He traveled his own path to fame By REGINA HACKETT SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC
	n April 3, 1502, a certain Friar Pietro replied to an inquiry of Isabella d'Este about the activities of the painter Leonardo da Vinci, who was living in Florence. "Leonardo's life is varied, and highly uncertain, so that he seems to live from day to day," wrote Pietro. After describing Leonardo's drawing for "Virgin and Child with Saint Anne," now in the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Pietro complained Leonardo was painting little else. Instead, he was "working hard on geometry, being impatient with the brush." Impatient with the brush but master of it, Leonardo surely would have waved aside the friar's complaint, had he heard of it. For Leonardo, there was no distinction between art and science. All of his efforts went to further his central ambition: to grasp the nature of life and the structure of the cosmos. Leonardo was a forerunner of the scientific method, testing and revising ideas before drawing conclusions. Vision was his ultimate guide, sight followed by insight. Part of his originality stems from his lack of training. Born out of wedlock in 1452 in the small town of Vinci, about 20 miles from Florence, Leonardo grew up a brilliant if solitary child. "In the earliest memory of my childhood," he wrote, "it seemed to me as I lay in my cradle a kite (bird of prey) opened my mouth with its tail and struck me many times between my lips." Sigmund Freud made the anecdote key to a 1910 study, "A Child-hood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci." After researchers discovered that Freud had used a bad translation, which turned Leonardo's kite into a vulture, much of the ominous import Freud found in the dream lost ground. Was Leonardo gay? Almost certainly yes. Instead of marrying and having children, he had a lifetime male companion, one of the few people mentioned by name in his will. Besides, the practice of sodomy was so widespread in 15th-century Florence that the Germans referred to all homosexuals as Florentines. Leonardo and his circle were accused of homosexuality, but the charge had little or no influence on his career. A major bar to his advancement (and blessing in disguise) was not his sexual orientation but his birth status, the fact that his parents weren't married to each other. For this reason, he was not able to pursue university studies, where he would have learned to seek knowledge in approved texts, looking backward, not forward. He was also barred from distinguished career paths. But not art, which wasn't a particularly distinguished career. At age 17, he was accepted as an apprentice into the studio of the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. There Leonardo quickly mastered Verrocchio's version of verisimilitude and found it wanting.		"A brilliant mind soars in an age of discovery" A Renaissance timeline "A Horseman," c. 1480, is a silverpoint drawing included in "Leonardo Lives" at the Seattle Art Museum.
	Verrocchio concentrated on crisp renderings of human features. In his "Baptism of Christ" from 1470, he allowed Leonardo to paint the angel on the left, soften the modeling of Christ's body and add a landscape, veering backward into deep space. In the end, the painting looks schizophrenic, with Verrocchio's static and hard-lined John the Baptist in startling contrast to the angel's limpid beauty, Christ's androgynous vulnerability and the soft, delicate tracery of the ground behind them. In his late 20s, Leonardo received his first notable commission, the "Adoration of the Magi," now in the Uffizi in Florence. Although he spent three years developing it in colored pigment, white lead and ink, he left it unfinished when he moved to Milan in the early 1480s. Even so, the revolutionary nature of his enterprise is apparent. Instead of the usual static assembly, Leonardo painted the moment as high drama, with each figure folded into his own amazement at the sight of the Redeemer. Around lovely youths and decrepit old men, rearing horses and jagged rocks hangs smoky haze, that ambiguous atmosphere of filtered light and shade that became for him a signature style. In Milan, he was employed by the city's ruler, Ludovico Sforza, and remained there until the French took over in 1499. At the court, Leonardo served as military engineer, painter, musician and party-giver. While his scientific observations were little known, his parties and pageants were legendary, with Turkish cavalcades, sumptuous dances, high feasts and theatrics. They made him almost as famous as his paintings, although the behavior of the revelers did not always please him. He wrote with some asperity in a notebook about seeing Sforza and his friends gobbling up the sculptures he had carved in marzipan and intended for admiration only. In Milan, he painted his first version of "Virgin of the Rocks" in 1483, which is now in the Louvre, and "The Last Supper" in 1497, miraculously still in place in Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. That the mural has survived at all is remarkable, as it began falling apart in the artist's lifetime, thanks to his experimental use of paints that didn't properly adhere to the wall. At this time, Leonardo began to devote more and more time to his notebooks. When he returned to Florence in 1500, he seemed to think of painting as a secondary activity, accepting commissions with reluctance. Those he completed he finished slowly. "Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" (also in the Louvre) was painted over a five-year period from 1508 to 1513, when he was back in Milan after the re-emergence of Sforza as ruler. While in Milan the first time, he painted a number of portraits of young ladies, but none come close to the one he did about 1503, the "Mona Lisa," also in the Louvre. By the time he died in France in 1519, Leonardo's reputation as great artist and seer was established. What 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote about him is still considered true: "Nature so favored him, no one else equaled him in the perfection, loveliness, vitality and grace of his works."		As an apprentice in 1470, Leonardo painted the angel on the left in "Baptism of Christ" by Andrea del Verrocchio.