The Multifaceted Artist - Genius Leonardo da Vinci

The exceptional prestige of Leonardo da Vinci during his life is universally recognized, especially the masterpieces of his oil paintings he brought to the world. But it is worth pointing out that over the centuries, specially in the romantic nineteenth century, a false image was molded on him that confused the actual features of his personality. Leonardo wanted to surround himself with a mysterious aura, appearing in the judgments of his contemporaries as a magician, but this figure derives above all from the originality and complexity of his work.

The testimonies of his activities are not easy to read. In addition to the few oil paintings, Leonardo da Vinci has left us many drawings, sketches, and notes in which were recorded the different objects of his interest and the branched explorations of his multifaceted thoughts.

The Genius of Science

From all this, the image of a Leonardo with almost supernatural qualities was born, and this myth of universal genius can only be surpassed through a careful historical evaluation concerning the ideas of his time and to the places of his professional training, namely Florence and Milan.

Training in the Florentine territory is of fundamental importance for his subsequent activities. Leonardo da Vinci welcomed and developed a modern conception of art understood as knowledge, founded on scientific and correct principles whose task did not consist in a mechanical imitation of nature, in a simple external mirroring, but in the proper scientific act of understanding and reproduction of its internal laws.

But what transformed Leonardo into an extremely innovative image was his acute spirit of observation and research, which led him to investigate natural phenomena carefully and required art to increasingly broad, in-depth experience of reality outside the repetitive patterns of the trade.

Leonardo da Vinci exalted the value of the experience that even leads him to deny scientific validity to those disciplines that were not based on it, in open controversy with the speculative orientation of the Florentine Neoplatonism.

The Genius of Art

This opposition to Neoplatonism perhaps concerned the reason for the abandonment of Leonardo da Vinci of the city of Florence. In fact, in 1482 he settled in Milan where he found a stimulating environment for his interests and would be involved in the organization and defense of the territory.

He seemed to realize his artistic aspirations in Milan. Professional opportunities allowed him to deepen and enrich his knowledge of the natural world by providing a rigorous scientific basis.

The basis of the revolutionary linguistic solutions of Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo's first Milanese oil painting, aimed to recreate nature not through an external mirroring, but with an in-depth investigation of the phenomena with their reasons included.

Leonardo's artistic activity in the Milan area was mainly found in the court environment. The nobility of the company contacts him to depict people insight and the oil painting Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani was made for an aristocratic lady, lover of Ludovico Sforza.

In the Milanese period, Leonardo performed many portraits, but his most challenging artwork was represented by the pictorial decoration of a wall of the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria Delle Grazie. In these years he gave life to his top famous oil painting Last Supper, probably finished in 1498.

The first part of the Florentine activity of the painter took place within the workshop of Verrocchio and highlights his main cognitive interests prefiguring his use of art as a form of investigation of nature.

The search for a seemingly natural and straightforward composition, but based in reality on a calculated complexity of articulations, is the basis of some drawings and oil paintings of these years depicting Madonna with Child.

The unfinished painting artwork Adoration of the Magi is imposed precisely because of the expressive power of the gestures and faces of the characters. In this oil painting Leonardo focused on the representation of the profound religious significance of the event, offering us one of the most dramatic works of the century. Through a new syntax composed of an unprecedented structuring of dynamic equilibrium, Leonardo da Vinci provided a new interpretation of the Renaissance concept of the work of art as an accomplished organism.

During his second Florentine period, which went from 1503 to 1506, Leonardo played an intense artistic activity rich in stylistic and figurative inventions fundamental for the development of sixteenth-century art.

In these years Leonardo da Vinci created the world famous oil painting Mona Lisa, also called “La Gioconda" to which Vasari spoke with a weak foundation of a certain Mona Lisa who was thought to be Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo’s wife. The oil painting seems to have had a lengthy elaboration on the part of the master who modified it until his death in France.

The theme of the relationship between art and knowledge in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci concerns a different theoretical approach to the rationalism of the fifteenth century and the Florentine Neoplatonism.

The obsession with the mathematical perspective of the former, and the metaphysical conception of the beauty of the latter, give way to a real phenomenology of the visible world.

Leonardo found the superiority of oil paintings on the other arts and the recognition of its cognitive value on the excellence of the sense of sight. This sense was celebrated in its physical character, and it was significant how Leonardo deals with the Platonic theme of the soul's prison body completely reversing its meaning concerning his conception of physical vision.

The sense of sight thus acquired a new dignity as the operation that opens up the world. Precisely because it was based on the view, paintings are connoted like art that reproduce nature with more fidelity. The opening to the world of phenomena excludes any model of absolute mathematical objectivity. Having widened the notion of perspective beyond its geometric formation demonstrates in Leonardo the tendency to respect the fullness of sensitive apparitions, which would be impoverished by the exclusive use of the mathematical perspective.

On the other hand, the theory of aerial perspective represents the instrument in which Leonardo, grasp the truth intrinsic to the manifestation of the object, can render on the canvas, in a more complete and meaningful way, the varied and changing world of unusual appearance.

Leonardo da Vinci's contribution to almost all scientific disciplines was decisive: even in astronomy, he had fundamental insights, such as on the heat of the Sun, on the glitter of the stars, on the Earth, on the Moon, and on the centrality of the Sun, which for many years would have provoked contrasts and oppositions.

But in his writings there are also examples that show his ability to dazzle difficult concepts; at that time it was far from having formulated the laws of gravitation, but Da Vinci already compared the magnetized magnetic planets that attract each other, thus clearly explaining the concept of gravitational attraction.