II.

Early Life in Florence

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the small town of Vinci, near Florence, in Tuscany. He was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid-1460s the family settled in Florence, where Leonardo was given the best education that Florence, a major intellectual and artistic centre of Italy, could offer. He rapidly advanced socially and intellectually. He was handsome, persuasive in conversation, and a fine musician and improviser. In about 1466 he was apprenticed as a garzone (studio boy) to Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. In Verrocchio’s workshop Leonardo was introduced to many activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble and bronze. In 1472 he was admitted to the painters’ guild of Florence, and in 1476 he was still considered Verrocchio’s assistant. In Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ (c. 1470, Uffizi, Florence), the kneeling angel in the left of the painting is by Leonardo.

In 1478 Leonardo became an independent master. His first commission, to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine town hall, was never executed. His first large painting, The Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi), begun in 1481 and left unfinished, was ordered for the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto, Florence. Other works ascribed to his youth are the so-called Benois Madonna (c. 1478, Hermitage, St Petersburg), the portrait Ginevra de’ Benci (c. 1474, National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), and the unfinished St Jerome (c. 1481, Pinacoteca, Vatican).