Дарья (Darya)The Life of Leonardo da Vinci
During his lifetime Leonardo da Vinci had attained fame as a painter, sculptor, architect and engineer. But many of his works had remained unfinished, and few people knew of his remarkable scientific investigations.
It is primarily through Leonardo’s drawings and notes that we can understand the man and his achievements. He drew incessantly – to devise his artistic projects, to explore the natural world, and to record the workings of his imagination. Leonardo kept thousands of these drawings to the end of his life, leaving them to his favourite pupil Francesco Melzi, to ensure that his legacy would be preserved.
Around 550 of these drawings entered the Royal Collection in the 17th century, mounted on the pages of a single album. They give a unique picture of one of the most remarkable minds in history.
Тhe Mona Lisa is one of the most famous and mysterious paintings in the world. Painted with oil on a poplar wood panel, the masterpiece depicts Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, which is why the artwork is also widely known as La Gioconda. Leonardo brilliantly utilized a revolutionary painting technique called sfumato, which expertly softens edges and blends colors to create a hazy, lifelike effect. This unique method gives the sitter her famously enigmatic smile and an expressive gaze that remarkably seems to alter depending on the viewer's perspective. Behind her, a distant, dreamy, and entirely imaginary landscape unfolds with winding roads and rugged mountains. Following Leonardo's death, King Francis I of France acquired the painting, and it now permanently belongs to the French Republic, drawing millions of visitors annually to its highly secured, bulletproof display at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Florence, to 1481
Leonardo was born in 1452 near the town of Vinci in central Italy. He was the illegitimate son of a lawyer and a peasant girl and was raised in his paternal grandfather’s house. We know little else about his early years.
By the age of 20 Leonardo was working as a painter in nearby Florence. This was a period of great experimentation in Florentine art: a generation of young artists were using drawing to devise compositions and to study figures, faces and the world around them.