to his room with his pockets full of the strangest things. He collected lizards and beetles, the skeletons of birds, scorpions and toads, bats and snakes. He used parts of these creatures as models to draw a monstrous dragon, a frightening mix of horns and tail, teeth and wings. He painted the dragon coming out of a cave with fierce eyes and fire flaring from its nostrils. When he finished he placed the shield on an easel and pulled a curtain over the window so that only a shaft of sunlight fell on it. Then he called on his father to tell him the shield was finished.

When Ser Piero walked into the dark room his eyes fell on the sun-lit dragon. He stood frozen with fear. Leonardo knew then that his work was good. The shield would stop any enemy in his tracks.

Maestro Verrocchio put Leonardo to work on part of a painting that he was working on, Baptism of Christ. He had Leonardo paint one of the angels in this work. When Verrocchio saw the angel that Leonardo painted, he was stunned. It was so beautiful and so much better than his own work that Verrocchio vowed he would never touch a paintbrush again.

In 1472, when Leonardo was twenty years old, he became a master craftsman of his trade. He had earned the right to the title of Maestro. He stayed at Verrocchio's bottega and worked with him for a few more years. He started to receive a few commissions of his own. He painted The Annunciation, a beautiful painting of the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary. He took special care to paint the wings of the angel so that they resembled the birds he studied so carefully. He painted a portrait of a Florentine lady, Ginevra, encircling her head with a halo of juniper. This was a visual play on words. Ginevra's name was similar to the Italian word for the juniper bush, “ginepro.”

But life wasn't all work. There was plenty of opportunity for fun in Florence, where nearly every month there was a carnival, tournament, , or parade. Leonardo enjoyed parties and liked to wear fine clothes. He loved to ride horses and play music. He wrote poems and riddles and jokes.

Page 4

Perspective

In paintings from the Middle Ages, objects and people looked flat and out of proportion. It was during the Renaissance that artists began to use perspective in their paintings and drawings. Artists began to draw things as they saw them in nature.

When you think about it, showing depth and space in a picture on a flat surface is no easy thing. Leonardo wrote about perspective in his notebooks. He said, "Among objects of equal size, that which is most remote from the eye will look the smallest." In the real world, the farther away things are, the smaller they look. Just look down a row of telephone poles and see for yourself. The poles closest to you look bigger than the ones farther away, even though they are the same size. In Renaissance art, like real life, the closer figures look larger and the farthest ones look smaller. If you look down a line of railroad tracks, the parallel lines seem to come together as they become more distant from you. In art, that point where the lines come together is called the vanishing point.

Perspective also refers to the way an object appears to change when you look at it from different points of view. If you look at a box straight on, you will see a square. If you look at it from another angle, you will see that it is a box, with depth and width.

Leonardo and his fellow artists used mathematics to plot the placement of objects in their paintings and drawings. They used other techniques to show perspective too, like shading and colors. They painted more distant objects and people in a blurry, unfinished way, which is what things look like when they're far away. The effect of greater distance was also created by using colors that were paler or with a blue tone.

Leonardo thought it was important for painters to understand how to use math and color to create a painting instead of just copying from other artists. He said that artists who painted without this knowledge were like sailors who get into a ship without a rudder or compass.
Page 3 Page 5
[Reviews] [Table of Contents] [Sample Chapter] [Sample Activity] [Time Line] [Links to Explore]
[Home] [Abraham Lincoln] [American Revolution] [Civil War] [Leonardo da Vinci] [Lewis and Clark] [Marco Polo] [Reviews] [Links to Explore] [Order Now!] [Events] [About Janis Herbert]