LEONARDO DA VINCI

born 1452, Vinci, Republic of Florence [now in Italy] died May 2, 1519, Cloux, France Self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, chalk drawing, 1512; in the Palazzo Reale, Turin, Italy. Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. His Last Supper (149597) and Mona Lisa (150306) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time. The unique fame that Leonardo enjoyed in his lifetime and that, filtered and purified by historical criticism, has remained undimmed to the present day is based on the equally unique universality of his spirit. Leonardo's universality is more than many-sidedness. True, at the time of the Renaissance and the period of humanism, many-sidedness was a highly esteemed quality; but it was by no means rare. Many other good artists possessed it. Leonardo's universality, on the other hand, was a spiritual force, peculiarly his own, that generated in him an unlimited desire for knowledge and guided his thinking and behaviour. An artist by disposition and endowment, he found that his eyes were his main avenue to knowledge; to Leonardo, sight was man's highest sense organ because sight alone conveyed the facts of experience immediately, correctly, and with certainty. Hence, every phenomenon perceived became an object of knowledge. Saper vedere (knowing how to see) became the great theme of his studies of man's works and nature's creations. His creativity reached out into every realm in which graphic representation is used: he was painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer. But he went even beyond that. His superb intellect, his unusual powers of observation, and his mastery of the art of drawing led him to the study of nature itself, which he pursued with method and penetrating logicand in which his art and his science were equally revealed.