Creating a smile
ADITI DE
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The stories in this new monthly column examine the life and times of creative minds. We begin with Leonardo da Vinci...
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At the Louvre museum in Paris... she continues to smile.
Why are some people ticklish? How does it feel to walk on water? Would a fly sound different with honey-coated wings? These and a million other questions constantly buzzed around the brain of one of the world's greatest creative geniuses, Leonardo da Vinci.
His 1519 gravestone in France reads: "First painter, engineer and architect of the King." But Leonardo packed much more into his life. You've probably heard of his famed `Mona Lisa' painting at the Louvre museum in Paris, known for its model's mysterious smile. Was Mona Lisa, the banker's wife Lisa La Gioconda, trying not to laugh at the comedians Leonardo hired to keep her from getting bored while he did her portrait? Nobody knows for sure. But we do know that the artist held on to the portrait all his life.
Leonardo is equally famous for his 1497 wall painting of `The Last Supper' in the Italian city of Milan, depicting Christ and his disciples, which took him three years to complete. The long and winding queues of tourists at the Church of della Grazia, which houses it, marvel at each face that looks human enough to touch, each shadow that is scientifically placed. Over the past 20 years, a restoration project removed its 500 years of grime, inch by inch.
If Leonardo hadn't been an artist, he would have still excelled — as a city planner, an architect, an engineer, an inventor, a botanist, an astronomer, even a physician. His ever-curious mind darted to and fro in his detailed notebooks, which include 5,000 pages of drawings. These take in flying machines, still on display at Milan's scientific museum, named after Leonardo. Are there other surprises on these pages? Sure. There are sketches of the first cars, bicycles, machine guns, tanks, unusual musical instruments, and even moveable bridges. Very little is known about Leonardo's childhood, except that he was born in the Italian town of Anchiano in 1452. His father was a lawyer, his mother an unschooled peasant. The teenaged Leonardo, who was sent to learn painting from Andrea del Verrocchio, so stunned his master by drawing perfect angelic faces that Andrea vowed never to paint again.
Propelled by curiosity, Leonardo dissected corpses from prison executions or from shelters for the homeless to study the human body, though the Catholic church banned this. Neighbours thought he was influenced by the devil because he wrote left-handed! Leonardo puzzled them further by writing his notes backwards, to keep them secret. Wasn't he cool?
Leonardo was a handsome man with a carefully curled beard, who wore short, rose-coloured robes — unlike the long ones others donned. He hated to have paint stains on his fingers and was always clean, in an age when other people didn't bathe much.
While painting, he often forgot to eat for days. When he did, he'd have his favourite, a vegetable and macaroni soup called minestrone. And guess what? He was a vegetarian, long before it became fashionable!
Leonardo loved animals and often bought birds in the market.No, he set them free, so that he could study their flight. He once brought a strange guest to a French court party, which made others scream in fright. They imagined it was a dragon, but it was just a large lizard! After Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519 near Amboise in France, it took the world aeons to realise the extent of its loss — for we haven't encountered another multi-pronged genius since. Isn't that incredible?
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