How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci’s great and innovative art pieces that reformed mankind

Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, inventor, military engineer, and draftsman. Gifted with a curious mind and a brilliant intellect, da Vinci studied the laws of science and nature, which greatly informed his work. His drawings, paintings, and other works have influenced countless artists and engineers over the centuries.

His natural genius crossed so many disciplines that he epitomized the term “Renaissance man.”

Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance artist and engineer, known for paintings like “The Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa,” and for inventions such as the flying machine.

Leonardo da Vinci was deeply connected with science and nature, he was a self-learner, he had written dozens of notebooks with secret inventions, observations, and theories relating to noble pursuits from aeronautics to anatomy.

Many of the concepts in his books were found complicated for his other contemporaries and were difficult to interpret, and though he was lauded in his time as a great artist, his contemporaries often did not fully appreciate his genius.

Early Life

Leonardo Da Vinci was born in a farmhouse outside the village of Anchiano in Tuscany, Italy on April 15, 1452. Leonardo da Vinci’s father, an attorney, and notary, and his peasant mother were never married to one another, and Leonardo was the only child they had together. With other partners, they had a total of 17 other children, da Vinci’s half-siblings.

At the age of five, he moved to his father’s estate in nearby Vinci(from which his surname was inspired), where he lived with his uncle and grandparents.

He received little education, nothing beyond basic reading, writing, and math, but his father appreciated his artistic talent and apprenticed him at around age 15 to the noted sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio, of Florence.

Despite getting membership offers from several people he remained with Verrocchio until he became an independent master in 1478. Around 1482, he began to paint his first commissioned work, The Adoration of the Magi, for Florence’s San Donato, a Scopeto monastery. However, he was unable to complete that piece as he relocated to Milan to work for the ruling Sforza clan, serving as an engineer, painter, architect, designer of court festivals, and most notably, a sculptor.

Da Vinci worked on the project on and off for 12 years, and in 1493 a clay model was ready to display. Imminent war, however, meant repurposing the bronze earmarked for the sculpture into cannons, and the clay model was destroyed in the conflict after the ruling Sforza duke fell from power in 1499.

Paintings

The Last Supper

Around 1495, Ludovico Sforza, then the Duke of Milan, commissioned da Vinci to paint “The Last Supper” on the back wall of the dining hall inside the monastery of Milan’s Santa Maria Delle Grazie.

The masterpiece, which took approximately three years to complete, captures the drama of the moment when Jesus informs the Twelve Apostles gathered for Passover dinner that one of them would soon betray him. The range of facial expressions and the body language of the figures around the table bring the masterful composition to life.

The Last Supper is also known as “The Cenacle,” this piece measures about 15 by 29 feet and is the artist’s only surviving fresco. It depicts the Passover dinner during which Jesus Christ addresses the Apostles and says, “One of you shall betray me.”

One of the painting’s stellar features is each Apostle’s distinct emotive expression and body language. Its composition, in which Jesus is centered among yet isolated from the Apostles, has influenced generations of painters.

Mona Lisa

In 1503 Leonardo Da Vinci started to work on what would become his most popular piece — the “Mona Lisa.”, It was a privately commissioned work which is characterized by an enchanting smile of a woman in the portrait, the ‘sfumato’ technique was applied by Leonardo Da Vinci in order to make subtle gradations.

Adding to the allure of the “Mona Lisa” is the mystery surrounding the identity of the subject. Princess Isabella of Naples, an unnamed courtesan, and da Vinci’s own mother have all been put forth as potential sitters for the masterpiece. It has even been speculated that the subject wasn’t a female at all but da Vinci’s longtime apprentice Salai dressed in women’s clothing.

It is widely believed by the historians that ‘Mona Lisa’ could be a pregnant woman, and some also believe that she is a woman who suffered through jaundice.

A biographer once shared that it might be a picture of Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant. The painting’s original Italian name — “La Gioconda” — supports the theory, but it’s still far from certain.

Engineering

Based on the documents from his notebook that have survived, it is evidently showing us his ideas for a wide range of devices. His sketches and ideas about devices such as gliders, helicopters, parachutes, diving suits, cranes, gearboxes, and many types of weapons of war.

Da Vinci had a strong imagination, he had an understanding of the emerging principles of science and engineering, and his superlative draftsmanship to devise new uses for levers, gears, pulleys, bearings, and springs. His creations were designed to be useful but also to be appealing to his patrons: the warring dukes and kings of late 15th- and early 16th-century France and Italy.

Although he despised war, he was employed to work for the military for most of his time, devising new defenses and weapons. His sketches show a prototype “tank” circa 1485, with armor plating and the ability to fire in any direction.

His sketches for an “aerial screw” (1486–90) anticipate the idea of the helicopter, although it was not the first demonstration of vertical flight. Human-powered flying machines that mimicked bird flight, were a fascination for him — and he drew many beautiful and innovative designs.

Most of Leonardo’s designs were never built or tested, although modern-day attempts to recreate them have met with mixed success, including some spectacular failures. His imagination was so far ahead of its time that it would take four centuries before ideas such as the tank became practical through the development of light and strong materials.

Mathematician

Da Vinci always considered himself more of a scientist than an artist, he made use of mathematical principals into his art such as, linear perspective — parallel lines, the horizon line, and a vanishing point — to create the illusion of depth on a flat surface. In The Annunciation, for example, he uses perspective to emphasize the corner of a building, a walled garden, and a path.

Leonardo had heard about Vitruvius’s work, that with the navel as the center, a perfect circle could be drawn around a body with outstretched arms and legs. He realized that if arm span and height are related, the person would fit perfectly inside a square.

His Vitruvian Man took these observations and attempted to solve the problem of “squaring” a circle. It’s not, in fact, possible to do this exactly (squaring the circle is a metaphor for the impossible), but he managed to come very close.

‘’Golden ratio’’ a popular concept in the area of mathematics which appears in nature, such as the spiral arrangement of leaves. It was first recognized by Luca Pacioli in 1509 that the use of the Golden Ratio led to aesthetically-pleasing images. Da Vinci believed it was critical in providing accurate proportionality, and it underpins the structure of the Mona Lisa.

With no proper schooling or a decent household, how Leonardo Da Vinci brought together the whole concept of Mathematics and Arts is remarkable.

“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

He is if not the best, one of the most inspiring men to go down in history.