiosity, perhaps because he could never seem to harness his mind to concentrate on one topic until he completely mastered it, perhaps because of his overpowering need for perfection, he kept seeing ways to improve on the performance of objects then in common use.

The patience and persistence he exhibited revealed a pattern that would mark all of Leonardo's efforts as a designer and engineer: If it wasn't perfect it wasn't finished. Because of this he rarely saw projects to completion. In fact, a younger Michelangelo criticized Da Vinci for the procrastination he exhibited. Was this seeming indolence triggered by his perfectionism or by his constant inquisitiveness? Anything that he observed in nature could trigger a flood of questions in his mind about how it functioned, how it accomplished particular tasks, and the purpose each of its attributes served none more so than his fascInatIon with birds to unlock the secrets of flight.

His desire to be free from the confines of earth suggests the confidence he had that there was nothing he couldn't accomplish if he put his mind to it. For Leonardo, nature was the perfect machine that had to be understood completely in order to be emulated as closely as possible in man-made efforts. That is why he became skilled as an anatomist—to learn how the muscles, tendons, and skeletal structure worked together to make a smile or raise an arm, why he theorized on how the fossils he found high in the Alps might have gotten there, and why the few paintings he attempted—only some 14 are known to have survived to the modern era—were renowned then as now for the subtly, accuracy, and secrets they embodied. The best way to form your own impression of this remarkable man and what he accomplished in his 67 years is to remember what he once proclaimed:

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

and to contemplate what others, such as author E.L. Kongsburg, have said about him:

[Leonardo] could not look at things made by God
without wondering how He had made them,
and he could not look at things made by man
without thinking of some way to make them better.