Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian Renaissance painter and polymath who achieved legendary fame and iconic status within his own lifetime. His renown primarily rests upon his brilliant achievements as a painter, as his Mona Lisa and The Last Supper are two of the most famous artworks ever created. Leonardo is also known for his diverse skills as a scientist, inventor, engineer, theorist, sculptor, architect, descriptions and study of the human body, and more. He became so highly valued during his lifetime that the King of France bore him home like a trophy of war, supported him in his old age and, according to legend, cradled his head as he died.
Leonardo's portrait was used, within his own lifetime, as the iconic image of Plato in Raphael's School of Athens. His biography was written in superlative terms by Vasari. He has been repeatedly acclaimed as the greatest genius to have lived. His painting of the Mona Lisa has been the most imitated artwork of all time and his drawing the Vitruvian Man iconically represents the fusion of Art and Science.
Leonardo's biography has appeared in many forms, both scholarly and fictionalized. Every known aspect of his life has been scrutinized and analyzed. His paintings, drawings and notebooks have been studied, reproduced and analyzed for five centuries. The interest in and appreciation of the character of Leonardo and his talents has never waned.
Leonardo has appeared in many fictional works, such as novels, television shows, video games and movies, the first such fiction dating from the 16th century. Various characters have been named after him.
Artworks after originals by Leonardo Copies
Leonardo's pupils and followers copied or closely imitated many of his pictures. Several of his important works exist only as copies by his admirers. These include: His cartoon of The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist was copied as an oil painting by Luini The Battle of Anghiari was copied several times by unknown Florentine artists as well by Peter Paul Rubens Leda and the Swan exists only as copies in the Louvre and Villa Borhgese
Other much-copied works include: Mona Lisa, for which Angela della Chiesa cites 14 examples, of which six are bare-breasted. These include paintings by Bernardino Luini, Salaì and Joos van Cleve John the Baptist for which there exists at least five versions by other hands, including Salai
Parodies of the Mona Lisa
No painting has been more imitated and satirised than the Mona Lisa. Beginning possibly with a naked portrait of Diane de Poitiers by Clouet, the pose and expression have been freely adapted to many female portraits. The avant-garde art world has made note of the undeniable fact of the Mona Lisa's popularity. Because of the painting's overwhelming stature, Dadaists and Surrealists often produce modifications and caricatures. In 1883, Le rire, an image of a Mona Lisa smoking a pipe, by Sapeck (Eugène Bataille), was shown at the "Incoherents" show in Paris. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp, one of the most influential modern artists, created L.H.O.O.Q., a Mona Lisa parody made by adorning a cheap reproduction with a moustache and a goatee as well as adding a rude inscription, which, when read out loud in French, sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul", literally translated as "she has a hot ass". This is a manner of implying the woman in the painting is in a state of sexual excitement and availability. This was intended as a Freudian joke, referring to Leonardo's alleged homosexuality. According to Rhonda R. Shearer, the apparent reproduction is in fact a copy partly modelled on Duchamp's own face.
Salvador Dalí, famous for his surrealist work, painted Self portrait as Mona Lisa in 1954. In 1963, following the painting's visit to the United States, Andy Warhol created serigraph prints of multiple Mona Lisas called Thirty are Better than One, like his works of Marilyn Monroe (Twenty-five Coloured Marilyns, 1962), Elvis Presley (1964) and Campbell's soup (1961–1962).
Replicas of lost works "Il Gran Cavallo" is a monumental bronze horse, 7 metres (24 feet) high, and a conjectural re-creation of a clay horse that was created in Milan by Leonardo da Vinci for the Ludovico Sforza and intended to be cast in bronze. Leonardo never finished the project because of war with France, and the clay horse was ruined. This representation was based on a number of Leonardo's preparatory drawings. It was created in 1999 in New York and given to the city of Milan.
Presentation of existing works The Last Supper is to be the subject of an animation by British film-maker Peter Greenaway, who plans to project interpretative images onto its surface to enliven the scene in which all the apostles but Judas question Jesus' statement that one of them will betray him.
Representations of Leonardo in art The Death of Leonardo
The story of Leonardo dying in the arms of the French king Francis I, although apocryphal,King Francis cannot have been present because the day after Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the King at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey distant from Clos Luce. appealed to the self-image of later French kings and to French history painters of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Apparently on commission from Louis XVI,According to François-Charles Joullain fils, Réflexions sur la peinture et la gravure 1786:2. Ménageot painted The Death of Leonardo da Vinci in the arms of Francis I in 1781, setting it in a background of classical statuary. This painting, which was the triumph of the Salon of 1781, included a portrayal of the Borghese Gladiator (Ménageot probably having seen it at the Villa Borghese during his stay at the French Academy in Rome from 1769 to 1774), although this was an anachronism since Leonardo died in 1519, about ninety years before the statue was discovered.
The 1818 painting The Death of Leonardo da Vinci by the French painter, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, depicts the scene of Leonardo's death shown taking place in the home Clos Lucé, which was provided for him at Amboise by King Francis I. The King is shown supporting Leonardo's head as he dies, as described by Vasari, watched by the Dauphin who is comforted by a cardinal. A distraught young man may represent Leonardo's pupil Melzi.
The treatment of this subject by Ingres is indicative of Leonardo's iconic status and specifically that he was of particular significance to the school of French Classicism. A number of his paintings had passed into the Royal collection and certain elements of them were much imitated. Leonardo's manner of soft shading known as sfumato was particularly adapted by Ingres, Jacques-Louis David and their followers. An influential painting was Leda and the swan, now regarded as by a pupil of Leonardo but then generally accepted as the master's work.
Statues A monument to Leonardo was erected in 1872 in Piazza del Scala, Milan. It comprises five marble statues by Pietro Magni, of Leonardo and his pupils Cesare da Sesto, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Marco d'Oggiono and "Andrea Salaino", and four reliefs depicting scenes in Leonardo's life. A statue of Leonardo by the Bulgarian sculptor Assen Peikov stands outside Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport in Rome.
References in other media
Novels and short stories The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (1901) by Dmitry Merezhkovsky. The Second Mrs. Giaconda (1975) by E. L. Konigsburg is a children's novel about why Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa. Leonardo Da Vinci: Detective is a short story by Theodore Mathieson, which portrays him using his genius to solve a murder during his time in France. Pasquale's Angel by Paul J. McAuley, set in an alternate universe Florence, portrays Leonardo as "the Great Engineer", creating a premature Industrial Revolution (see clockpunk). The novel The Memory Cathedral by Jack Dann is a fictional account of a "lost year" in the life of Leonardo. Dann has his genius protagonist create his flying machine. The 1999 novel Pilgrim by Timothy Findley describes the encounters of an immortal named Pilgrim with Leonardo da Vinci and others, as told to Carl Jung. Terry Pratchett's character Leonard of Quirm (or da Quirm) is a pastiche of Leonardo. A talented artist and inventor, Lord Vetinari, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, imprisoned Leonard, as his naïvety regarding the military applications of some of his inventions, particularly his conceptual siege weapons, would have made it dangerous for him to fall into the wrong hands. Leonard's talent for inventing does not extend to names, which are often clunky circumlocutions; for example, his submarine is called a 'Going-Under-the-Water-Safely Device'. Crowley, the demon in Good Omens by Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, owns the original sketch or cartoon of the Mona Lisa and considers it superior to the finished work. Three novels by Martin Woodhouse and Robert Ross feature the adventures of Leonardo da Vinci in the guise of a James Bond-type spy of the Italian Renaissance: The Medici Guns (1974); The Medici Emerald and The Medici Hawks. The Secret Supper (2006) by Javier Sierra explores the symbology of Leonardo's Last Supper, and its threat to the Catholic Church, as he is painting the fresco in 15th century Milan. Black Madonna (1996) by Carl Sargent and Marc Gascoigne, is set in the Shadowrun game universe and portrays Leonardo as still living in the 21st century, blackmailing corporations to finance his inventions. The Medici Seal, a children's novel by Theresa Breslin (2006). In the Children of the Red King series, a Donatella da Vinci married a Bertram Babbington-Bloor. Donatella was the daughter of an Italian magician, but no further connection between Leonardo and Donatella is stated. In Robert Heinlein's 1957 novel The Door Into Summer, Dr. Twitchell recounts a tale of a student whom he displaced in time by 500 years. While there was no way of knowing whether the student went to the past or the future, Dr. Twitchell hints that he believes it was the past due to the student's name—Leonard Vincent. In the novel Saturn's Apprentice by M.A. Lang, an alchemical experiment gone wrong causes Leonardo to be lost in the present day, while back in Renaissance Florence his friend Tomasso Masini desperately tries to save him. Leonardo da Vinci is a significant character in the novels Assassin's Creed: Renaissance (2009) and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood (2010), books based on the video game series Assassin's Creed. Leonardo is portrayed as a close friend of the protagonist, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a Florentine nobleman's son who joined the Assassin Brotherhood after the murder of his father and brothers by the ruling families of Italy, each part of the once thought disbanded Knights Templar. Leonardo helps Ezio decipher encrypted codex pages left behind by legendary master assassin, Altair (the protagonist of the original Assassin's Creed game). Leonardo's flying machine is successfully built and helps Ezio travel across Venice in order to assassinate one of his targets. Leonardo makes a brief appearance in Assassin's Creed: Revelations novel. Ezio and his close friend and fellow Assassin, Niccolò Machiavelli, visit him during the week that he died, present at his side while he dies. Machiavelli recalls a rumour that King Francis cradled his head in his arms as he died, to which Ezio remarked: "Some people – even Kings – will do anything for publicity".
The Da Vinci Code