Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 in, or near, the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, about 20 miles from Florence. He was the son of Piero da Vinci, a successful Florentine legal notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi, a woman from the lower class. Known to history as Leonardo da Vinci, he became one of the defining figures of the High Renaissance: painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect.

His early life was shaped by Florence, then a center of Christian Humanist thought and culture. Leonardo received only a basic and informal education in writing, reading, and mathematics, perhaps because his artistic talents were noticed early. Around age 14, he entered the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his time. There he trained for seven years and learned not only drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling, but also drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and woodwork.

Leonardo began his career in Florence, then spent much time in the service of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Later he worked again in Florence and Milan, and briefly in Rome. In his final years, he accepted the invitation of Francis I and spent his last three years in France, where he died on 2 May 1519. During his lifetime he attracted a large following of imitators and students, and after his death his varied work and personal life continued to draw attention.

Although he was active in many fields, Leonardo’s fame first rested on painting. He is identified as one of the greatest painters in the history of Western art and is often credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. Fewer than 25 major works are attributed to him, and many works were lost or unfinished, yet several became central to Western art. The Mona Lisa is his best known work and is regarded as the world’s most famous individual painting. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time, and his Vitruvian Man drawing is regarded as a cultural icon. In 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed in whole or in part to Leonardo, sold at public auction for US$450.3 million.

Leonardo’s notebooks show the range of his mind. He made drawings and notes on anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and palaeontology. He also conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, a ratio machine that could be used in an adding machine, and the double hull. Many of these designs were not built, or were not feasible in his lifetime, because metallurgy and engineering were still in their infancy during the Renaissance. Still, some smaller inventions entered manufacturing, including an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire.

What keeps Leonardo’s words alive is the same quality that keeps his images and notebooks alive: clear attention joined to wide curiosity. His empirical thinking helped him study anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, even though he did not publish his findings and they had little to no direct influence on later science. The line often placed beside his name, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” suits the way many readers still see him: a maker who looked closely, thought across boundaries, and sought order in the visible world.