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Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who excelled as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. Though initially renowned for his achievements as a painter, Leonardo da Vinci is also celebrated for his notebooks, which contain drawings and notes on diverse subjects such as anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. He is widely regarded as a genius epitomizing the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his works have profoundly influenced later generations of artists, rivaled only by his contemporary Michelangelo.
Born out of wedlock to a notary and a lower-class woman in or near Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci received his education in Florence under the tutelage of the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. He began his career in Florence, later working in Milan under Ludovico Sforza. Throughout his life, he also spent time in Rome and Milan and attracted a significant following of imitators and students. Invited by Francis I, he spent his final three years in France, where he passed away in 1519. Since his death, his achievements, interests, personal life, and empirical thinking have consistently garnered interest and admiration, making him a frequent cultural namesake and subject.
Leonardo da Vinci is recognized as one of the greatest painters in Western art history and is often credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. Despite many lost works and fewer than 25 attributed major pieces, including numerous unfinished works, he created some of the most influential paintings in the Western canon. The Mona Lisa is his best-known work and 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 part to Leonardo da Vinci, sold at auction for $450.3 million, setting a record for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction.
Revered for his technological ingenuity, Leonardo da Vinci conceptualized flying machines, an armored fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, a ratio machine for use in an adding machine, and the double hull. While few of his designs were constructed or feasible during his lifetime due to the nascent state of metallurgy and engineering, some smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered manufacturing unheralded. He made significant discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, but did not publish his findings, resulting in little direct influence on subsequent science.
Early Life (1452–1472)
Birth and Background
Leonardo da Vinci, properly named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (“Leonardo, son of ser Piero from Vinci”), was born on 15 April 1452 in, or close to, the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, 20 miles from Florence. He was born out of wedlock to Piero da Vinci (Ser Piero da Vinci d’Antonio di ser Piero di ser Guido; 1426–1504), a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi (c. 1434–1494), from the lower class.
It remains uncertain where Leonardo da Vinci was born; the traditional account, from a local oral tradition recorded by the historian Emanuele Repetti, is that he was born in Anchiano, a country hamlet that would have offered sufficient privacy for the illegitimate birth, though it is still possible he was born in a house in Florence that Ser Piero almost certainly had. Leonardo da Vinci‘s parents both married separately the year after his birth. Caterina – who later appears in Leonardo da Vinci‘s notes as only “Caterina” or “Catelina” – is usually identified as the Caterina Buti del Vacca, who married the local artisan Antonio di Piero Buti del Vacca, nicknamed L’Accattabriga, ‘the quarrelsome one’.
Ser Piero married Albiera Amadori – having been betrothed to her the previous year – and after her death in 1464, went on to have three subsequent marriages. From all the marriages, Leonardo da Vinci eventually had 16 half-siblings (of whom 11 survived infancy) who were much younger than he (the last was born when Leonardo da Vinci was 46 years old) and with whom he had very little contact.
Very little is known about Leonardo da Vinci‘s childhood and much is shrouded in myth, partially because of his biography in the frequently apocryphal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) by 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari. Tax records indicate that by at least 1457 he lived in the household of his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci, but it is possible that he spent the years before then in the care of his mother in Vinci, either Anchiano or Campo Zeppi in the parish of San Pantaleone. He is thought to have been close to his uncle, Francesco da Vinci, but his father was probably in Florence most of the time. Ser Piero, who was the descendant of a long line of notaries, established an official residence in Florence by at least 1469 and had a successful career.
Despite his family history, Leonardo da Vinci only received a basic and informal education in (vernacular) writing, reading, and mathematics; possibly because his artistic talents were recognized early, so his family decided to focus their attention there.
Later in life, Leonardo da Vinci recorded his earliest memory, now in the Codex Atlanticus. While writing on the flight of birds, he recalled as an infant when a kite came to his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail; commentators still debate whether the anecdote was an actual memory or a fantasy.
Verrocchio’s Workshop
In the mid-1460s, Leonardo da Vinci‘s family moved to Florence, which at the time was the center of Christian Humanist thought and culture. Around the age of 14, Leonardo da Vinci became a garzone (studio boy) in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who was the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his time. This was about the time of the death of Verrocchio’s master, the great sculptor Donatello. Leonardo da Vinci became an apprentice by the age of 17 and remained in training for seven years.
Other famous painters apprenticed in the workshop or associated with it include Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo da Vinci was exposed to both theoretical training and a wide range of technical skills, including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metalworking, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and woodwork, as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting, and modeling.
Leonardo da Vinci was a contemporary of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio or at the Platonic Academy of the Medici. Florence was ornamented by the works of artists such as Donatello’s contemporaries Masaccio, whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion, and Ghiberti, whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise De pictura were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo da Vinci‘s own observations and artworks.
Much of the painting in Verrocchio’s workshop was done by his assistants. According to Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci collaborated with Verrocchio on his The Baptism of Christ (c. 1472–1475), painting the young angel holding Jesus’s robe with skill so far superior to his master’s that Verrocchio purportedly put down his brush and never painted again (the latter claim probably being apocryphal). The new technique of oil paint was applied to areas of the mostly tempera work, including the landscape, the rocks seen through the brown mountain stream, and much of Jesus’s figure, indicating Leonardo da Vinci‘s hand. Additionally, Leonardo da Vinci may have been a model for two works by Verrocchio: the bronze statue of David in the Bargello and the archangel Raphael in Tobias and the Angel.
Vasari tells a story of Leonardo da Vinci as a very young man: a local peasant made himself a round buckler shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo da Vinci, inspired by the story of Medusa, responded with a painting of a monster spitting fire that was so terrifying that his father bought a different shield to give to the peasant and sold Leonardo da Vinci‘s to a Florentine art dealer for 100 ducats, who in turn sold it to the Duke of Milan.
First Florentine Period (1472–c. 1482)
By 1472, at the age of 20, Leonardo da Vinci qualified as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate and live with him. Leonardo da Vinci‘s earliest known dated work is a 1473 pen-and-ink drawing of the Arno Valley. According to Vasari, the young Leonardo da Vinci was the first to suggest making the Arno river a navigable channel between Florence and Pisa.
In January 1478, Leonardo da Vinci received an independent commission to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of Saint Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio, indicating his independence from Verrocchio’s studio. An anonymous early biographer, known as Anonimo Gaddiano, claims that in 1480 Leonardo da Vinci was living with the Medici and often worked in the garden of the Piazza San Marco, Florence, where a Neoplatonic academy of artists, poets, and philosophers organized by the Medici met. In March 1481, he received a commission from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto for The Adoration of the Magi. Neither of these initial commissions were completed, being abandoned when Leonardo da Vinci went to offer his services to Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo da Vinci wrote Sforza a letter describing the diverse things he could achieve in the fields of engineering and weapon design, and mentioned that he could paint. He brought with him a silver string instrument – either a lute or lyre – in the form of a horse’s head.
With Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers, among whom Marsilio Ficino, proponent of Neoplatonism; Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings; and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle, were the foremost. Also associated with the Platonic Academy of the Medici was Leonardo da Vinci‘s contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. In 1482, Leonardo da Vinci was sent as an ambassador by Lorenzo de’ Medici to Ludovico il Moro, who ruled Milan between 1479 and 1499.
First Milanese Period (c. 1482–1499)
Leonardo da Vinci worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In the spring of 1485, Leonardo da Vinci traveled to Hungary (on behalf of Sforza) to meet King Matthias Corvinus, and was commissioned by him to paint a Madonna. In 1490, he was called as a consultant, together with Francesco di Giorgio Martini, for the building site of the cathedral of Pavia and was struck by the equestrian statue of Regisole, of which he left a sketch.
Leonardo da Vinci was employed on many other projects for Sforza, such as the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions; a drawing of, and wooden model for, a competition to design the cupola for Milan Cathedral; and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Ludovico’s predecessor, Francesco Sforza. This would have surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello’s Gattamelata in Padua and Verrocchio’s Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the Gran Cavallo. Leonardo da Vinci completed a model for the horse and made detailed plans for its casting, but in November 1494, Ludovico gave the metal to his brother-in-law to be used for a cannon to defend the city from Charles VIII of France.
Contemporary correspondence records that Leonardo da Vinci and his assistants were commissioned by the Duke of Milan to paint the Sala delle Asse in the Sforza Castle, around 1498. The project became a trompe-l’œil decoration that made the great hall appear to be a pergola created by the interwoven limbs of sixteen mulberry trees, whose canopy included an intricate labyrinth of leaves and knots on the ceiling.
Second Florentine Period (1500–1508)
When Ludovico Sforza was overthrown by France in 1500, Leonardo da Vinci fled Milan for Venice, accompanied by his assistant Salaì and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli. In Venice, Leonardo da Vinci was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack. On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that “men [and] women, young and old” flocked to see it “as if they were going to a solemn festival.”
In Cesena in 1502, Leonardo da Vinci entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer while traveling throughout Italy with his patron. Leonardo da Vinci created a map of Cesare Borgia’s stronghold, a town plan of Imola, to win his patronage. Upon seeing it, Cesare hired Leonardo da Vinci as his chief military engineer and architect. Later in the year, Leonardo da Vinci produced another map for his patron, depicting the Chiana Valley in Tuscany, to provide a better overlay of the land and improve strategic positioning. He worked on this map alongside a project to construct a dam from the sea to Florence to ensure a consistent water supply for the canal throughout the year.
Leonardo da Vinci had left Borgia’s service and returned to Florence by early 1503, where he rejoined the Guild of Saint Luke on 18 October of that year. By this time, Leonardo da Vinci had begun working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the model for the Mona Lisa, which he would continue working on until his twilight years. In January 1504, he was part of a committee formed to recommend the placement of Michelangelo’s statue of David. Leonardo da Vinci then spent two years in Florence designing and painting a mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina.
In 1506, Leonardo da Vinci was summoned to Milan by Charles II d’Amboise, the acting French governor of the city. There, Leonardo da Vinci took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favorite student. The Council of Florence wished Leonardo da Vinci to return promptly to finish The Battle of Anghiari, but he was given leave at the behest of Louis XII, who considered commissioning the artist to make some portraits. Leonardo da Vinci may have started a project for an equestrian figure of d’Amboise; a wax model survives and, if genuine, is the only extant example of Leonardo da Vinci‘s sculpture. Leonardo da Vinci was otherwise free to pursue his scientific interests. Many of Leonardo da Vinci‘s most prominent pupils either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, and Marco d’Oggiono. In 1507, Leonardo da Vinci was in Florence sorting out a dispute with his brothers over the estate of his father, who had died in 1504.
Second Milanese Period (1508–1513)
By 1508, Leonardo da Vinci was back in Milan, residing in his own house in Porta Orientale, within the parish of Santa Babila.
In 1512, Leonardo da Vinci was working on plans for an equestrian monument for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio. However, this project was disrupted by an invasion of Swiss, Spanish, and Venetian forces, which drove the French from Milan. Leonardo da Vinci remained in the city and spent several months in 1513 at the Medici’s Vaprio d’Adda villa.
Rome and France (1513–1519)
In March 1513, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son Giovanni became Pope Leo X. Leonardo da Vinci traveled to Rome that September, where he was received by the pope’s brother, Giuliano. From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo da Vinci spent much of his time living in the Belvedere Courtyard of the Apostolic Palace, alongside Michelangelo and Raphael. He was granted an allowance of 33 ducats a month and, according to Vasari, decorated a lizard with scales dipped in quicksilver.
The pope commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to create a painting of unknown subject matter but later canceled the commission when Leonardo da Vinci began developing a new kind of varnish. During this period, Leonardo da Vinci fell ill, which may have been the first of several strokes leading to his death. He practiced botany in the Vatican Gardens and was tasked with making plans for the Pope’s proposed draining of the Pontine Marshes. Additionally, he dissected cadavers and made notes for a treatise on vocal cords, which he hoped would regain the Pope’s favor, but his efforts were unsuccessful.
In October 1515, King Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On 21 March 1516, Antonio Maria Pallavicini, the French ambassador to the Holy See, received a letter from Lyon dated a week earlier. The letter, sent by royal advisor Guillaume Gouffier, seigneur de Bonnivet, contained instructions for assisting Leonardo da Vinci in his relocation to France and assured him that the King was eagerly awaiting his arrival. Pallavicini was also instructed to reassure Leonardo da Vinci that he would be warmly received by both King Francis and his mother, Louise of Savoy.
Leonardo da Vinci entered Francis’s service later that year and was granted use of the manor house Clos Lucé, near the royal Château d’Amboise. He was frequently visited by Francis and worked on plans for a vast castle town the King intended to build at Romorantin. Additionally, he created a mechanical lion that, during a pageant, walked towards the King and, upon being struck by a wand, opened its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies.
During this period, Leonardo da Vinci was accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Francesco Melzi, and supported by a pension totaling 10,000 scudi. At some point, Melzi drew a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. Other known portraits from his lifetime include a sketch by an unknown assistant on the back of one of Leonardo da Vinci‘s studies (c. 1517) and a drawing by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino depicting an elderly Leonardo da Vinci with his right arm wrapped in clothing. These records, along with an October 1517 visit by Louis d’Aragon, confirm that Leonardo da Vinci‘s right hand was paralyzed when he was 65. This condition may have contributed to why some of his works, including the Mona Lisa, were left unfinished. Leonardo da Vinci continued working until he eventually became ill and bedridden for several months.
Death
Leonardo da Vinci died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67, possibly from a stroke. King Francis I, who had become a close friend, was present during his final moments. Vasari describes Leonardo da Vinci lamenting on his deathbed, expressing regret for not practicing his art as he should have. According to Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci requested a priest to hear his confession and administer the Holy Sacrament in his last days.
Vasari also recounts that King Francis I held Leonardo da Vinci‘s head in his arms as he passed away, though this account may be more legend than fact. In accordance with his will, sixty beggars carrying tapers followed Leonardo da Vinci‘s casket to his final resting place. His principal heir and executor was Francesco Melzi, who received Leonardo da Vinci‘s paintings, tools, library, and personal effects, along with financial assets. Leonardo da Vinci‘s other long-time pupil and companion, Salaì, and his servant Baptista de Vilanis each received half of Leonardo da Vinci‘s vineyards. His brothers received land, and his serving woman received a fur-lined cloak. On 12 August 1519, Leonardo da Vinci‘s remains were interred in the Collegiate Church of Saint Florentin at the Château d’Amboise.
Some 20 years after Leonardo da Vinci‘s death, the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini reported that King Francis I remarked: “There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo da Vinci, not so much about painting, sculpture, and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher.”
Salaì
Salaì, also known as Il Salaino (“The Little Unclean One” or “the devil”), entered Leonardo da Vinci‘s household as an assistant in 1490. Within just a year, Leonardo da Vinci compiled a list of his misdemeanours, describing him as “a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton.” Salaì had stolen money and valuables on at least five occasions and spent a fortune on clothes. Despite these issues, Leonardo da Vinci treated him with great indulgence, and Salaì remained in Leonardo da Vinci‘s household for the next thirty years.
Salaì produced several paintings under the name Andrea Salaì, but his work is generally regarded as being of lesser artistic merit compared to other pupils of Leonardo da Vinci, such as Marco d’Oggiono and Boltraffio. Vasari claims that Leonardo da Vinci “taught him many things about painting,” yet Salaì‘s contributions are often viewed as less significant.
At the time of his death in 1524, Salaì owned a painting referred to as Joconda, listed in a posthumous inventory of his belongings. This painting was assessed at 505 lire, a notably high valuation for a small panel portrait, suggesting it might have been a work of considerable importance.
At the time of his death in 1524, Salaì possessed a painting listed as Joconda in the posthumous inventory of his possessions. This artwork was valued at 505 lire, which was an unusually high appraisal for a small panel portrait. The painting’s significant valuation underscores its potential importance, possibly linking it to Leonardo da Vinci‘s renowned Mona Lisa.
Personal Life
Despite the extensive notebooks and manuscripts left by Leonardo da Vinci, he rarely mentioned details about his personal life.
During his lifetime, Leonardo da Vinci‘s remarkable inventive abilities, his “great physical beauty,” and “infinite grace,” as noted by Vasari,[‡ 5] drew significant attention. Among the intriguing aspects of his life was his affection for animals. It is believed that he was a vegetarian and, according to Vasari, he had a practice of buying caged birds just to release them, reflecting his compassion for animals. This element of Leonardo da Vinci‘s character provides a glimpse into his personal values and interests, distinct from his more well-known works like the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo da Vinci had a circle of friends who have gained recognition either for their contributions to their fields or their historical importance. Among them was mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom Leonardo collaborated on the book Divina Proportione during the 1490s. Notably, Leonardo seems to have maintained limited close relationships with women, apart from his friendships with Cecilia Gallerani and the Este sisters, Beatrice and Isabella. During a trip through Mantua, Leonardo created a portrait of Isabella, which was later used to produce a now-lost painted version.
Leonardo da Vinci was known for keeping his private life veiled in secrecy. Discussions about his sexuality have generated a great deal of satire, analysis, and speculation, starting in the mid-16th century and resurging in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sigmund Freud, for instance, explored this in his work Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood. Leonardo’s most personal relationships were likely with his apprentices Salaì and Melzi. Melzi, in a letter informing Leonardo’s brothers of his death, described the feelings Leonardo had for his students as both loving and passionate. There have been claims since the 16th century suggesting that these relationships may have been sexual or erotic in nature. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Leonardo da Vinci, asserts that the relationship with Salaì was indeed intimate and homosexual.
Earlier in his life, specifically in 1476 when he was about twenty-four years old, Leonardo da Vinci and three other young men faced charges of sodomy in a case involving a known male prostitute. The charges were eventually dropped due to insufficient evidence, with speculation that the Medici family’s influence—particularly through one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni—played a role in the dismissal. Over time, there has been extensive discussion about Leonardo’s presumed homosexuality and its potential influence on his art, including the androgyny and eroticism present in works such as Saint John the Baptist and Bacchus, as well as in several erotic sketches.
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