The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (270 page)

 
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(1836–1904).
German painter active in Munich and elsewhere. He painted various subjects, but is remembered as the most successful German portraitist of his day. His rich Venetian technique (he had been employed as a copyist of Old Masters in Italy) combined with his solid, respectful characterization appealed greatly to the prosperous ruling classes of Germany. He painted some eighty portraits of Bismarck, whom he first met in 1878 and with whom he had a reserved friendship. Lenbach was a dominant figure in Munich's artistic life in the late 19th cent. His splendid house there, which he designed himself, is now a museum.

 
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Leochares
.

Greek sculptor active in the mid 4th cent. BC. He worked for Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great and is recorded in several ancient sources, but is an elusive figure. In about 350 BC he worked with
Scopas
and two other sculptors on the friezes of the celebrated Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, but it is not possible confidently to assign any of the surviving portions (BM, London) to him. On rather tenuous evidence, the original of the
Apollo Belvedere
is sometimes attributed to Leochares, and a seated marble figure of the goddess Demeter in the British Museum (the
Demeter of Cnidus
) has been proposed as a work from his own hand. It is considered one of the finest Greek sculptures to survive from the fourth century.

 
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Leonard , Michael
.

See
SUPERREALISM
.

 
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(1452–1519).
Florentine artist, scientist, and thinker, the most versatile genius of the Italian
Renaissance
. Leonardo was born in or near the small town of Vinci in the Tuscan countryside. His father Piero was a Florentine notary and Leonardo was his illegitimate son by a peasant girl, Caterina . In 1472 he was enrolled as a painter in the fraternity of St Luke in Florence, after serving an apprenticeship with
Verrocchio
.
Vasari
attributed to Leonardo one of the angels in Verrocchio's
Baptism of Christ
(Uffizi, Florence,
c.
1470), and the head of the angel on the left of the picture does indeed far surpass its companion in spirituality and beauty of technique, giving the first demonstration of that combined languor and intensity which is so characteristic of Leonardo's work. Verrocchio is said to have been so impressed that he gave up painting, and it is possible that he was content to entrust the painting side of his business to Leonardo, who was still living in his master's house in 1476. Leonardo stayed in Florence until 1481 or 1482, when he moved to Milan. Several paintings are reasonably attributed to this early Florentine period, notably an exquisite
Annunciation
in the Uffizi, and a portrait of Ginevra de' Benci (NG, Washington), probably painted
c.
1476 for the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo , as well as the large altarpiece of
The Adoration of the Magi
(Uffizi, Florence), commissioned in 1481 by the monks of S. Donato a Scopeto and left unfinished when Leonardo moved to Milan. This painting and the numerous preparatory drawings for it show the astonishing fecundity of Leonardo's mind. The range of gesture and expression was unprecedented, and features such as the contrasting figures of wise old sage and beautiful youth who stand at either side of the painting, and the rearing horses in the background, became permanent obsessions in his work.
Leonardo lived in Milan until 1499 (when the French invaded), working mainly at the court of Duke Ludovico
Sforza
(II Moro). He is said to have been recommended primarily as a musician, and in a letter to the duke listing his accomplishments he gives some idea of his versatility, writing of himself first and foremost as a designer of instruments of war and adding his attainments as an artist almost as an afterthought. From then on schemes of applied science and investigations of all kinds into the natural world occupied much of his time and filled his notebooks. He never properly formulated his researches, and when he put theories into practice, whether methods of painting or diversions of rivers, the results were generally faulty. It was the quest which absorbed him, and there was never the dedication to his art that characterizes many great masters. Although he surpassed all of his contemporaries in the sheer beauty of his technique as a painter, this ‘mechanical’ aspect of his work was much less appealing to him than solving problems of composition and characterization in his drawings (incomparably the finest collection of which is at Windsor Castle). His dilatoriness infuriated his paymasters and although his
œuvre
as a painter is small, he left a high proportion of his pictures unfinished. This stress on the intellectual aspects of painting was one of the most momentous features of Leonardo's career, for he was largely responsible for establishing the idea of the artist as a creative thinker, not simply a skilled craftsman (see
LIBERAL ARTS
). Leonardo's main artistic undertakings in Milan were a project for a huge equestrian statue to Ludovico Sforza's father, now known only in preliminary drawings, and the wall-painting of the
Last Supper
(
c.
1495–7) in the refectory of Sta Maria delle Grazie. The
fresco
method of mural painting was not flexible or subtle enough for the slow-working Leonardo, so he adopted an experimental technique that quickly caused the picture to deteriorate disastrously. It has been many times restored, but although it is only a shadow of Leonardo's original creation it still retains some of the immense authority that has made it, for almost five centuries, the most revered painting in the world. Leonardo's other works in Milan included portraits, notably the marvellous picture of Duke Ludovico's mistress Cecilia Gallerani known as the
Lady with an Ermine
(Czartoryski Gal., Cracow) and an altarpiece of the
Virgin of the Rocks
, which exists in two problematically related versions, the earlier (Louvre, Paris) possibly painted when Leonardo was still in Florence, the later (NG, London) still being worked on in 1508. There may have been some studio assistance in the London version, but the finest passages, notably the heads of the Virgin and the angel, with their exquisitely curled hair and heavylidded eyes, can be by no one but Leonardo himself. The larger, bolder forms of the London picture show Leonardo's move towards the more monumental style of the High Renaissance, of which he was the main creator.
Between 1500, when he returned for a time to Florence, and 1516, when he left Italy for France, Leonardo's life was unsettled. In 1502–3 he worked as a military engineer for Cesare Borgia, in 1506–13 he was based again in Milan, and in 1513 he moved to Rome, but the artistic activity of his later years was chiefly centred in Florence in the years 1500–6. From this time dates his portrait of
Mona Lisa
(Louvre) and the wall painting of the
Battle of Anghiari
in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, where he worked in rivalry with
Michelangelo
. The battle piece is destroyed, but is preserved in copies; fittingly, the most famous copy is a drawing by
Rubens
(Louvre), for Leonardo's painting anticipated the dynamism of the
Baroque
and influenced battle painters up to the 19th cent. In Florence also Leonardo worked out variations on a theme that fascinated him at this time and presented a great challenge to his skill in composing closely knit groups of figures. This was
The Virgin and Child with St Anne
, known today mainly through a painting in the Louvre and the incomparably beautiful
cartoon
(which includes also the infant John the Baptist) in the National Gallery, London. The exact dates of these two famous works are controversial.
In 1516 Leonardo accepted an invitation from Francis I to move to France, and he died at Cloux, near Amboise, in 1519. He did little artistic work in the last decade of his life, the last paintings from his hand generally being accepted as two pictures of
St John the Baptist
(one later converted into a
Bacchus
), both in the Louvre (
c.
1515). They show the enigmatic smile, the dense shadow, the pointing finger, and the thick curling hair that rapidly became clichés in the work of his followers. In painting Leonardo had an enormous influence. His heroic figures and beautifully balanced compositions (particularly his use of pyramidical grouping) were the basis of the High Renaissance style, influencing particularly his two greatest contemporaries, Michelangelo and
Raphael
, and his subtle modelling through light and shade (see
SFUMATO
) showed the potentialities of the
oil
medium, which he was one of the first Italians to exploit.
Giorgione
and
Correggio
were among those most deeply influenced by this aspect of Leonardo's work. His writings on painting were influential too; they were first published from his scattered notes as the
Treatise On Painting
(in Italian and French) in 1651, but were well known before then. In sculpture and architecture no work that is indisputably by Leonardo survives, but his expertise and ideas were important in both fields. Leonardo is one of the very few artists whose reputation has from his own times onward constantly remained at the highest level, even though his output of completed works was small—a reflection of his extraordinary force of intellect and his virtually single-handed creation of the idea of the artist as genius.