Vinci

Leonardo da, la-o-nar'do da vin'chee (1452-1519), a noted Italian painter. He was born at the village of Vinci, between Piza and Florence. Leonardo's portraits and Madonnas are found in the leading galleries of Europe. His masterpiece, The Last Supper, was painted on the wall of the refectory, or dining room, of a convent in Milan. Christ and his disciples sit at table as described in Luke xxii. This enormous fresco, considered by many the greatest painting produced by Italy, suffered shameful treatment. In 1652 the Dominican monks, desiring to enlarge their doorway, cut off the legs of the figure of Christ and the nearest disciples. During the Napoleonic wars French Hussars used the refectory as a storeroom for horse fodder. Tourists, too, were at one time carelessly allowed to dig out bits of plaster and carry them away as souvenirs. Water stains and attempted patching have helped to ruin the picture, but for the last hundred years every effort has been made to preserve so great a work. Fortunately a large number of copies have been made, the best by an artist who devoted six years to the work. Leonardo's talent is summed up by saying that, in point of time, he taught Michelangelo force, Raphael beauty, and other artists grace. Leonardo was not only a great artist, but he was a leader in other departments of thought. See Painting

His knowledge was almost preternatural.--Hallam.

Long before Bacon, he laid down the maxim that experience and observation must be the foundation of all reasoning in science; that experiment is the only interpreter of nature, and is essential to the ascertainment of laws. Unlike Bacon, who was ignorant of mathematics, and even disparaged them, he points out their supreme advantage. Seven years after the voyage of Columbus, this great man--great at once as an artist, mathematician, and engineer--gave a clear exposition of the theory of forces obliquely applied on a lever; a few years later he was well acquainted with the earth's annual motion. He knew the laws of friction and the principle of virtual velocities; he described the camera obscura, understood aerial perspective, the nature of colored shadows, the use of the iris, and the effects of the duration of visible impressions on the eye. He wrote well on fortifications, anticipated Castelli on hydraulics, occupied himself with the fall of bodies on the hypothesis of the earth's rotation, treated of the times of descent along inclined planes and circular arcs, and of the nature of machines. He considered, with singular clearness, respiration and combustion, and foreshadowed one of the great hypotheses of geology, the elevation of continents.--Draper.