Imagine a small town nestled in the Tuscan countryside.  Its fortified walls of stone bleached by sunshine are surrounded by slopes of olive trees, their silver leaves flickering in an invisible breeze.  The town’s streets are narrow and cobbled, its skyline pierced by a church campanile and several private family towers–squared vertical forts to which squabbling clans can retreat after street fights in order to pelt one another with insults and rotting fruit.  The sun is intense and the air is laced with the scents of unwashed bodies and house-kept farm animals, pushed aside every now and then by a clean wind from the distant hills.

It was here, in the small town of Anchiano, near Vinci and thirty miles from Florence, that Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452.  Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero da Vinci, was a wealthy Florentine notary.  His mother, Caterina, was a local peasant woman who had been seduced out of wedlock by Piero.  Ser Piero took custody of his illegitimate son soon after childbirth, and Caterina went on to marry another man, someone whose social standing was more appropriate to her own.  But the separate lives of Ser Piero and Caterina seemed to work out happily—each went on to have numerous children with their respective future spouses, leaving Leonardo with seventeen half-siblings.

When Leonardo was ten or twelve he moved with his father to Florence, where he was given a humanistic education.  He showed talent in rhetoric and music, particularly on the lyre-like instrument, the seven-stringed, bow-played lira da braccio, at which he would later excel, performing at the great courts of Italy.  But due to his obvious artistic talents, in 1466, at the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to the sculptor and painter, Andrea del Verrocchio.

The life of an apprentice in a master’s workshop, or bottega, was one of constant work and instruction.  He would live, along with other apprentices typically aged 14-17, in lodgings provided by the master.  His fellow apprentices included Pietro Perugino and Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Sandro Botticelli would pop in regularly.^[i] Leonardo’s tasks were occasionally mundane, such as grinding pigments according to the master’s preferred recipes, applying the preparatory white gesso layer to panels before the master begins a painting, and running errands and picking up groceries.  But he was also given assignments that were more purposeful: lessons in drawing, painting, proportions, mathematics, and sculpture with the master himself, and careful assignments, both to practice techniques and to paint portions of the work commissioned of the master.  Apprentices and assistants would often be charged with painting in landscapes, still-lifes, architectural features, and sometimes secondary figures, all under the master’s supervision.  The master would design the commissioned painting, and would handle the most difficult aspects, notably faces and hands, but the more peripheral elements might be entirely the work of assistants.  For some works the master might barely touch the painting, and yet a work emerging from Verrocchio’s studio would be considered a Verrocchio.  This would lead to potential confusion in the future, as it is thought that Leonardo may have painted multiple versions of the Mona Lisa, or that his apprentices may have produced identical copies—one of which might have saved the original Mona Lisa from theft by the Nazis during the Second World War.

In Verrocchio’s studio, fitted out for both painting and sculpture commissions, Leonardo would scamper among leather-smocked assistants, the smell of linseed oil and varnish saturating the still air.  In one corner an apprentice might be grinding fresh pigments, charcoal for black or vermillion for red, or the extremely rare and expensive lapis lazuli for a bright blue.  Lapis lazuli was normally reserved only for the garments of the Virgin Mary, as it was the single most expensive item by weight that one could buy in the Renaissance, and had to be carried along dangerous, bandit-pocked trade routes from what is now Afghanistan.

There would be a separate section of the studio dedicated to sculpture, full of sketches, clay, wax, and fabric which could be soaked in wet clay and then modeled onto a wax mockup of the final sculpture.  Poplar panels would sit carefully in a corner, padded by blankets so as not to damage them before they could be painted—these were expensive, the work of master planers, and were painstakingly prepared in order to last for centuries.  The panels would be covered in gesso, a mixture of plaster and glue made from boiling leftover bits of animals (hooves and such), which would act as a white base layer upon which to paint.

Verrocchio (1435-1488) was arguably the most important artist in Florence in the 1460s, with a lively studio producing both sculpture (in bronze and marble but also in gold) and painting.  He was particularly fond of Leonardo, and so impressed with his abilities that he gave Leonardo a cameo role in an important commission for a Baptism of Christ (now in the Uffizi), one which would prove a star turn—later to Verrocchio’s dismay.

Between 1472 and 1475, Verrocchio worked on the Baptism of Christ, a commission for the church of San Salvi, and later transferred to the Vallombrosan Sisterhood in Santa Verdiana.^[ii] Verrocchio much preferred sculpture to painting—he produced relatively few paintings in his career, and is best remembered for his work in bronze, particularly his elegant, majestic David (now in the Bargello) which gives Michelangelo’s more famous rendition of the subject a run for its money, and his Doubting of Saint Thomas, an intricate sculpture group which is still displayed on the outside of Orsanmichele in Florence.

Giorgio Vasari, the great biographer of the Renaissance artists, painter and architect, wrote of the Baptism of Christ in 1550:

At the time [of Leonardo’s apprenticeship], Andrea [del Verrocchio] was completing a panel showing Saint John Baptizing Christ in which Leonardo worked on an angel holding some garments, and although he was such a young boy, he completed the angel in such a way that Leonardo’s angel was far superior to the figures painted by Andrea.  This was the reason why Andrea would never touch colors again, angered that a young boy understood them better than he.^[iii]

This oft-repeated anecdote, of the apprentice out-doing the master and showing his precocious genius, might be considered hyperbole, but in this case it is likely true.  Verrocchio made very few paintings, and it is clear even to the untrained eye that the kneeling angel in the Baptism of Christ is by a different hand, and is frankly far better than the other figures in the painting.

Leonardo was in ascendance.  He was next asked to create a cartoon, a full-size preparatory drawing (from the Italian cartone, or large piece of paper) of Adam and Eve that would be transferred onto a woven curtain at a Flemish studio, ultimately destined for the King of Portugal.  Of this Vasari wrote:

He drew with his brush, in chiaroscuro illuminated by lead white, a lush meadow with a number of animals, and it can truly be said that genius could not create anything in the divine realm equal in precision and naturalness.  There is a fig tree, which besides the foreshortening of its leaves and the appearance of its branches, is drawn with such love that the mind is dazzled by the thought that a man could possess such patience.^[iv]

Leonardo was on a roll, and his time in Verrocchio’s studio was clearly paying off.

One other anecdote from Vasari smacks of the “creation myths” that often surround geniuses, but which could very well be true.  Leonardo’s father is said to have acquired a round shield, made of fig wood by a local farmer who lived near the family’s villa in Vinci.  Ser Piero asked Leonardo to paint something on it, without specifying the subject.  Leonardo chose the face of Medusa, caught in a stupefying scream, having just been beheaded by Perseus, as per the Greek legend, her hair comprised of writhing snakes.  This was a doubly clever subject to choose for a shield because, according to legend, anyone who looked at Medusa directly would be turned to stone.  To circumvent this outcome, Perseus used a shiny, polished shield as a mirror, looking at Medusa only through the reflection in the shield, and thereby beheading her without being petrified himself.  Medusa’s own face in the shield would have been the last thing she saw, and that image is what Leonardo captured.  Though Leonardo’s “Medusa Shield” is not extant, Caravaggio took it upon himself more than a century later to bring to life his own version of the anecdote, creating his famous Medusa Shield which is now in Uffizi.^[v]

Leonardo joined the painter’s guild in Florence in 1472, though he is still listed as an assistant in Verrocchio’s studio as late as 1476.  It was in 1477 that he became an independent master.

His first independent commission, an altarpiece for the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio was never executed.  In 1481 he began an Adoration of the Magi for the Monastery of San Donato a Scopeto, which was also unfinished.  During this period he painted the Benois Madonna (1478), a portrait of Ginevra de’Benci (1474, before he had opened his own studio), and an unfinished Saint Jerome (1481).

This would become a trend—beginning works that he would never complete.  Leonardo was blessed with a remarkable, and remarkably hyperactive, imagination.  He was aware of his own limitations and lack of discipline to follow through on a project and see it to its conclusion.  The “patience” on which Vasari remarked with praise was limited to individual aspects of a completed work, but too often Leonardo’s mind would wander to the next project before the first one was done.  The result is that a large percentage of the extant paintings by Leonardo are unfinished.  We can only imagine what he would have accomplished had Ritalin been available in the 15^th century.

Despite his skills in painting, the real money, and the steadiest work, was in engineering and architecture.  Leonardo made more money by performing on the lira da braccio and through offering his services as a military engineer, than he did through painting.

In 1482 Leonardo wrote a self-promotional letter to Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan, the Renaissance equivalent of a job application, describing his inventions and abilities in military engineering: how he could build portable bridges and new multi-shot cannons, armored ships and tanks.  His skills in sculpture were mentioned as a secondary advantage, his paintings barely a consideration in his list of ten categories of work in which he was skilled.^[vi] The Duke leapt at the opportunity to hire this military engineer, who happened also to be an artist.  Leonardo moved to Milan and worked as chief engineer and architect for the Sforza war machine.

But Leonardo was never satisfied with doing only one thing at a time.  His interest in proportions, perspective, the mathematics and scientific definitions of beauty and art, drew him into a wide range of intellectual circles in Milan.  He even collaborated with a mathematician, Luca Pacioli, on publishing a mathematical treatise (Divina Proportione, 1509).  He built very little, and his legacy is in thousands of pages of drawings, sketches, and notes for projects that might be realized but almost none of which, to the best of scholarly knowledge were.

Leonardo took on apprentices at his studio in Milan, and prepared a book on painting, most likely for their benefit, which was first published in 1651.  But while in Milan, painting was a sideline to engineering.  Nevertheless, he created two notable versions of the same painting, Virgin of the Rocks (1483 and 1490—it is unclear as to why Leonardo made two versions, although there was a legal dispute with the original commissioners when Leonardo took too long to finish it).  He rarely finished any paintings (the two Virgin of the Rocks paintings are rare exceptions), drawn away by other matters which his employers found more pressing, such as engineering, or perhaps simply by his over-stimulated mind.

From 1495-97 he painted the Last Supper on the refectory wall of the monastery in Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie.  Oddly he chose to paint in fresco secco, experimenting with the use of oil, rather than the traditional tempera, on dry plaster (rather than wet).  This most famous “fresco” in the world is not, therefore, technically a fresco in the traditional sense—it is actually an oil painting on a wall.  Due to the failure of this unusual painting technique, the Last Supper was already deteriorating by 1500, and it is a miracle that any of it survives today.  The first conservation attempt was in 1726, but this had little effect and may even have caused further problems.^[vii] Earnest, high-tech conservation efforts began in 1977 and continue to this day.

The largest-scale project of Leonardo’s career was partially created, but then destroyed: an enormous monument to Francesco Sforza (Ludovico’s father), in the form of a colossal bronze horse.  A full-scale clay model, twenty-four feet high (7.32 meters), was built in 1495 for display in front of Milan’s Castello Sforzesco.  Leonardo designed an elaborate new system for casting the final sculpture in bronze—it would have been the largest sculpture in the world, a truly magnificent undertaking.  But in December 1499 the Sforza family was driven from Milan by the French army, and the unfinished statue was destroyed, used as a target by French archers and then melted down.  Leonardo returned to Florence in 1500.

In 1502 Leonardo joined the service of Cesare Borgia, the duke of Romagna and the son of Pope Alexander VI.  Once again, Leonardo’s primary tasks were to work as architect and military engineer.  He supervised the fortification of the papal territories in central Italy, and served just behind the front lines, as lead field engineer for the Florentine army when it defeated the Pisans.  In 1503 he served on a committee of artists to determine where Michelangelo’s David, finished the following year and already dubbed the mascot of Florence, should be displayed.

Another of Leonardo’s wondrous but never completed projects was a plan to decorate the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio, a huge frescoed battle scene called Battle of the Anghiari, which was to occupy one wall opposite a huge battle scene by Michelangelo.^[viii] Neither fresco was executed (as far as we know)—the room was meant to act as a sort of informal competition between the two leading painters of Florence.  Michelangelo may have refused to begin because his wall was in shadow, whereas Leonardo’s wall had excellent natural light.

Some think that Leonardo may have at least begun painting his fresco, and that it was walled-in by Vasari when, decades later, he was asked to cover the room in frescoes.  Vasari was such an admirer of Leonardo’s, however, that he would not have willingly destroyed even a fragment of one of his frescoes.  The mystery of the missing fresco is currently under investigation, and there is significant hope that it might be uncovered.[ix]

In addition to his disappearing fresco, Leonardo’s second sojourn in Florence was spent painting a number of portraits, including the Mona Lisa.^[x]

In 1506 Leonardo returned to Milan, now summoned by the French governor of the city, Charles d’Amboise.  He was always in search of a new challenge, and had even once written to the sultan in Turkey, offering his services, as he was most likely keen to try his hand at building a bridge across the Golden Horn.^[xi] But in 1507, now in the service of France, Leonardo was named court painter to King Louis XII, who was then resident in Milan.  For the next six years, Leonardo divided his time between Florence and Milan, where he continued engineering works.  He lived in Rome from 1513-16, working for Pope Leo X.  He was given an apartment in Palazzo Belvedere at the Vatican, and worked primarily on scientific experiments.  This switch to experiments may have had as much to do with the arthritis that Leonardo seems to have developed, as it did with intellectual interests.

In 1516 he moved to France permanently, working for King François I, who was a great art collector and huge admirer of Leonardo, though Leonardo was not François’ first choice for Italian artist-in-residence: he had unsuccessfully wooed Raphael and Michelangelo before Leonardo accepted.  The Italianophile French king allowed Leonardo to do what he liked.  The Italian master drew, sketched, designed, prepared the occasional masque for the French court, and otherwise provided François with more of a trophy than a productive artist—Leonardo made no more paintings that we are aware of.  He lived out his years in the castle of Cloux, near the French royal summer palace of Amboise in the Loire Valley.  He died there 2 May 1519, of unknown natural causes.  All of his belongings that had accompanied him to France, including the Mona Lisa, were bequeathed to his assistant, Gian Giacomo Capretti, nicknamed Salai.  Salai then sold the estate to François I, who seems to have been a friend as well as patron of Leonardo’s.^[xii] Some sources claim that François was in Leonardo’s bedroom when the artist passed away.  The purchase was made through Salai, and the king paid 4000 écus for the collection.

Leonardo left a hugely influential legacy, both artistic and scientific.  Though he produced few paintings, fewer still that he finished, his technique was wildly influential to future painters.  In fact only twenty-two Leonardo paintings are extant, with a further eight documented by currently missing, either lost or destroyed.

This is the first in a series of excerpts from the new book, The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World’s Most Famous Painting, written by Noah Charney and published by ARCA Publications.  It tells the complete criminal history of the Mona Lisa, including the true story of the famous 1911 theft by Vincenzo Peruggia, the 100th anniversary of which is August 21.  Another installment will be published tomorrow, on Leonardo’s artistic legacy.  All profits from the sale of The Thefts of the Mona Lisa support charity.  To order a copy, click here.

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^[i] Donald Sassoon Leonardo and the Mona Lisa Story (Overlook Duckworth 2006), p.28

^[ii] Angela Ottino della Chiesa The Complete Paintings of Leonardo da Vinci (Penguin, 1967)

^[iii] Giorgio Vasari The Lives of the Artists (Oxford University Press, 1998), p.287

^[iv] Ibid., p.287

^[v] Two versions were painted by Caravaggio, one in 1596 and the other in 1597, the latter being the more famous example at the Uffizi.

^[vi] Sassoon (2006), p.30

^[vii] For more on the Last Supper please see Barcilon, Pinin Brambilla et al Leonardo: The Last Supper (University of Chicago Press, 2001)

^[viii] For more on the story of Leonardo’s battle fresco, please see Jones, Jonathan The Lost Battles: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Artistic Duel that Defined the Renaissance (Simon & Schuster 2010)

[ix] The mystery of the missing fresco is currently being investigated by Maurizio Seracini.  Seracini, an Italian bio-engineer, is the director of Editech, the Diagnostic Center for Cultural Heritage in Florence.  He uses state-of-the-art technology to build on old-fashioned detective work and connoisseurship, most famously in his investigation of the Hall of Five-Hundred in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, where he believes that this lost Leonardo fresco may be hidden.  In 1505, Leonardo is thought to have begun his monumental fresco, Battle of Anghiari, a torqued battle scene of riders and swordsmen.  He never finished the fresco, but it was of legendary grandeur.  It is known by a number of copies, the most famous of which is by Rubens.  Michelangelo made a preparatory sketch, but never executed his own planned fresco, as he felt that the lighting situation would result in a disadvantage in this “duel” of the two greatest living artists, each commissioned to paint one side of the great hall.  In 1563 Giorgio Vasari was commissioned to remodel the Palazzo Vecchio, altering the dimensions of the Hall of Five-Hundred and covering the new walls with his own frescoed battle scenes.  As previously mentioned, it seems unthinkable that Vasari, who so admired the work of Leonardo, would destroy Leonardo’s fresco.  But the mystery remains, as that fresco has never been seen since.  In 1975 Maurizio Seracini noticed a tiny bit of text hidden within Vasari’s frescoes, the only text in the enormous room.  It reads “Cerca trova,” or “Seek and you shall find.”  He and many leading Leonardo scholars believe this to be a real clue from Vasari, indicating that he somehow preserved Leonardo’s fresco, while still fulfilling his commission—and that perhaps Leonardo’s fresco is hidden beneath a false wall on which Vasari painted his own.  In the summer of 2010, Seracini finally received permission from the city of Florence to begin his study of what lies behind Vasari’s own priceless fresco (as of this writing, Seracini is still trying to raise sufficient funds for the project). For more on this story, please see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/science/06tier.html

^[x] The painting is variously referred to as Mona Lisa or the Mona Lisa, terms we use interchangeably here.  It is a French and Italian tradition to affectionately refer to women with “the” (la) preceding their surname.  And it is also a habit for tourists to refer to very famous works with “the” preceding the title, such as “the David” for Michelangelo’s sculpture of David.  This tends to discount the many other sculptures of David, but it is a habit nonetheless.

^[xi] Sassoon (2006), p.52

^[xii] He also had with him in France his Saint John (Bacchus), Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and Portrait of a Florentine Lady.

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