Monday 26 March 2012

Secret Lives: Leonardo da Vinci

(April 15, 1452 to May 2, 1519)

The guise of a genius


WHY ARE some people ticklish? How does it feel to walk on water? Would a fly sound different, if it had  honey on its wings? These and a million other questions constantly buzzed around the brain of one of the world’s greatest creative geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci.

His 1519 gravestone in France reads: “First painter, engineer and architect of the King.” But in reality, Leonardo packed much more into his life. You’ve probably heard of him as the artist behind the‘Mona Lisa’, the most famous painting in the world, known for its model’s mysterious smile. It’s the pride of the Louvre museum in Paris. Was Mona Lisa the real Lisa La Gioconda, a banker’s wife? Was she trying not to laugh at the comedians Leonardo hired to keep her from getting bored while he did her portrait? Nobody knows for sure. But we do know that the artist held on to the portrait all his life.

Leonardo is equally famous for his wall painting of ‘The Last Supper’ in the Italian city of Milan, depicting Christ and his 13 disciples, which took him three years to complete. The 1497 masterpiece still attracts long and winding queues of tourists at the Church of della Grazia, which houses it. Each face looks human enough to touch, each shadow is scientifically placed.

The work has missed destruction by inches time and again. During the French Revolution, Napoleon’s soldiers threw stones at it. A bomb landed close by during World War II. But 500 years of grime has now been removed, inch by inch, in a recent restoration project that took 20 years. Aren’t we lucky it’s still real for us?

If Leonardo hadn’t been an artist, he would have excelled at other skills ~ as a city planner, an architect, an engineer, an inventor, a botanist, an astronomer, even a physician. How come? Because his ever-curious mind darted to and fro in his detailed notebooks, which include 5,000 pages of drawings. These take in flying machines, still on display at Milan’s scientific museum, named after Leonardo. Are there other surprises on these pages? Sure. Sketches of the first cars, bicycles, machine guns, tanks, and even moveable bridges. Wasn’t he amazing?

Very little is known about Leonardo’s childhood, except that he was born in the Italian town of Anchiano in 1452. His father was a lawyer, his mother an unschooled peasant. As a teenager, he was sent to learn painting from Andrea del Verrocchio. Leonardo, who drew angelic faces better than anyone else, so stunned his master that Andrea is said to have thrown down his own brushes and sworn never to paint again.

Neighbours thought Leonardo strange because of his undying curiosity. He dissected corpses from prison executions or from shelters for the homeless to study the human body, though this was banned by the Catholic church. They thought he was influenced by the devil because he wrote left-handed! Leonardo puzzled them further by writing his notes backwards, to keep them private. Wasn’t he cool?

Leonardo was a handsome man with a carefully curled beard, who wore short, rose-coloured robes ~ unlike the long ones others donned. He hated to have paint stains on his fingers and was always clean, in an age when other people didn’t bathe much.

While painting, he often forgot to eat for over a day. When he did, he’d have his favourite, a vegetable and macaroni soup called minestrone. And guess what? He was a vegetarian, aeons before it became fashionable!

Leonardo loved animals and often bought birds in the market. Did he cage them at home? No, he set them free, so that he could study their flight. The thought of flying kept him in high spirits (this was years before the Wright brothers), so did his drawings for a submarine.

While he worked for the royal courts in Italy and France, Leonardo was popular at parties, where he’d rattle off riddles on the spur of the moment. He rode horses, sang well, and even invented his own musical instruments. Once, he brought a strange guest to a party, which made others scream in fright. They imagined it was a dragon, but it was just a large lizard!

Since he never married, Leonardo once adopted a peasant boy for 26 years. He nicknamed the lad, who even stole from his patron, Salai (devil). Whenever Leonardo moved between courts, all he took with him were his notebooks, the ‘Mona Lisa,’ and Salai. Now, isn’t that called travelling light?

Like many of us, Leonardo hated to wake up early. When he had to, he came up with a water-operated alarm clock. Another creation of the wonder man?

Though Leonardo was an awesome sculptor too, most of his work was shattered to smithereens by invading armies. Imagine what we’ve been deprived of! He enjoyed experimenting with new ways of painting. He even started on a fresco or wall painting by an untried method he’d read about. To his horror, soon his colours melted into one another. He hadn’t read the fine print: Don’t try this on walls!

When Leonardo died in 1519 near Amboise in France, his last patron ~ the king of France ~ was shattered. The master’s pupil Francesco da Melzo, who was with the 67-year-old genius when he died, wrote to Leonardo’s half-brothers:  “It is a hurt to anyone to lose such a man, for nature cannot again produce his like.”

The world hasn’t seen another one-man wonder like Leonardo da Vinci since. Isn’t that incredible?

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