While he might now be considered one of the most famous figures from the Renaissance, and perhaps of all human history, Leonardo did not enjoy a particularly successful career, though his prodigious talent was certainly recognized. “They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe,” he groused in one of his notebooks, “but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.” Although he self-deprecatingly referred to himself as an “unlettered man,” he also took immense pride in his unique methodology. Still, throughout his life, Leonardo seemed somewhat ambivalent about his lack of formal education. In this way, he extricated himself from received knowledge and prevailing dogma he approached the world, and his varied projects, with an honest and unbridled curiosity.Īpparently proud of this unschooled approach, he once signed a document “Leonardo da Vinci, disscepolo della sperientia” (“disciple of experience”). Left to his own devices, Leonardo developed an empirical approach to learning that prioritized experience, observation, and experimentation. Other than that, he was largely self-taught. Instead, Leonardo briefly attended a local abacus school to learn commercial math. Had Leonardo become a notary, he would have been sent off to a Latin school to study the classics and humanities. Yet this choice allowed Leonardo to evade the notary profession and instead follow his curiosity as an artist, architect, and inventor. Although Piero’s second child wasn’t born until Leonardo was 24, he never seemed compelled to legitimize Leonardo as his heir, though it was a fairly common practice to do so. Prominent sons born out of wedlock during this time include seven princes from the Este family, as well as Pope Alexander VI, who had many illegitimate children himself, among them the notorious Cesare Borgia, who grew up to become a cardinal and commander of the papal armies (as well as an employer of Leonardo).ĭespite his status as non legittimo, by the age of five, Leonardo lived with his paternal grandfather in Vinci as a generally accepted member of the household (his father conducted his business in nearby Florence). This seems to have at least been true among the upper classes of society. Renaissance Italy was “a golden age for bastards,” historian Jacob Burckhardt claims in his 1860 book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. In fact, a striking number of Renaissance geniuses were non legittimo, including Leon Battista Alberti, Boccaccio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Lippi, and Petrarch, among many others. As Walter Isaacson notes in his biography of the artist, Leonardo “had the good luck to be born out of wedlock.” Had he been the result of a legal union, Leonardo would have followed in his father’s footsteps, like all the males in the family had for at least five generations (Piero’s guild, the Arte dei Giuduci e Notai, also enforced exclusionary moral rules that prohibited bastards). On April 15, 1452, Leonardo da Vinci was born to Piero da Vinci, a prominent notary, and Caterina Lippi, an unmarried local peasant, in a small town about 20 miles outside of Florence. Below, we delve into some of the lesser-known details surrounding the ultimate Renaissance Man. Other aspects of Leonardo’s life and work, however, can help to demystify the man behind the legend. His obsessive observations of the natural world led to idiosyncratic-and now legendary-designs for proto-flying machines unprecedentedly accurate anatomical drawings, culled from cadaver dissections and a handful of masterful, psychologically complex artworks. Though he rarely wrote about himself or his feelings in his notebooks, Leonardo’s prolific, forward-thinking experiments attest to his being a feverishly creative and relentlessly curious individual, unmoored from his era’s philosophies and social customs. In a forthcoming biopic adapted from Walter Isaacson’s exhaustive recent biography, Leonardo DiCaprio will take his own stab at a definitive portrayal. He alternately appears as a fantastical inventor, an ambitious artist with bitter rivalries, a kindly eccentric, or a cryptic, cultish puzzle maker. Through an endless litany of movies, TV shows, biographies, conspiratorial novels, and experiential exhibitions, the innovative polymath takes wildly different forms. Although he left behind thousands of notebook pages filled with all kinds of observations on art, nature, and life, Leonardo da Vinci remains something of an enigma.
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