Leonardo da Vinci

Early Life and Training:

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was born in Anchiano, Tuscany (now Italy), close
to the town of Vinci that provided the surname we associate with him today. In
his own time he was known just as Leonardo or as Il Florentine, since he lived
near Florenceand was famed as an artist, inventor and thinker.
Leonardo da Vinci also he was a painter, architect, inventor, and student of all
things scientific. His natural genius crossed so many disciplines that he
epitomized the term Renaissance man. Today he remains best known for his
art, including two paintings that remain among the worlds most famous and
admired, Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Art, da Vinci believed, was indisputably
connected with science and nature. Largely self-educated, he filled dozens of
secret notebooks with inventions, observations and theories about pursuits from
aeronautics to anatomy. But the rest of the world was just beginning to share
knowledge in books made with moveable type, and the concepts expressed in
his notebooks were often difficult to interpret. As a result, though he was lauded
in his time as a great artist, his contemporaries often did not fully appreciate his
geniusthe combination of intellect and imagination that allowed him to create,
at least on paper, such inventions as the bicycle, the helicopter and an airplane
based on the physiology and flying capability of a bat. Leonardo da Vincis 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 Vincis half-siblings. Da Vincis parents
werent married, and his mother, Caterina, a peasant, wed another man while da
Vinci was very young and began a new family. Beginning around age 5, he lived
on the estate in Vinci that belonged to the family of his father, Ser Peiro, an
attorney and notary. Da Vincis uncle, who had a particular appreciation for
nature that da Vinci grew to share, also helped raise him.

Early Career:
Da Vinci received no formal education 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. For
about a decade, da Vinci refined his painting and sculpting techniques and
trained in mechanical arts. When he was 20, in 1472, the painters guild of
Florence offered da Vinci membership, but 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 Florences San Donato, a
Scopeto monastery. However, da Vinci never completed that piece, because
shortly thereafter 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. The family asked da Vinci to create a magnificent 16-foot-tall
equestrian statue, in bronze, to honor dynasty founder Francesco Sforza. 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.Leonardo da Vinci: The Last Supper and Mona Lisa
Although relatively few of da Vincis paintings and sculptures survivein part
because his total output was quite smalltwo of his extant works are among the
worlds most well-known and admired paintings.
The first is da Vincis The Last Supper, painted during his time in Milan, from
about 1495 to 1498. A tempera and oil mural on plaster, The Last Supper was
created for the refectory of the citys Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Also
known as The Cenacle, this work measures about 15 by 29 feet and is the
artists 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
paintings stellar features is each Apostles distinct emotive expression and body
language. Its composition, in which Jesus is centered among yet isolated from
the Apostles, has influenced generations of painters.
When Milan was invaded by the French in 1499 and the Sforza family fled, da
Vinci escaped as well, possibly first to Venice and then to Florence. There, he
painted a series of portraits that included La Gioconda, a 21-by-31-inch work
thats best known today as Mona Lisa. Painted between approximately 1503
and 1506, the woman depictedespecially because of her mysterious slight
smilehas been the subject of speculation for centuries. In the past she was
often thought to be Mona Lisa Gherardini, a courtesan, but current scholarship
indicates that she was Lisa del Giocondo, wife of Florentine merchant Francisco
del Giocondo. Today, the portraitthe only da Vinci portrait from this period that
survivesis housed at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, where it attracts
millions of visitors each year.
Around 1506, da Vinci returned to Milan, along with a group of his students and
disciples, including young aristocrat Francesco Melzi, who would be Leonardos
closest companion until the artists death. Ironically, the victor over the Duke
Ludovico Sforza, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, commissioned da Vinci to sculpt his
grand equestrian-statue tomb. It, too, was never completed (this time because
Trivulzio scaled back his plan). Da Vinci spent seven years in Milan, followed by
three more in Rome after Milan once again became inhospitable because of
political strife.

Leonardo da Vinci: Philosophy of Interconnectedness

Da Vincis interests ranged far beyond fine art. He studied nature, mechanics,
anatomy, physics, architecture, weaponry and more, often creating accurate,
workable designs for machines like the bicycle, helicopter, submarine and
military tank that would not come to fruition for centuries. He was, wrote
Sigmund Freud, like a man who awoke too early in the darkness, while the
others were all still asleep.

Probably because of his abundance of diverse interests, da Vinci failed to

complete a significant number of his paintings and projects. He spent a great
deal of time immersing himself in nature, testing scientific laws, dissecting
bodies (human and animal) and thinking and writing about his observations. At
some point in the early 1490s, da Vinci began filling notebooks related to four
broad themespainting, architecture, mechanics and human anatomycreating
thousands of pages of neatly drawn illustrations and densely penned
commentary, some of which (thanks to left-handed mirror script) was
indecipherable to others.
The notebooksoften referred to as da Vincis manuscripts and codicesare
housed today in museum collections after having been scattered after his death.
The Codex Atlanticus, for instance, includes a plan for a 65-foot mechanical bat,
essentially a flying machine based on the physiology of the bat and on the
principles of aeronautics and physics. Other notebooks contained da Vincis
anatomical studies of the human skeleton, muscles, brain, and digestive and
reproductive systems, which brought new understanding of the human body to a
wider audience. However, because they werent published in the 1500s, da
Vincis notebooks had little influence on scientific advancement in the
Renaissance period.

Later Years:
Da Vinci left Italy for good in 1516, when French ruler Francis I generously offered
him the title of Premier Painter and Engineer and Architect to the King, which
afforded him the opportunity to paint and draw at his leisure while living in a
country manor house, the Chteau of Cloux, near Amboise in France. Although
accompanied by Melzi, to whom he would leave his estate, the bitter tone in
drafts of some of his correspondence from this period indicate that da Vincis
final years may not have been very happy ones. (Melzi would go on to marry and
have a son, whose heirs, upon his death, sold da Vincis estate.)

Da Vinci died at Cloux (now Clos-Luc) in 1519 at age 67. He was buried nearby
in the palace church of Saint-Florentin. The French Revolution nearly obliterated
the church, and its remains were completely demolished in the early 1800s,
making it impossible to identify da Vincis exact gravesite.

Raphael
A leading figure of Italian High Renaissance classicism, Raphael is best known for
his "Madonnas," including the Sistine Madonna, and for his large figure
compositions in the Palace of the Vatican in Rome.
Synopsis:
Raphael was born on April 6, 1483, in Urbino, Italy. He became Perugino's
apprentice in 1504. Living in Florence from 1504 to 1507, he began painting a
series of "Madonnas." In Rome from 1509 to 1511, he painted the Stanza della
Segnatura ("Room of the Signatura") frescoes located in the Palace of the
Vatican. He later painted another fresco cycle for the Vatican, in the Stanza
d'Eliodoro ("Room of Heliodorus"). In 1514, Pope Julius II hired Raphael as his
chief architect. Around the same time, he completed his last work in his series of
the "Madonnas," an oil painting called the Sistine Madonna. Raphael died in
Rome on April 6, 1520.

Early Life and Training:

Italian Renaissance painter and architect Raphael was born Raffaello Sanzio on
April 6, 1483, in Urbino, Italy. At the time, Urbino was a cultural center that
encouraged the Arts. Raphaels father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter for the Duke
of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro. Giovanni taught the young Raphael basic
painting techniques and exposed him to the principles of humanistic philosophy
at the Duke of Urbinos court. In 1494, when Raphael was just 11 years old,
Giovanni died. Raphael then took over the daunting task of managing his fathers
workshop. His success in this role quickly surpassed his fathers; Raphael was
soon considered one of the finest painters in town. As a teen, he was even

commissioned to paint for the Church of San Nicola in the neighboring town of
Castello.
In 1500 a master painter named Pietro Vannunci, otherwise known as Perugino,
invited Raphael to become his apprentice in Perugia, in the Umbria region of
central Italy. In Perugia, Perugino was working on frescoes at the Collegio del
Cambia. The apprenticeship lasted four years and provided Raphael with the
opportunity to gain both knowledge and hands-on experience. During this period,
Raphael developed his own unique painting style, as exhibited in the religious
works the Mond Crucifixion (circa 1502), The Three Graces (circa 1503), The
Knights Dream (1504) and the Oddi altarpiece, Marriage of the Virgin, completed
in 1504.

Paintings:
In 1504, Raphael left his apprenticeship with Perugino and moved to Florence,
where he was heavily influenced by the works of the Italian painters Fra
Bartolommeo, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Masaccio. To Raphael, these
innovative artists had achieved a whole new level of depth in their composition.
By closely studying the details of their work, Raphael managed to develop an
even more intricate and expressive personal style than was evident in his earlier
paintings.

From 1504 through 1507, Raphael produced a series of "Madonnas," which

extrapolated on Leonardo da Vinci's works. Raphael's experimentation with this
theme culminated in 1507 with his painting, La belle jardinire. That same year,
Raphael created his most ambitious work in Florence, the Entombment, which
was evocative of the ideas that Michelangelo had recently expressed in his Battle
of Cascina. Raphael moved to Rome in 1508 to paint in the Vatican "Stanze"
("Room"), under Pope Julius IIs patronage. From 1509 to 1511, Raphael toiled
over what was to become one of the Italian High Renaissances most highly
regarded fresco cycles, those located in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura
("Room of the Signatura"). The Stanza della Segnatura series of frescos include
The Triumph of Religion and The School of Athens. In the fresco cycle, Raphael
expressed the humanistic philosophy that he had learned in the Urbino court as a
boy.
In the years to come, Raphael painted an additional fresco cycle for the Vatican,
located in the Stanza d'Eliodoro ("Room of Heliodorus"), featuring The Expulsion
of Heliodorus, The Miracle of Bolsena, The Repulse of Attila from Rome and The
Liberation of Saint Peter. During this same time, the ambitious painter produced
a successful series of "Madonna" paintings in his own art studio. The famed
Madonna of the Chair and Sistine Madonna were among them.

Architecture:

By 1514, Raphael had achieved fame for his work at the Vatican and was able to
hire a crew of assistants to help him finish painting frescoes in the Stanza
dellIncendio, freeing him up to focus on other projects. While Raphael continued
to accept commissions -- including portraits of popes Julius II and Leo X -- and his
largest painting on canvas, The Transfiguration (commissioned in 1517), he had
by this time begun to work on architecture. After architect Donato Bramante died
in 1514, the pope hired Raphael as his chief architect. Under this appointment,
Raphael created the design for a chapel in Sant Eligio degli Orefici. He also
designed Romes Santa Maria del Popolo Chapel and an area within Saint Peters
new basilica.
Raphaels architectural work was not limited to religious buildings. It also
extended to designing palaces. Raphaels architecture honored the classical
sensibilities of his predecessor, Donato Bramante, and incorporated his use of
ornamental details. Such details would come to define the architectural style of
the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods.

Death:
On April 6, 1520, Raphaels 37th birthday, he died suddenly and unexpectedly of
mysterious causes in Rome, Italy. He had been working on his largest painting on
canvas, The Transfiguration (commissioned in 1517), at the time of his death.
When his funeral mass was held at the Vatican, Raphael's unfinished
Transfiguration was placed on his coffin stand. Raphaels body was interred at
the Pantheon in Rome, Italy.
Following his death, Raphael's movement toward Mannerism influenced painting
styles in Italys advancing Baroque period. Celebrated for the balanced and
harmonious compositions of his "Madonnas," portraits, frescoes and architecture,
Raphael continues to be widely regarded as the leading artistic figure of Italian
High Renaissance classicism.

Leonardo da Vinci and

Raphael

Name : Ebtihaj Mohammed Albahri

Id: 2010311051
Cores: hist 112