“Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.” Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci, frequently seen as the progenitor of the high renaissance was born out of wedlock in 1452 to a notary father and a woman of modest class. Though he received on paper only the most basic of education (vernacular writing, reading and mathematics) his early genius became evident and at 15 Leonardo began study with the artist Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. Alongside learning about painting and sculpture, he developed his early style alongside other key artists of the period including Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, and Sandro Botticelli. Next came Milan, and of the six works he completed while there, finished works included The Last Supper and The Virgin of the Rocks.

If Leonardo remains the world’s leading archetype of a polymath, this period saw him become increasingly interested in observing nature as a means of obtaining scientific knowledge, recording observations in a series of notebooks which covered a wealth of subjects including painting, architecture, machinery, anatomy, palaeontology and the science of flight. If the manufacture of many of his designs, such as armoured fighting vehicles and flying machines was inconceivable in his own lifetime due to the materials at his disposal, time was kind, and many of his ideas came to later fruition at the hands of others. His subsequent return to Florence in 1503 saw his scientific studies develop further and witnessed the production of further artistic works including the Mona Lisa.

Leonardo’s image of the Vitruvian man, the leading design for The Renaissance: Journeys of Discovery series (c 1490) pays homage to Vitruvius’s dictum that a temple should reflect the proportions of a human body – fusing together the shape of man with the rules of geometry. In bringing together the worlds of art and science in this way, Vitruvian Man has become a cultural icon synonymous with the period, combining many of its core themes. While Giorgio Vasari stated that Leonardo’s “cast of mind was so heretical that he did not adhere to any religion, thinking perhaps that it was better to be a philosopher than a Christian.” in the anatomical work on display in the Vitruvian man he is seeking empirical evidence for the soul. Though he immersed himself in many of the humanist ideas which flourished during the epoch, the Vitruvian man symbolises not Leonardo’s turning away from God, but his learning to “rejoice that our creator has provided an instrument of such excellence.”