Explore the life and works of one of history's greatest geniuses. Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance polymath whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, paleontology, and cartography.
Biography
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of the Republic of Florence. He was the out-of-wedlock son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and an orphaned girl, Caterina di Meo Lippi.
Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Italian painter Andrea del Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan, and he later worked in Rome, Bologna, and Venice.
He spent his last years in France at the home awarded to him by Francis I of France. Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on May 2, 1519 at the age of 67, possibly of a stroke.
Leonardo is renowned primarily as a painter. The Mona Lisa is the most famous of his works and the most famous portrait ever made. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time and his Vitruvian Man drawing is regarded as a cultural icon as well.
Famous Artworks
Mona Lisa (c. 1503–1519)
The Last Supper (1495–1498)
Vitruvian Man (c. 1490)
The Virgin of the Rocks (1483–1486)
Lady with an Ermine (1489–1490)
Salvator Mundi (c. 1500)
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (c. 1503)
St. John the Baptist (c. 1513–1516)
Ginevra de' Benci (c. 1474–1478)
Inventions and Studies
Leonardo's notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time. Some of his most notable studies and inventions include:
Flying machines
Ideal city
Adding machine
Solar power
Calculator
Theory of plate tectonics
Leonardo's approach to science was observational: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. His studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy.
