达芬奇和蒙娜丽莎(英语版)

Leonardo da Vinci and his Mona Lisa

2011级英语一班马佳学号：201152010111

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519, Old Style)

Leonardo da Vinci was born at a small town near Florence,where he was apprenticed to a painter.Da Vinci spent most of his childhood in his grandpa's farmland.He loved nature as well as art. The young Da Vinci was brilliant and intelligent and he had various interests such as singing and playing flute. He showed his great talent for painting when he was very young.

Da Vinci's father supported him in painting and sent him to Florence ,when Da Vinci was 14 years old then, and learned from the great artist Andrea del Verrocchio.Verrocchio's home was at the famous centrum of art in that area, and many humanists at that time would like to pay a visit there, from which Da Vinci made acquaintances with many well-known artists, humanists and scientists.

From 1482 to 1499, Da Vinci enjoyed his most peaceful time in art career in Milan. To avoid the war, Da Vinci left Milan to other city like Venice and did some study in science.

In 1500, Da Vinci went back to Florence and began his creation of the great painting Mona Lisa. The prototype of the painting is the wife of Venice Duke.Along with The Last Supper and The Virgin of the Rocks, Mona Lisa Smile was another masterpiece of Da Vinci.

Da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly and inventive imagination". He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote"

Da Vinci was, and is, renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mon. a Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number because of his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination.Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on