Leonardo stayed at Verrocchio’s workshop a long time—thirteen years. He became a master and a member of the guild. But he didn’t move out to start a studio of his own. Perhaps Verrocchio’s studio felt like a home to Leonardo, a place where he belonged and was wanted. Verrocchio was a kind master, and the two were probably quite close.
Florence was also an exciting place to live. It was full of new ideas. It was also a city with books. Lots of books. Until the mid-1400s, there were no printed books. Every book was copied by hand. Sometimes beautiful pictures were painted on the pages. The result was a work of art in itself. But it took a long time to make a single book. Then, around 1450, in Germany, a man named Johannes Gutenberg made a discovery. He figured out how to build a printing press. It used letters made of pieces of steel. They could be moved around to create different words. An inked page of type could be printed onto paper many times. The Bible was considered the most important book. So the first title printed was a Bible.
Very quickly, however, other books were printed as well. Books on math. Books of maps. Books by great thinkers of the past, like Plato and Aristotle. With more books available, more people started learning to read.
As a child, Leonardo had been taught to read and write. He also knew simple math. But that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to learn about everything. He couldn’t attend a university. But he could teach himself. So he started buying and collecting books. He continued to do this all his life.
Artists needed math in order to make paintings look three-dimensional, or 3-D. In the Middle Ages, paintings didn’t look realistic. The people in them looked flat, like a king or a queen on a playing card. The buildings looked flat, too, like pieces of scenery in a play. But in the 1400s an artist named Filippo Brunelleschi figured out a way to make paintings appear to have depth. A person looking at a painting would be tricked into thinking it was something in real space. For instance, figures close-up had to be much bigger than figures that were supposed to be far away. This is called painting in perspective. A painter needed math to measure out the correct spaces for figures on the wood panels.
Leonardo was a great painter because he followed the rules … and then made rules of his own. There was magic in his fingers. He blurred hills and valleys in the background of a painting. Just a little bit. They looked as if they were blending into the sky. This is exactly how faraway mountains appear to our eyes. They don’t have sharp details or sharp outlines.
In 1478, when Leonardo was about twenty-six years old, he completed a whole painting. It is a scene of the Annunciation. The Annunciation was when an angel appeared to Mary. He told her that she was going to have a son named Jesus. In Leonardo’s painting, Mary is wearing clothes that a woman of the time would have worn. She is sitting in a walled garden. The landscape in the background looks very much like the hills of Vinci. The picture is very peaceful, and yet it also has drama.
The Annunciation is one of only thirteen paintings that experts are sure that Leonardo painted. And three of those thirteen aren’t finished. Why did he paint so few? It wasn’t that he died young. He lived well into his sixties. He wasn’t lazy. He loved to work. For the Annunciation, he did dozens of drawings beforehand. Every curl of hair had to be right. Every blade of grass.
Perhaps Leonardo finished other paintings that may have gotten lost. Someday, in the future, a Leonardo painting may be found in a tiny church or a castle. That would be a great gift for the whole world.
But the fact is that Leonardo had trouble sticking with a project. If he got an order for a painting, the first steps interested him the most. He liked figuring out how to group the figures on the panel. That part was a challenge—like fitting together all the pieces of a puzzle. But finishing a painting, filling in the colors, wasn’t as exciting. So very often he left his work undone. Also, his patrons could be fussy. And Leonardo did not like to be told what to do. He was a genius, after all!
By 1478, Florence was not the peaceful, pleasant city it had been. The Medici family and another powerful family were at war with each other. There were plots to kill the Medici rulers. The streets were dangerous.
At age thirty, Leonardo decided it was time for a change. He left Florence to go north to Milan, another city-state. There, he hoped to work for the ruler of Milan, a scheming duke named Ludovico Sforza.
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