Leonardo DA Vinci (1452-1519), Florentine artist, one of the great masters of high Renaissance, celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His profound love of knowledge and research was the keynote of both his scientific and artistic endeavors. His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies, particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics. He anticipated many of the developments of modern science. Leonardo was born in the small town of Vinci, in Tuscany, near Florence. He was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid- 1460s the family settled in Florence, where Leonardo was given the best education that Italy could offered. He rapidly advanced socially and intellectually. About 1466 he was the apprentice of Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. In Verrocchio's workshop Leonardo was introduced to painting and sculpture in marble and bronze. In 1472 he was entered in the painters guild of Florence, and in 1476 he was still considered Verrocchios assistant. In 1478 Leonardo became an independent master. His first commission, to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the plazzo vecchio, the Florentine town hall, was never executed. The period of Italian art in which Leonardo DA Vinci lived is called high Renaissance. In the course of the fifteenth century a long chain of early Renaissance artists, mainly of Florentine decent, had concentrated on a visual as well as theoretical conquest of nature. Their work formed the basis for a great idealistic style, which began to emerge from about 1490 onwards and was nearing its end at the time of Raphaels death in 1520. It was given fullest expression during the decade 1500 to 1510, and the names of Leonardo, Michelangelou, Raphael, Bramante, Giorgone and Titian, round which legions of m...
