Leonardo Da Vinci Facts
Leonardo Da Vinci Facts
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| Interesting Leonardo Da Vinci Facts: |
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| Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born in the Vinci region of Florence, Italy. |
| He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. |
| In 1457 he moved into the home of his father and received an education in mathematics and Latin. |
| In 1466 he was apprenticed to the famous Florentine painter, Verrocchio where he learned drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, plaster casting and mechanics as well as painting and sculpting. |
| In 1472 Leonardo became a master craftsman in the guild of St Luke. |
| Leonardo's earliest surviving work in a pen and ink drawing of the Arno valley drawn on August 5, 1473. |
| In January 1478 he was commissioned to paint the Altarpiece for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio and in March 1481 he was hired to paint The Adoration of the Magi for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto. |
| In 1482, while working for Lorenzo de Medici, he created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head that so impressed his patron that De Medici sent it to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan as a gift. |
| Da Vinci was hired by Sforza and worked in Milan for 17 years. |
| During that time he was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. |
| He carried out many projects for the Duke including arranging pageants and designing a dome for the Milan Cathedral. |
| Sforza commissioned a huge equestrian statue and seventy tons of bronze was ordered to complete it. |
| Leonardo made a full-sized model of the horse but it was never cast and in 1494 Sforza gave the bronze to make cannon to defend Milan from Charles VIII. |
| When Milan fell Da Vinci moved to Venice where he was employed as a military architect and engineer. |
| In 1502 he was employed by Cesare Borgia and a military architect and created maps for his patron. |
| He experimented with different types of paint and new techniques, with the disastrous result that many of his paintings did not survive. |
| His scientific notebooks did survive and he designed machines as diverse as an automatic bobbin winder, an armoured vehicle and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. |
| While many of his ideas were ingenious, he did not publish them and they had little direct bearing on science. |
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