Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
The visionary inventor, architect, and engineer (Oh, yes, and artist)
Leonardo is often seen as the "epitomy" of the Renaissance humanist ideal. Probably most widely known for his Mona Lisa and Last Supper, he was also an architect—most famously involved in the Milan Cathedral redesign of the Milan Duomo, along with Bramante, who headed the design of St. Peter's Basilica for a time (Michelangelo helped in that endeavor, along with others). Unfortunately, most of Leonardo's architectural skills are evidenced only in drawings that he created, rather than actual architectural designs which were built.
Da Vinci's paintings were similar in destiny, in that only 20 of his paintings survive. The "lost" painting is Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari, which he began the painting around 1505 and disaster struck almost immediately, when a heavy rain struck and the humidity caused the encaustic plaster which he used to fail. Peter Paul Rubens drew a reproduction of the unfinished painting in 1603 which gives us an idea of what it entailed, but little more.
The Mona Lisa is an example of his use of sfumato, which is a soft blending of colors via the use of oil paint, which had been a Northern Renaissance invention of the Van Eyck brothers, of Belgium. Up to that time, wall paintings were pigment on plaster ("fresco"), or egg tempera, both of which dried notoriously fast and did not allow the kind of blending available with oils. Oil paints also allowed for "glazing," which is mixing a small amount of pigment with an oil medium that gave a transparency to the color, which was placed on top of an "underpainting" of a more monochromatic nature, much like the practice of how black and white photos used to be given color with paints.
The one element of concern about the Mona Lisa is that oil paint, particularly glazing, tends toward transparency over time. Since Leonardo painted oil on the traditional wood panel with a green tone, as the oil ages the green tone underneath becomes more prominent. The reason the European traditional artists used green as an undertone is that the skin tones in the caucasian face is due to the blueness of the veins showing through the semitransparency of the skin color is indeed a greenish hue. Having a green undertone works with the natural transparency of the oil paint to achieve a greater level of realism. Since the oil dries more slowly, it also allows for blending that achieves the sfumato for which Leonardo became famous.
