Leonardo da Vinci- by Cherith M.

Photo Source: Credit: Red chalk
(about 1514);Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Italy (SCALA/Art Resource) obtained from World Book Online

Leonardo was born in Vinci near Florence, Italy in 1452. He was known as a Renaissance man because he was a master in many different areas. He excelled in art, architecture and mathematics, and was also a skilled engineer, scientist and inventor. The Italian Renaissance was happening during the fifteenth century which was also when Leonardo was born.

When Leonardo was a teenager he was an apprentice to a famous painter and sculptor named Verrocchio. In Verrocchio’s painting, known as the Baptism of Christ, the angel at the left of the painting was painted by Leonardo when he was twenty-two. This showed an amazing future, that Leonardo was going to be a painter.

Even though Leonardo did not complete as many paintings as others, his influence was and still is great. For example many people know about Leonardo’s The Last Supper, and everybody knows about Leonardo’s painting The Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is now hanging in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. The Mona Lisa showed that Leonardo painted with two skills, one called sfumato, in which Leonardo combined colors to make a smokey effect on his painting. The other technique he used was chiaroscuro, in which he used light and darkness to make the painting appear to be 3-D.

His painting skills led him to study the human body. His pictures of the human body helped us understand more about it. A lot of what we know about Leonardo is in thousands of his notebook pages that still exist; some museums have them on display. Leonardo changed human history!

Source: brainpop.com/leonardo/video