Painter, sculptor, inventor. Born April 15, 1452 near the village of Vinci, Italy. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a prominent notary of Florence, who had no other children until much later. Ser Piero raised his son himself, a common practice at the time, arranging for Leonardo's mother to marry a villager. When Leonardo was 15, his father apprenticed him to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading artist of Florence and a characteristic talent of the early Renaissance. A sculptor, painter, and goldsmith, Verrocchio was a remarkable craftsman, and his great skill and passionate concern for quality of execution, as well as his interest in expressing the vital mobility of the human figure, were important elements in Leonardo's artistic formation. Indeed, much in Leonardo's approach to art was evolutionary from tradition rather than revolutionary against it, although the opposite is often true of his results.After completing his apprenticeship, Leonardo stayed on as an assistant in Verrocchio's shop, and his earliest known painting is a product of his collaboration with the master. In Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (ca. 1475), Leonardo executed one of the two angels, a fact already recorded in the 16th century, as well as the distant landscape, and he added the final touches to the figure of Christ, determining the texture of the flesh. Collaboration on a major project by a master and his assistant was standard procedure in the Italian Renaissance. What is special is that Leonardo's work is not, as was usual, a slightly less skilled version of Verrocchio's manner of painting but an original approach altering it. It completely possesses all the fundamental qualities of Leonardo's mature style and implies a criticism of the early Renaissance. By changing hard metallic surface effects to soft yielding ones, making edges less cutting, and increasing the slight modulations of light and shade, Leonardo evoked a new flexibility wit...
