5


DiScOvErInG HiStOrY


Leonardo as a painter The Duke of Milan agreed to employ him. Once there, Leonardo painted one of his most famous paintings, The Last Supper, on the wall of a church.


In 1499 Leonardo moved back to Florence because Milan had been invaded by the French army and the Duke had been imprisoned. In Florence he painted a portrait of the wife of a Florentine merchant. This painting is called the Mona Lisa and it took Leonardo two years to paint. It is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris and is probably the world’s most famous painting.


The Mona Lisa is quite a small painting as it measures only 77 centimetres in height x 53 centimetres in width.


✣ By the way


The fresco of The Last Supper was damaged when the monks in the monastery cut a doorway through the picture.


✣ By the way


To achieve the soft glow on the faces of his subjects, Leonardo painted at dusk with a linen sheet over his head.


Leonardo’s other interests


Leonardo wrote all his thoughts and ideas into notebooks and so we still have over 5,000 pages of his writings. He studied the stars and planets (astronomy), the rocks in the earth (geology) and plants (botany). He was also interested in how the body works (anatomy). He cut open (dissected) over 30 bodies in his lifetime which helped him to understand how the muscles in the body worked. As a result he was able to paint more realistically.


Later life


In 1513, Leonardo moved to Rome to work for Pope Leo X for three years. He was then invited to the royal court of France by King Francis I. Leonardo died in France in 1519 aged 67. Amazingly he died believing he had offended God because he felt he never fully achieved his potential.


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Fig 5.7 The Mona Lisa was painted using a technique that made the skin of the woman appear soft. This is called sfumato which means smoky in Italian.


Fig 5.8 Anatomy of a man – Leonardo da Vinci was very interested in finding out how the human body worked.


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