Leonardo da Vinci
15 Apr 1452 O.S. – 15 Nov 201763 items
artscienceFrom Vinci to Amboise
The illegitimate son of a Tuscan notary trained in a Florentine workshop, offered himself to the Duke of Milan as a military engineer, and spent his life moving between patrons: Ludovico Sforza, Cesare Borgia, the French governors of Milan, a pope’s brother and a king of France. He finished fewer than twenty paintings and left thousands of notebook pages on anatomy, water, flight and machines.
How it is built
Seven bands show where he lived and whom he served: Florence, Milan under Ludovico, the wandering years with Cesare Borgia inside them, Milan under the French, Rome, Amboise, and finally the half-century his pupil Melzi kept the notebooks. Works are events dated as the catalogues date them; a “give or take” on a date is the honest width of the scholarship. After his death a few events follow the works and papers to the 2017 sale of the Salvator Mundi.
Calendars
Every date of his life is Julian, as the documents give it: his birth on 15 April 1452 and his death on 2 May 1519 are not converted to the Gregorian calendar, which came in 1582. Florence began its year on 25 March (the stile fiorentino), so a Florentine document of January 1477 falls in 1478 by modern count; the three items where that matters are entered as the document writes them. Dates after 1582 are Gregorian.
Threads to follow
painting: the few pictures, finished and notdrawings: from the Arno valley to the map of Imolamanuscripts: the notebooks and what became of themanatomy: dissections in Florence, Pavia and Romeengineering: stages, rivers, fortresses, flightlegend: stories, mostly Vasari’s, that fail the record
As a day well spent gives joyful sleep, so a life well used gives joyful death. — Leonardo, Codex Trivulzianus
Items
Leonardo is born at Vinci
Listed in his grandfather’s tax return
The copper ball goes up on Brunelleschi’s dome
Enrolled in the painters’ Company of St Luke
The earliest dated drawing
The Annunciation
An angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ
Named in an anonymous accusation of sodomy
Ginevra de’ Benci
His first public commission
A hanged conspirator, drawn from life
The Adoration of the Magi, left unfinished
The Virgin of the Rocks is commissioned
The Paradise masque
Lady with an Ermine
The Vitruvian Man
Salaì joins the household
The clay horse is shown
The Last Supper
Drawings for Pacioli’s Divine Proportion
Ludovico gives him a vineyard
French archers shoot at the clay horse
Isabella d’Este sits for a drawing
Venice: a plan to flood the Isonzo
“He cannot bear the brush”
Borgia’s passport
The map of Imola
A margin note dates the Mona Lisa
The Battle of Anghiari is commissioned
On the committee to place Michelangelo’s David
His father dies
Anghiari: painting begins
The Codex on the Flight of Birds
The centenarian’s dissection
The Codex Arundel is begun
The Codex Leicester
The London Virgin of the Rocks is delivered
Dissections at Pavia
Leonardo leaves Milan for Rome
A plan to drain the Pontine Marshes
Barred from dissecting
A mechanical lion for the king
Giuliano de’ Medici dies
A cardinal’s visit
A royal palace for Romorantin
Leonardo makes his will
Leonardo dies at Cloux
Melzi writes to the half-brothers
Buried at Saint-Florentin
- ≈ 65 years
The Codex Atlanticus reaches the Ambrosiana
The Treatise on Painting is printed
- ≈ 259 years
The Mona Lisa is stolen
A bomb hits the Last Supper’s refectory
- ≈ 51 years
Bill Gates buys the Codex Leicester
The Salvator Mundi sells for $450.3 million