Leonardo da Vinci, the renaissance man

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    By Elizabeth Stuart

    Leonardo da Vinci was a gracious man, whose gentleness and concern for living things can be inferred from the reverence with which he depicted them in his art and studies.

    He was born the illegitimate child of a successful notary and a peasant woman in Vinci, Italy, a small town not far from Florence, Italy. Da Vinci was adopted by his father and raised in the home of his grandfather.

    Da Vinci was raised as a Roman Catholic, and while he wasn”t a religious fanatic, da Vinci felt amiable towards the church, said Vern G. Swanson, director of the Springville Museum of Art.

    With 17 half-siblings, da Vinci wasn”t able to secure any kind of inheritance from his father and lived most of his life as a poor man.

    As a young boy, da Vinci served an apprenticeship in the studio of Andrea Verrocchio, a notable artist of the time, where his exposure to a broad range of sculpting mediums, painting, and architectural engineering increased his curiosity for a broad range of subjects.

    According to legend, da Vinci painted an angel in one of Verrocchio”s paintings, and Verrocchio, inspired and cowed by his student”s artistic brilliance, vowed never to lift a paintbrush again, said Char Poulton, instructor of art history at BYU.

    Da Vinci”s artistic work continues to inspire art scholars to day.

    “If you”ve ever been in front of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing, it changes you,” said Swanson of the Springville Museum of Art. “[When looking at da Vinci”s work] I know that God is in heaven and everything is unfolding in the universe as it is supposed to.”

    Da Vinci”s work was much more than visually inspiring; however, it was technically advanced and well thought out.

    Poulton said da Vinci was far ahead of his contemporaries in terms of subject matter and style.

    “He sees beyond the obvious,” she said. “Everything he does, whether a portrait or ”The Last Supper,” has multiple layers of meaning.”

    Conventional art was not da Vinci”s sole passion; he also was well versed in the arts of science, engineering, and hydraulics.

    “Leonardo defined the saying ”renaissance man,”” Swanson said. “He was a jack of all trades, and a master of all.”

    Da Vinci”s excellence at what he turned his hand to can be attributed, in part, to his personality.

    Poulton said inquisitiveness and exploration were da Vinci”s defining characteristics.

    “He had an insatiable curious mind, wanting to know how things worked,” she said.

    Da Vinci left more than 13,000 pages of sketches and notes, all written in his distinguishing mirror writing, backwards from right to left, that spanned numerous disciplines from the human circulatory system to a design for an underwater breathing machine.

    Unfortunately, spread thin between travel, military engineering, intellectual endeavors in anatomy, and the study of geometry, da Vinci developed a reputation for leaving projects undone.

    “To reflect is noble, to realize is servile,” da Vinci wrote in one of his famous notebooks, unruffled by his apparent incapacity to follow through with projects.

    “His personality was not suited to that,” Poulton said. “His mind was more suited to thinking, inventing, adventure, and experiment.”

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