Leonardo da Vinci
Key Facts
- Apprenticed to Verrocchio in Florence from 1466; surpasses his master from the outset
- Paints “The Last Supper” (1495-1498) at the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, a masterpiece of narrative composition
- Author of the Mona Lisa (c. 1503-1506), the most famous and most visited painting in the world
- Designs flying machines and forerunners of the tank and the submarine in his engineering notebooks
- Produces anatomical drawings from dissected corpses with a precision unmatched for the time
- Invited to France by Francis I in 1516, dies at Clos Lucé (Amboise) on May 2, 1519
- His notebooks (more than 7,200 pages) anticipate many inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries
Biography
Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, Tuscany, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant woman. The absolute embodiment of the Renaissance ideal, he was simultaneously a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, anatomist, musician, and mathematician. No other man of his era, and perhaps in all of history, embraced so many disciplines with equal genius.
At fourteen, his father placed him in the workshop of Florentine master Andrea del Verrocchio, where he quickly surpassed his mentor. Florence, under the enlightened patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, was a hotbed of ideas. There Leonardo established his method: the rigorous observation of nature as the only worthy teacher. His notebooks, written in mirror script with his left hand, accumulate thousands of anatomical, botanical, hydraulic, and mechanical sketches revealing boundless curiosity.
In 1482, he entered the service of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, as court engineer. It was in Milan that he painted The Last Supper (1495-1498), a mural in the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a masterpiece of dramatic composition and psychological study of faces. His studies of bird flight led him to design flying machines (an ornithopter and an early helicopter) far ahead of their time. He also drew war machines, mobile bridges, and an ancestor of the tank.
After the fall of the Sforzas, Leonardo wandered between Florence, Venice, Rome, and Milan, painting the Mona Lisa (c. 1503-1506), whose enigmatic smile and sfumato technique revolutionized the depiction of the human face. He studied anatomy on cadavers, produced surgical plates of unmatched precision, and developed theories on hydrodynamics and geology. In 1516, Francis I invited him to France and offered him the Château du Clos-Lucé near Amboise, where he spent his final years surrounded by honour and intellectual curiosity.
Leonardo da Vinci died on 2 May 1519 in Amboise at sixty-seven, leaving a small body of paintings (fewer than twenty completed works) but of immense influence. His notebooks, rediscovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reveal a man who had imagined the aeroplane, submarine, and steam engine centuries before their invention. He remains the universal symbol of polymathic genius.