Leonardo Da Vinci Left example essay topic

Always thinking, many works unfinished, lived in many places, this was the life of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci had a powerful mind and was a very curious and daring boy. Leonardo was so curious about flying, he jumped off a barn with wings that he made by himself. Leonardo loved nature and exploring. He would also like to draw geometrical shapes. Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 in Vinci, Italy.

Vinci was a farming community with hillsides, growing grapes, fruit trees and olives. His mother was a peasant woman and his father was a notary. He was often alone, exploring and experimenting in the hills and other areas of his home. This gave him a bond and a love of nature that is reflected in all his art and sculpture.

As a teenager, Leonardo was apprenticed to an artist and sculptor, named Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. By the age of twenty-one Leonardo was an accomplished painter and sculptor. He painted many portraits of royalty, dukes, duchesses, kings and queens. His most famous portrait is the 'Mona Lisa'. The subject was the wife of a Florentine merchant. Its fame is due to her strange and mysterious smile.

It is thought that Leonardo used court jesters to make her smile as he worked. Margaret Livingstone, a present-day authority on visual processing, has a scientific explanation about Mona Lisa's smile. When people look at a face, their eye goes to the eyes, and the peripheral vision, (the side vision), which is less accurate, goes to the other areas of the face. So, when someone looks at the eyes of Mona Lisa, the peripheral vision goes to her mouth, and the shadows painted there by Leonardo suggest to the viewer that 'elusive smile'. If you just looked at her mouth, she doesn't seem to be smiling at all. With Leonardo's extensive study of optics, this could have been deliberate, adding to his genius.

Leonardo experimented with different types of paints and plaster. This was probably one of the reasons for his interest in these arts, because he left so many works unfinished. Through his painting and sculpture, he found away to pursue his experiments and use the things he learned, and still be accepted by the society he lived in... By 1503 he worked to aid Florence's war with Pisa.

He designed an aqua duct plan to cut off the water to Pisa so that Florence would win the war. He was then established as a creative and talented engineer. He was often in the employ of the Nobility for his engineering skills. He served as Principal engineer for the Duke of Milan and drew up plans, for portable bridges, ships, armored vehicles, catapults, and other war machines. In 1514's to 1516 Leonardo lived in Rome, and built both toys and machines. He studied optics and tried to make large round mirrors, like the ones used in telescopes.

Craftsmen in Leonardo's time knew how to use and repair familiar machines. Leonardo figured if he could understand how each machine part worked; he could use these parts to make new machines. He was also interested in botany, human anatomy, and used animal parts from a butcher shop to study. He also tried to dissect a human corpse, but got in trouble with the Catholic Church because it was considered a sin. But he was able to develop a model of how the human heart works. Leonardo made sketches and plans of things like a tank, helicopters, a plane, and an arithmetic machine.

These are common machines in our lives. His early thinking about the arithmetic machine was the start of things that came after it like the abacus, the slide rule, the adding machine, the calculator and finally the computer. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in a way that no one else did. He used a technique called mirror writing in which his letters appear backwards. No one knows the true reason why he used mirror writing but he might have tried to make it harder for people to read his notes and get his ideas. He might have been hiding his scientific ideas from the Roman Catholic Church who disagreed with what Leonardo was trying to learn.

In that time people were not suppose to question anything thought to be created by God. Writing left handed from left to right was messy because the ink that he just put down would smear as his hand moved across it and writing in the other direction would prevent smudging On May 2, 1519 in Cloud France, Leonardo da Vinci died. He died of old age. If Leonardo da Vinci were alive today he might try to make artificial organs or a cure for AIDS and cancer. He might try to figure out a way to fly without planes and helicopters or a way to prevent air pollution. Leonardo da Vinci left many unseen notebooks after he died.

All of the notebooks that Leonardo left contained mirror writing. One of the notebooks is in the British Museum and known as the Codex Arundel. These are loose papers, which come from various times of his life, are about the physical and geographical effects of water. Leonardo hoped to write a book about this subject.

The Renaissance was a special time in the history of man. The word renaissance means rebirth. The Renaissance came following the Dark Ages. It was an explosion of creativity in art, literature, science and music. Leonardo da Vinci was born in these times.

He was known as the 'Renaissance Man', because he himself was an 'explosion' of all these things, and brought so much to them. Before the Renaissance, people had to spend their entire lives just struggling to exist. As you can see, Leonardo was a genius. He was extremely open-minded in his thinking. He wanted to know things, just for the sake of knowing them. He put pieces of knowledge together in different and new ways, like pieces of puzzles.

His imagination gave him ideas that were hundreds of years ahead of his time. What we can learn from Leonardo is there is always something to discover in learning new things, and that something can be found in looking at something in many different ways. And each person can be many things throughout their lifetime.