Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian painter, draughtsman, engineer, and anatomist, and the most versatile figure of the Italian Renaissance. Fewer than twenty paintings are attributed to him with confidence, yet his surviving drawings and notebooks range across anatomy, mechanics, optics, water, and flight 1.

Born out of wedlock near Vinci and trained in Florence, he worked for the Sforza court in Milan, for the Florentine republic, and finally for the French crown. His career shows how Renaissance artists moved between workshops, courts, and fortifications, and how drawing served as a common language for art and engineering 2.

This entry follows his training, paintings, anatomy, engineering, and reputation.

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, a small town west of Florence, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant woman. He learned reading, writing, and arithmetic but little Latin, and later described himself as a man without letters. At about fourteen he was apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio, whose workshop produced sculpture, armour, and paintings.

By 1472 Leonardo was enrolled in the painters' guild of Florence. His earliest surviving works include an angel in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ, the Annunciation, and the portrait of Ginevra de' Benci. In 1481 he received a commission for the Adoration of the Magi, which he left unfinished when he moved to Milan 1.

Leonardo arrived in Milan around 1482 and spent seventeen years in the service of Ludovico Sforza. He worked as a court engineer and impresario as well as a painter, designing festivals, fortifications, canals, and machines, and he wrote a celebrated letter listing the military devices he could build 2.

In Milan he painted the first version of the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and, between about 1495 and 1498, The Last Supper for the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The mural was painted on dry plaster rather than fresh, an experiment that caused it to deteriorate within decades. When the French captured Milan in 1499, Ludovico fell and Leonardo left the city 3.

Leonardo's painted output is small, in part because he experimented constantly with materials and methods. His signature technique is sfumato, the blending of tones without hard outlines, which gives faces and landscapes their soft transitions. He also used chiaroscuro, the strong contrast of light and shadow, to model form 1.

The Mona Lisa, begun around 1503, is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine merchant. Leonardo carried it with him for years and never delivered it; it entered the French royal collection and later the Louvre, where it became the most visited painting in the world 4. The National Gallery in London holds the second version of the Virgin of the Rocks, made for a different patron and differing in composition and colour 5.

Leonardo filled thousands of pages with drawings and notes, written in mirror script from right to left. Roughly 7,000 pages survive, probably a fraction of what he produced 1. His anatomical studies were based on dissection, and he recorded muscles, bones, and internal organs with a precision that would not be matched for two centuries 2.

He is credited with early accurate depictions of the spine's curvature and with detailed studies of the heart's valves, the chambers of the brain, and a fetus in the womb. He intended to publish a treatise on anatomy, but it never appeared, and the notebooks remained scattered among collectors. Their influence on medicine was therefore slight until they were published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 6.

Leonardo's engineering interests were practical and speculative at once. He designed canals and locks for the Milanese waterways, advised on fortifications, and sketched machines for lifting, excavating, and pumping. Some designs, including a diving suit and an armoured vehicle, were never built; others reflect careful observation of existing mechanisms 1.

His study of flight began with birds and continued with models of wings, parachutes, and a helical aerial screw. He also investigated optics, the flow of water, and the origin of fossils found in rock, arguing that they were the remains of living creatures rather than sports of nature. The Vitruvian Man, drawn around 1490, applies the proportions described by the Roman architect Vitruvius to a human figure 6.

After the fall of the Sforzas, Leonardo worked in Florence, briefly for Cesare Borgia as a military engineer, and then in Rome under the patronage of Giuliano de' Medici. In 1516 he accepted an invitation from Francis I of France and moved to the manor of Clos Lucé near Amboise, where he died on 2 May 1519, aged sixty-seven 2.

He left his notebooks to his pupil Francesco Melzi, and they were dispersed after Melzi's death. Some were cut up, some were sold, and a large group reached the Royal Collection in England. The Treatise on Painting was compiled and published in 1651, and his scientific drawings became widely known only in the nineteenth century. His reputation now rests on the notebooks as much as on the paintings 1.