Leonardo da Vinci
1452–1519 3 entries
Biography
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, engineer and scientist, the very image of the Renaissance man. He was born in 1452 in or near the village of Vinci, outside Florence, the illegitimate son of a notary, and trained as a painter in the Florentine workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. In 1482 he moved to Milan, to the court of Ludovico Sforza, for whom he worked as a painter, engineer and designer of festivities, and there he painted the Last Supper on the wall of a monastery refectory.
He finished only a handful of paintings, among them the Mona Lisa, yet they changed European art. His drawing of the Vitruvian Man, a figure set in a circle and a square, became a symbol of the harmony between man and the world. His true life’s work lies in his notebooks, thousands of pages written from right to left in mirror script, full of studies of anatomy, of the flight of birds and the flow of water, and of machines centuries ahead of their time. After years in Florence, Milan and Rome, he accepted the invitation of King Francis I and spent his last years in France, where he died in 1519 at Clos Lucé, near Amboise.
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