The Story
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he has also become known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and palaeontology.
Leonardo is widely regarded as a genius who epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works contributed to the development of European art to an extent rivalled only by that of his younger contemporary Michelangelo. Born out of wedlock to a successful notary and a lower-class woman in, or near, Vinci, he was educated in Florence by the Italian painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. He began his career in the city, but then spent much time in the service of Ludovico Sforza in Milan.
Executed in Oil on panel, measuring Diam.: 75 cm (29 9/16 in.); Framed: Diam.: 104.2 cm (41 in.), the surface rewards close looking. Piero di Cosimo builds the composition through layered glazes and a tightly controlled palette, letting cool shadows recede so that the warm, lit passages step forward. The brushwork shifts from the precise to the almost dissolved — a hallmark of mature Renaissance practice.
“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”
