Leonardo da Vinci

About this figure

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was born in or near the Tuscan town of Vinci, the son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a woman named Caterina; because his parents never married, he grew up without the guild and family connections that would normally set the course of a boy's career, and largely made his own instead. As a teenager he was apprenticed in Florence to the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the city's leading workshops, where he learned to work in multiple media at once and was registered with the painters' guild by his early twenties. Little of his Florentine work from this period survives complete; even in maturity, Leonardo finished only a small fraction of what he began, a pattern that shaped his reputation almost as much as any single painting.

Around 1482 he moved to Milan and entered the service of Ludovico Sforza, the city's duke, where he stayed for roughly the next sixteen years as a court painter and engineer, designing fortifications, canals, pageants, and a bronze equestrian monument to Ludovico's father that was modeled in clay but never cast, the metal reportedly diverted to cannon during a French invasion. It was in Milan, for the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, that he painted The Last Supper in the 1490s, a mural that began deteriorating almost immediately because of his experimental technique and has been restored many times since. After the French overthrew Sforza rule in 1499, Leonardo worked for several patrons in turn, including a brief spell as military engineer to Cesare Borgia, and began the portrait now known as the Mona Lisa around 1503, a picture he is thought to have kept reworking for years rather than delivering to a client.

Leonardo's notebooks, thousands of pages in his own left-handed mirror script, are where his real range shows: dissections of muscle and bone, studies of water and flight, designs for machines that were never built, and observations on light, proportion, and the mechanics of painting that he intended to organize into a treatise. He never completed that treatise himself; the version later published as the Trattato della Pittura was compiled after his death from his manuscripts by his student and heir Francesco Melzi. In his final years Leonardo accepted an invitation from the French king Francis I and settled at a manor house near Amboise, where he died in 1519. A popular story has him dying in the king's arms; this detail rests on later tradition rather than firm contemporary record, and is best treated as legend rather than established fact. What is not in doubt is the range of the notebooks he left behind, which show a mind treating painting, anatomy, and engineering as branches of one continuous inquiry into how things work.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.