On April 15, 1452, in or near the small Tuscan hill town of Vinci, about twenty miles from Florence, a child was born who would come to represent, perhaps more fully than any other single person, the boundless aspirations of the Renaissance. He was named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, the illegitimate son of Piero da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi, a woman of lower social standing. The circumstances of his birth, outside the conventions of marriage, may have closed certain professional doors in his era, but they did little to constrain the extraordinary range of his curiosity and achievement.
His parents each married others in the year following his birth. Leonardo was raised primarily in the household of his father and paternal family in Vinci, eventually receiving his formal artistic training in Florence under the supervision of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the most accomplished painters and sculptors working in Italy at the time. It was within Verrocchio's workshop that Leonardo acquired the technical foundations of painting, drawing, sculpture, and engineering that would sustain and anchor his later innovations. By all accounts he surpassed his teacher with remarkable speed, and legend holds that Verrocchio laid down his brush after seeing Leonardo's contribution to a shared painting, recognizing that he had been eclipsed.
Leonardo began his independent career in Florence but spent a substantial portion of his most productive years in the service of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. It was in Milan that he expanded far beyond painting, filling his notebooks with observations, diagrams, and speculations on anatomy, mechanics, hydrology, geology, and optics. The notebooks, of which thousands of pages survive, are among the most remarkable documents in the history of thought. Written in his characteristic mirror script from right to left, they record not a system of organized knowledge but a restless intelligence moving from subject to subject, following threads of curiosity wherever they led.
As a painter, Leonardo produced fewer than twenty-five works that can be attributed to him with confidence, and several of those remain unfinished. Yet the paintings he did complete have exerted an influence on Western art that few works have matched. The Mona Lisa, completed in the early sixteenth century, is recognized as the most famous individual painting in the world, celebrated for the subtlety of its subject's expression and for Leonardo's pioneering use of sfumato, a technique of blending tones so smoothly that outlines dissolve into atmosphere. The Last Supper, painted on the refectory wall of a Milan convent in the 1490s, became the most reproduced religious painting of all time. The Vitruvian Man, a drawing showing a male figure inscribed within a circle and a square, became one of the defining cultural icons of the Western tradition, representing the Renaissance conviction that human beings and mathematical proportion were harmoniously aligned.
His scientific and engineering investigations were equally astonishing in their scope. Leonardo conceptualized flying machines decades before powered flight was technically conceivable, sketching ornithopters and hang-glider-like devices based on careful observations of bird wings. He designed an early form of armored fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power arrangements, and a device resembling an adding machine. He explored the principles of the double hull for ships and invented an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, modest devices that entered practical use without being attributed to him. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy by dissecting human corpses — a controversial practice at the time — producing drawings of bones, muscles, and organs of extraordinary accuracy. He contributed insights to civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, the study of friction and wear. Because he rarely published or shared his findings in a systematic way, these discoveries had little direct influence on the science of his contemporaries. History would have to rediscover many of them independently.
After his long years in Milan, Leonardo worked again in Florence, then briefly in Rome under the patronage of the Medici, and spent time in Venice. Each city and each patron drew from him different energies. He worked on urban planning projects, canal engineering, and military architecture alongside his artistic commissions. He was a man impossible to confine to a single role, and this very quality that made him exceptional also sometimes frustrated the patrons who wanted finished paintings and received instead a series of dazzling but incomplete investigations.
In his final years, Leonardo accepted an invitation from King Francis I of France and settled at the Chateau du Clos Luce, near the royal residence at Amboise. He spent his last three years there, reportedly in close friendship with the king, who is said to have held Leonardo's head as he died on May 2, 1519, at the age of sixty-seven. France still honors his memory with pride, and the Loire Valley where he spent his last years preserves the site of his final home.
The sale of Salvator Mundi in 2017, attributed in whole or in part to Leonardo, for the extraordinary sum of four hundred fifty million dollars set a new record for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction, a reminder that five centuries after his death the market for his work remains without equal. His fame has never dimmed, not for a single generation since his death. Born outside of wedlock in a modest hill town, he became the emblem of an entire civilization's ambition to understand the world through observation, reason, and the disciplined cultivation of skill. The term Renaissance man was, in many ways, invented to describe him.
