What did Leonardo da Vinci really look like His Amazing History Facial Reconstructions

Hello everyone and welcome back to Royalty Now, where we bring you face-to-face with figures from the past. Leonardo da Vinci is simply one of the most remarkable human beings ever to live. Although he's credited as one of, if not the most influential painter of all time, he was also a genius inventor, a mathematician, astronomer, and musician. One look through his notebooks will show you just how infinitely curious of a mind he had. But what did Leonardo look like? Today we'll talk about his history and then reveal our recreation of the Renaissance man himself. So let's go ahead and get started. Leonardo was born in a small village of Vinci in the Tuscan hills on the night of April 15, 1452. His father was Sir Piero da Vinci and his mother was named Catalina. Although we don't know much about his mother, we do know that his father was a successful notary and that his wealthy farmer grandfather noted his birth in his ledger. Although his parents were from different social classes and were not married, Leonardo's birth was a celebration. Within a year his mother would be married to a kiln worker and his father would move away to Florence. But because of how small Vinci was, Leonardo still spent a lot of time with both his mother and his father's parents, Antonio and Lucia. He would remain in Vinci for the entirety of his childhood, growing up carefree and playing around some of the most beautiful Italian landscapes a person could imagine. Although his father had been mostly absent for his childhood, it became apparent to everyone that Leonardo was a particularly intelligent young man. Unfortunately in his time there were consequences for being born out of wedlock. He would not be allowed to work in the family business or even attend university. But this fact would actually end up becoming one of the best things that ever happened to him. The Black Plague had ravaged Europe, but this left the opportunity for new trade lines to be established across the Mediterranean. These lines would end up creating a wealthy class of merchants and bankers and allowed for knowledge to spread across Europe. Emerging from this class of wealthy bankers were the Medici family. By 1434 Cosimo de' Medici became Florence's de facto ruler and by 1454 it would be because of Cosimo that the long warring kingdoms of Italy finally entered a delicate peace. For the first time in nearly a century rich men did not have to spend their wealth on war and one of the richest of them all Cosimo would end up spending his money on art. Artists who used to have to work exclusively for the church were now being paid by private citizens to express themselves in more creative ways. Workshops that produced paintings, sculptures, jewelry, and metal works began to pop up in Florence flourishing into newly appreciated professions. Young Leonardo was in the perfect place at the perfect time. His father who was now married to a woman from a rich family used his connections to get his son an apprenticeship in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. Verrocchio was a master who had trained many of Florence's best new artists and had the prestige to be able to select only those he believed had true potential. He immediately recognized it in Leonardo. In Verrocchio's workshop he would not only learn the arts but also math, poetry, and music. This style of learning was perfect for him. Throughout the course of his life Leonardo would touch on almost all fields of human knowledge becoming an accomplished musician and reading all of the great philosophers which is where we get the term renaissance man today. During those first few months he began his apprenticeship by grinding up pigments to make paints, creating models out of terracotta, and learning how to draw. According to his master Verrocchio, drawing was the foundation for an artist and in order to do anything else well you had to be able to draw. Feeling challenged for the first time in his life Leonardo would fall in love with learning and he quickly became one of the best draftsmen in the studio. His drawings are astonishing when you think about the fact that they were made in the 1400s. Many of us think of this time in art as being medieval and sort of ugly and primitive but at the same time Leonardo was doing this. In the 1460s Verrocchio cast a bronze statue of David. Leonardo who was described as a great beauty by his contemporaries is thought to have been the young model. His formative years at Verrocchio's workshop are filled with all kinds of work and a healthy competition with his fellow apprentices but even at his young age he was thinking bigger. Florence had been the home of genius artists like Brunelleschi who engineered the dome from the Duomo the Santa Maria del Fiore. Its completion in 1436 did something that many people thought impossible. It became the largest masonry dome in the world, a title it took from the Pantheon in Rome which had held it for 1300 years. When Master Verrocchio was commissioned to complete Il Duomo with a bronze lantern, Leonardo was allowed to see just how complex the dome was from the inside. He saw in Brunelleschi what he wanted to become, a genius who could achieve the impossible. By the 1470s Leonardo had surpassed his colleagues and was so good that his master even allowed him to paint sections of a painting he was working on. He was given the Messiah's feet and one of two angels to complete. While Verrocchio had painted in tempera and used white to produce contours, Leonardo chose a different tactic. He painted in oil using a technique called sfumato, where an artist paints in incredibly thin layers which, when dried and stacked on top of one another, create a sense of three-dimensionality to a work. Although disputed, legend has it that after seeing Leonardo's work on this painting, Verrocchio swore never to touch a paintbrush again after being mastered by his apprentice. Probably at the nudging of Verrocchio, later that same year, Leonardo would join a painter's guild whose members were other extraordinary artists, the likes of Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli. So at 20 years old, he was now a professional painter, able to take his own commissions, and it seemed like no time at all before he made a name for himself. Leonardo da Vinci's curiosity, his extensive notes, and his sketches all point to a meticulous man trying to solve the world's mysteries. That brings me to today's sponsor, June's Journey, a hidden object mystery game for history lovers taking place in the 1920s. You play as June Parker, an amateur detective, as she works to solve the game's central mystery. I spent a lot of time hunting for clues in these beautifully illustrated scenes, which is how you progress through the main mystery, decorating my island landscape and discovering special events and seasonal content. My favorite part was certainly decorating. The art style makes everything look so lush and beautiful. I found myself reaching for this game over and over when I had a little downtime. It was relaxing to play something more involved that didn't just feel like mindless scrolling on my phone. As a history lover, I also liked the historic angle of the game and costuming of the characters. Download June's Journey for free by clicking the link or scanning the QR code on the screen. It's available on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, as well as on PC. Enjoy and let's get back to our subject. His first commissioned portrait was of a girl, Ginevra da Vinci. In a time where most women's portraits were stiff and painted in profile, Leonardo had her facing directly at you. The woman in the portrait was a poet who has one surviving poem. In it, she describes herself as a mountain lion, an animal with a strong sense of This portrait by Leonardo seems not to show us what Ginevra looked like, but also gives us a look at who she saw herself to be. Strong and independent. This is what sets Leonardo's work apart from the average painter of his time. He believed that the motions of the mind, the motions of the soul, are what make us who we are, and he strived painstakingly to show them. There's something you can almost feel staring into this woman's eyes, a quality that would transform Leonardo into one of the most revered artists of all time. The kind of artist that Leonardo was must have been very attractive to the women in Florence, and you wouldn't have been crazy to think that Leonardo and Ginevra may have had a deeper connection. But the reality of it was that Leonardo was cut from a different cloth. In 1476, Leonardo and four other men were accused and arrested for being the lover of a man named Giacomo Saltarelli. Although condemned by the church, homosexuality was tolerated in Florence, mostly because most of its famous poets and artists were known to be gay. Historians believe that Leonardo was imprisoned and must have reconciled the fact that the punishment for sodomy was death. Luckily, one of the other men that had been accused was from a powerful family, so two months after being arrested, they were absolved of their crimes and released. Leonardo never spoke of his time in prison, but years later one of the very first inventions that he drew was a machine that could break you out of prison. Maybe needing some time away from the city, the following years had Leonardo spending a lot of his time studying and drawing in nature. He became particularly obsessed with how nature unites us all. In it he saw true perfection. Nature does nothing in vain. Looking towards nature for inspiration, he would imagine these spectacular inventions that we look back on and marvel at. Yet the question that Leonardo always came back to was how humanity fit into it all. For his next commission, The Adoration of the Magi, Leonardo spent hundreds of hours studying and sketching the people of Florence. How they talked, how they laughed, what they looked like when they argued, how they sat in boredom and stood in thought. He would use this to imagine the scene of the three kings with baby Jesus. And as he drew his first drafts, it became something that no one had ever seen before, with the king's entourage also placed in the painting. Almost as if Leonardo was there, he imagined what he had seen on the streets of Florence. People's differing reactions to the scene. Some react with wonder, some with joy, and some with caution. Among the people in the dark right corner, you see a curly-haired young man looking away from the scene entirely. This is thought to be a self-portrait of a 29-year-old Leonardo da Vinci. But he would never finish this masterpiece, and you can almost feel that self-criticism baked into the man in the corner. This is the beginning of a recurring problem with Leonardo for the rest of his life, that he saw errors in his work where others saw miracles. By the time he turned 30, he decided that he was no longer happy in Florence. He needed a massive change, so he made his way to Milan. Milan was ruled by the Sforza family, who ruled by force, and it was a different atmosphere than the more democratic Florence. So while the market for paintings in Milan was not as hot as it was in Florence, Leonardo found freedom in the idea. He would take some time, do what he wanted. But soon he was struggling to even find work. He wasn't seen or respected as a scholar or an intellectual here because he didn't go to university. He offered his services to the Sforza family, but was ignored. And although he would get one commission with a church when he finally finished the painting called Virgin of the Rock, they failed to agree on a price. In order to make money, Leonardo would open his own studio in Milan and began teaching apprentices of his own. Slowly he began getting work and showed off his skill by painting a portrait of a man, who had likely traveled with him from Florence. Finally, after being convinced of his skill, the Sforza family came around. He would paint Cecilia Galerani, the lover of the Duke Ludovico Sforza. Instead of just doing the usual thing that any other artist would do, Leonardo decided he would take this time to make a statement. Typically, women would be painted from the side, stiff and formal. But this was a man's lover. The portrait was commissioned for their enjoyment. So he painted Cecilia gazing away from us, the viewer, almost as if she were looking at the Duke out of frame. And you as a viewer just happened to have caught the moment. Her coy smile signals an inner dialogue that is just for her to enjoy. What Leonardo was doing was magical. Cecilia is frozen in history, forever young and forever in love. With this commissioned success, he was able to move into a spacious new workshop. He would call this space his factory, maybe because he was always working on something. Portraits, inventions, and thousands of observations and drawings showing us the true depth of Leonardo's knowledge. Why does water behave the way it does? Why does the sun appear larger at sunset? How do birds fly? What are humans here for? How do we work? He'd been taught since he was young that in order to become the best artist he could, he had to have a deep understanding of human anatomy. But in the 1400s, our understanding of the human body had not changed since the work of a Greek physician named Galen, who had actually dissected monkeys and pigs for his information, since dissecting cadavers was illegal at the time. This led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the human body moved and functioned, which made figures and paintings look not quite right. Leonardo set out to master the muscles moving beneath the skin, the dips and dimples that occur in human skin, and the way human eyes catch the light. He would immerse himself in these studies of anatomy and become incredibly interested in the works of a Roman named Vitruvius. Vitruvius was an architect who spoke of humans having perfect proportions, almost like a well-designed church. The Vitruvian Man, a drawing created by Leonardo in 1490, was inspired by Vitruvius, along with Leonardo's own studies. It's a depiction of the perfect man with all of the correct proportions, according to Leonardo. Sometime in the early 1490s, the Sforza family would again commission work from him. Il Morto had chosen a monastery where he and his family would be buried. Leonardo was asked to paint a large fresco, 15 feet tall and 29 feet wide in the dining hall, where the monks would silently eat their food. It would depict the Last Supper, when Jesus announces that he knew one of his 12 apostles there would be the one to betray him. It would be the largest work of art Leonardo had ever attempted. Like all of his other works, he would imagine the scene like no one had ever done before. He bought his own bible, translated into Italian for the first time only 20 years before, and obsessively thought about each character in the scene's intentions, how they would react to the news of Jesus' betrayal. It was a desire for realism that no other artist before him had mastered, or even thought about. Once he began, he worked from dawn until dusk for months until he was finished. Leonardo's Last Supper must have felt like a flash photograph of the moment for those who saw it. Every apostle in the fresco has a different reaction to the news of the betrayal. Some look around at each other in shock, anger, or speculation. Except for Judas, who stares tensely at Jesus, knowing it was he who betrayed him. Leonardo, who had already become notorious for his unfinished projects, had completed a true masterpiece. Ludovico Sforza was incredibly impressed, and in return he made Leonardo an official member of his court. Over the coming months he was asked to do all sorts of things, from lavish decorations to pageant costumes. He was happy in Milan, spending the better part of 20 years there, and he even buried his mother there after she came to live with him in the 1490s. But when the French invaded and captured the city and his patron Ludovico, Leonardo had no choice but to leave in 1500. He'd become very famous in Italy, not only for his paintings, but for his aura and charisma as well. He would spend a while wandering from place to place, taking work where and when he wanted it. But he eventually returned to where we always knew he would, Florence. But the Florence he returned to was very different from the one he had left. Instead of the open, cultured mecca of the Renaissance it had once been, Florence had now been replaced by a city that had been convinced its identity was sacrilegious. In 1494, a Dominican friar had taken control of the city, and had ordered the burnings of paintings, carnival masks, and mirrors. Although he eventually lost control four years later, the city had experienced a mass exodus of its renowned artists. Leonardo must have felt like he had made a mistake by coming back, but he found work almost immediately when he was commissioned to paint the Virgin Mary and her mother. As soon as he was finished with the preparatory drawing, he hung it up in the church for the monks to see. There was a line out the door for two whole days. People were clamoring to see his work. It didn't matter that it wasn't finished. For the people of Florence, this marked the end of a difficult time in the city. Florence's prodigal son had returned. But painting wasn't Leonardo's top priority any longer. He had dedicated his life to the craft, and at 50 years old, his greatest work, The Last Supper, was stuck in a monk's dining hall. Although he had thrived without a formal education, he felt that he needed to be respected as an intellectual, and not just as a painter. His focus on the commission eventually fell by the wayside, and Leonardo found himself traveling again. In 1502, he began work for the son of Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia. Cesare is described as a man of opportunity and a gangster who ruled through fear and violence. After Leonardo produced an overhead aerial view of the city of Imola, he was hired as his chief military engineer. Over the next year, Leonardo would produce numerous sketches of war machines, learning how to produce meticulous maps that showed every detail of topography, and watched as Cesare took city after city in Romania by force. This time with Cesare had hardened him, and Leonardo, a gentle soul by nature, saw that war was nothing but what he called bestial madness. When he left Cesare's service and returned to Florence, he used these observations of battle to inspire a mural that was commissioned inside the Palazzo Vecchio. On one wall would be da Vinci's mural, and on the opposite side would hang a mural by a 29-year-old artist who had just completed his marble statue of David. Michelangelo had just returned to Florence after working in Rome, and was annoyed to find that Leonardo was now the talk of the town. This competitive spirit is what inspired his work on David. Leonardo was actually on the committee that decided where the David statue was to be placed. He argued for it to be hidden behind a low wall. No one else agreed. Now the two artists had begun a true rivalry. Leonardo began his work on his mural, The Battle of Angiari, choosing to depict not victory, but chaos. Horses rear in tension, men twist in fury and pain, and faces contort with rage. There's no heroism here, only violence, desperation, and madness. Michelangelo, on the opposite wall, chose a different approach. His image, Battle of Cascina, focused on raw physical power and the perfection of the human body. His figures were powerful, muscular, and idealized. The contrast could not have been clearer. Michelangelo celebrated strength, while Leonardo questioned it. But neither mural would ever be completely finished. Instead of a traditional fresco, Leonardo tried a new technique, hoping to gain richer colors and deeper emotion. But it failed. The paint began to drip down the wall, ruining his work. We can never know for sure if Leonardo had been forced to make an error by the young Michelangelo, but without Leonardo as his competition, Michelangelo also lost his inspiration. And just like that, Florence lost two masterpieces, and history lost a chance to Even through his failures, Leonardo's reputation still managed to grow. He simply saw the world differently than anyone else had before. His insatiable mind was really something to behold, and his list of admirers was starting to include that of princes and kings. By his late 50s, his focus had only drifted further away from large commissions and towards study and experimentation. He still took on work when it interested him, but had become notorious for abandoning it when it no longer did. Around this time, he began working on a portrait of a noblewoman named Lisa Garadini. Yet unlike so many of his others, something about this painting kept his interest. At first, it was nothing unusual, a commission just like many others. But as he worked, Leonardo began to see something more. Instead of delivering it, he kept it for himself. And no matter what else caught his eye, he returned back to this painting again and again. Layer upon layer, year after year. The shadows grew softer. The edges dissolved. The light around her eyes shifted almost imperceptibly. Yet Leonardo continues. On her face is an expression between expressions. A smile, a smirk, that almost seems like it changes every time you look. In this Mona Lisa, Leonardo comes closer than ever to what he had spent his life chasing. Not a likeness, not beauty, but the illusion of life itself. A painting not of the hand, but of the mind. After his death, it would become the most famous painting of all time. By 1513, Leonardo decided that it was time to leave Florence for Rome, invited by the powerful Medici family. Unfortunately, Rome was not kind to Leonardo. Not only was it dominated by younger artists, including Michelangelo and his incredible work in the Sistine Chapel, but Leonardo's health had begun to fail. When an invitation arrived from the King of France, Leonardo accepted without hesitation. At the age of 64, he crossed the Alps and settled in France under the patronage of King Francis I, who would eventually become a close friend. He was given a manor house, a generous pension, and complete freedom to think, design, and dream. For the first time since he was a child playing in the Tuscan hills, Leonardo was not pressured to produce, only to exist. By the spring of 1519, his body finally began to fail him. His right hand, which had been weakened by a stroke, could barely hold a pen. Walking had become difficult. Even simple movements now required effort. But his mind, that thing that had defined him for nearly seven decades, never slowed. He spent his final days as he always had, surrounded by notebooks, loose pages covered in questions that he would never have time to answer. On May 2, 1519, Leonardo da Vinci died at the age of 67. He lived in the search, in questions, in the space between knowing and wondering. Five hundred years later, we are still following the paths that he began to trace, still opening his notebooks, still standing in droves before his paintings, still recognizing ourselves in the questions he asked. Because Leonardo was not trying to leave behind answers. He was trying to show us how to look. So what did Leonardo da Vinci really look like? For a man who created thousands of sketches, paintings, and sculptures, he certainly kept his own appearance mysteriously private. In his youth, he was described as being a beautiful man, with flowing, curly hair, with everything meticulously groomed. He was broad-shouldered and strong throughout his life. Unfortunately, we may never know for sure what young Leonardo truly looked like, because although certain depictions, like Verrocchio's David, are rumored to be based on his appearance, there's really no true evidence for this yet. Only a few confirmed images of Leonardo have survived, all sketched when he was in his mid-sixties. The best image comes from Francesco Melzi, Leonardo's apprentice and close friend. It's a sketch in profile, made around 1510. Melzi also made this one, a quick sketch on a page that also contains the study of a horse's leg. Scholars have only recently confirmed this one by citing his unusual nose shape and beard, which apparently wasn't very fashionable for the time, but Leonardo wore it throughout his life. There's also this image, said to be a self-portrait by Leonardo. However, there are some significant differences between these faces. On the surface, they look similar, an older man with a receding hairline, long beard, and Italian profile. But when you look more closely, the supposed self-portrait looks much older than the others, despite being made around the same time. His eyebrows are very bushy, contrary to every report that he was meticulous about his personal appearance. And his nose is larger and more downturned. Now, we know that Leonardo often drew in character, meaning he exaggerated features on faces, because he loved the life and meaning that's shown in every detail of the human face. He would see random people in public who he liked the look of and make a quick sketch. So, it's possible that he exaggerated his features for this self-portrait, but I'm not sure. I want to be able to capture both in my recreations. So, what I've done is create a lifelike version from the self-portrait first, and then we'll modify and transition those features to match the melty sketch. Even though there's not much evidence for it, I also made a young version from the possible statue made in his youth. So, let's see the faces of Leonardo da Vinci brought to life now. Don't forget to download June's Journey for free using the link below or the QR code on screen. We'll see you for the next one.