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Who Was Leonardo da Vinci?

Leonardo da Vinci is the closest thing history offers to a universal genius. Born in a small Tuscan town in 1452, the illegitimate son of a notary, he became the painter of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, two of the most famous images in the world. But painting was only part of his life. He dissected corpses to understand the human body, studied the flight of birds to design flying machines, drew plans for tanks, bridges and canals, and filled thousands of notebook pages with observations on water, light, geology and the workings of the heart. He finished relatively few paintings, and many of his projects were never built, yet his notebooks and his surviving pictures changed both art and science. The story of Leonardo is the story of a mind that refused to stay in one discipline, and of a man whose curiosity was larger than any single career could hold.

Last updated: 13 November 2026

1. The boy from Vinci

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 in the village of Vinci, about forty kilometres from Florence, to Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary, and Caterina, a young woman of modest background. Because his parents were not married, Leonardo was born outside the formal structures of Florentine society, and that outsider status shaped his life. He was not sent to a Latin school, as a legitimate son of his class would have been, and he never mastered Latin, the language of scholarship. Instead he learned to observe, to draw, and to teach himself — habits that would make him both an extraordinary artist and an outsider to the academic world of his time.

As a teenager Leonardo moved to Florence and entered the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the city's leading artists. Verrocchio's workshop was a place where painting, sculpture, metalwork and engineering were taught side by side, and the young Leonardo learned them all. Tradition holds that he painted an angel in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ so beautifully that his master gave up painting — a story that may be legend, but which captures the impression Leonardo made. By 1472 he was registered as a master in the Florentine painters' guild, and he was already taking on commissions of his own, including an altarpiece for a monastery that he never finished, a pattern that would repeat throughout his life.

Leonardo's early years in Florence also gave him his first scientific interests. He studied the mathematics of perspective, the way the eye sees the world, and the anatomy of the human body, and he began the habit of keeping notebooks that would last until his death. He was left-handed, and he wrote from right to left in a mirror script that is easy to read only when held up to a mirror. Scholars have debated why he wrote this way — some say it was simply natural for a left-handed writer, others that he wanted to keep his notes private — but the result is that his notebooks feel intensely personal, the record of a mind thinking on the page.

2. Milan: The Last Supper and the engineer

In 1482 Leonardo left Florence for Milan, where he entered the service of Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of the city. He introduced himself to Ludovico not as a painter but as a military engineer, listing his abilities to build bridges, cannons, tanks and siege engines, and only at the end mentioning that he could also paint. The letter shows how Leonardo saw himself: an engineer and inventor first, a painter second. In Milan he designed fortifications, canals and stage machinery, and he worked on a vast bronze horse, a monument to Ludovico's father, which was never cast because the bronze was needed for cannons. The full-scale clay model was destroyed by French soldiers when they invaded Milan.

It was in Milan that Leonardo painted his first undisputed masterpiece, The Last Supper, on the wall of the dining hall of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The work was commissioned in the mid-1490s, and Leonardo painted it slowly, over several years, working in short sessions and spending long periods simply looking at it. He chose the moment when Jesus announces that one of his disciples will betray him, and he painted the disciples' reactions — shock, denial, anger, fear — as a drama of individual psychology, each figure responding differently. It was a new way of painting a religious scene, and it became one of the most copied and discussed images in Western art.

The Last Supper also shows Leonardo's tendency to experiment, and the cost of it. Instead of painting in the traditional fresco technique, which required working quickly on wet plaster, he tried a new method using oil paint on a dry wall, hoping for richer colours and the freedom to work slowly. The paint began to flake within years of its completion, and the painting has been damaged, restored and re-restored ever since. What survives today is a shadow of what Leonardo painted, yet even in its damaged state it retains an extraordinary power, and modern restorations have recovered much of the original colour and detail. The story of The Last Supper is, in miniature, the story of Leonardo's career: an astonishing achievement, and a work that his own restlessness and experimentation put at risk.

3. The notebooks: anatomy, flight and water

Leonardo's notebooks are one of the great treasures of the Renaissance. He filled more than seven thousand surviving pages with drawings and notes, written in his mirror script, on subjects ranging from the flow of water to the structure of the human heart. He dissected more than thirty human corpses, in secret and at considerable personal risk, because the Church and the medical authorities of the time frowned on dissection, and his anatomical drawings were far ahead of the medical knowledge of his day. He drew the heart, its valves and its chambers, with an accuracy that would not be matched for centuries, and he was the first to describe the heart as a muscle that pumps blood, rather than a furnace that heats it.

His studies of flight were equally ambitious. He watched birds for hours, drew their wings in detail, and designed machines to carry a human into the air: a great flapping wing driven by the pilot's muscles, a helicopter-like screw, and a parachute. None of them could have worked with the materials and the power available in his lifetime — human muscle is not strong enough to sustain flight in a machine of that size — but the drawings show a mind working systematically through a problem, testing ideas, discarding the ones that failed, and recording what he had learned. The same approach runs through his studies of water, in which he drew the movement of rivers, whirlpools and waves with a precision that modern fluid dynamics still admires.

Leonardo also worked as an engineer for the rulers who employed him, designing bridges, canals, fortifications and weapons. His notebooks contain a tank, a machine gun, a diving suit and a robot-like mechanical knight, all drawn with the same care as his paintings. Very few of these designs were built in his lifetime, and some of them may have been intended as impressive drawings for a patron rather than as practical plans. But they show the range of his mind, and they raise the question that runs through his whole life: was he a scientist who painted, or a painter who studied science? The honest answer is that he did not see the distinction. For Leonardo, art and science were the same activity — the careful observation of nature, recorded by drawing.

4. The Mona Lisa and the problem of finishing

The Mona Lisa, begun in Florence in 1503 and worked on for years, is the most famous painting in the world, and it is also one of the strangest. It is a small portrait, less than a metre high, of a woman seated against a landscape of winding roads and misty mountains. The sitter is traditionally identified as Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, though the identification rests on a note written in the margin of a book by a contemporary, and some scholars have proposed other sitters. Leonardo carried the painting with him for the rest of his life, refining it in layer after layer of thin paint, and it was still in his possession when he died in France, which is why it ended up in the French royal collection and, eventually, in the Louvre.

The painting's fame rests partly on the sitter's expression — the slight smile that seems to change as you look at it — and partly on Leonardo's technique. He used a method called sfumato, from the Italian word for smoke, building up dozens of translucent layers of paint so that edges dissolve into shadow and the face seems to emerge from darkness. The landscape behind her is painted in the same hazy tones, and the effect is that the figure and the world around her belong to each other. The Mona Lisa has been copied, parodied, stolen and argued over, and its fame has grown far beyond the painting itself. It is worth remembering that Leonardo himself never sold it and never exhibited it: it was a private work, carried from city to city, and its fame is an accident of history.

Leonardo's difficulty in finishing works was famous in his own lifetime. His patrons complained that he began projects and abandoned them, and the list of his unfinished paintings is long: the Adoration of the Magi, begun in Florence in 1481 and left incomplete; the great mural of the Battle of Anghiari in Florence, of which only copies survive; the bronze horse in Milan, never cast. Modern scholars have offered several explanations: that his curiosity pulled him from one subject to another, that his standards were so high that few works satisfied him, and that he was more interested in solving the problem a painting posed than in finishing it. Whatever the reason, the pattern means that Leonardo's reputation rests on a small number of finished works — perhaps fifteen paintings are generally accepted as his — and on the notebooks, which show the thinking behind them.

5. Disputed works: the Salvator Mundi debate

No question about Leonardo's work is more heated today than the attribution of Salvator Mundi, a painting of Christ holding a crystal orb, which was sold at auction in 2017 for a sum reported at the time as the highest ever paid for a painting. The panel had been heavily overpainted and was long thought to be the work of a follower. After a restoration that removed layers of later paint, some scholars argued that it was a genuine Leonardo, pointing to the quality of the face and the hands, and to the painting's likeness to other versions of the subject associated with his workshop. The auction house presented it as a Leonardo, and the sale made headlines around the world.

Other scholars disagreed, and the debate has continued since the sale. The critics argue that the painting's execution is uneven, that parts of it — notably the orb and the drapery — are weak, and that it is more plausibly the work of Leonardo's workshop, perhaps with some passages painted by the master himself. Some have argued that it was painted by one of his assistants, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, or by another member of his circle. The painting's current whereabouts are not publicly confirmed, which has made further study difficult, and the absence of a clear public record has fuelled speculation. The honest position, and the one this site takes, is that the attribution is disputed: the painting may be a Leonardo, or a workshop production with his involvement, and readers should be aware that the question is not settled.

The debate matters because it shows how attribution works in art history. A painting is not declared a Leonardo by a single test, but by a consensus of evidence: the style, the technique, the materials, the documents, and the judgement of scholars who have spent their lives studying his work. When that consensus does not exist, the responsible course is to say so. Other Leonardo attributions have been debated in the same way, including the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks and the portrait known as La Belle Ferronnière, and in each case the debate tells us something about how Leonardo's workshop operated, with assistants copying and completing his designs. Leonardo's genius does not depend on the Salvator Mundi being his; it rests on the works that are certain, and on the notebooks that no one else could have written.

6. The last years in France

In 1516, at the age of sixty-four, Leonardo accepted an invitation from the young French king, Francis I, and moved to France, settling at the manor of Cloux, near the royal castle at Amboise in the Loire Valley. Francis gave him a generous pension and the title of first painter, engineer and architect to the king, and asked little of him in return. Leonardo brought with him three paintings — the Mona Lisa, a Saint John the Baptist and a Virgin and Child with Saint Anne — and his notebooks. He spent his last years in relative peace, visited by the king, who was said to admire him greatly, and by a small circle of friends and assistants, including his companion Francesco Melzi, who would later inherit his notebooks.

Leonardo's health declined in his final years. His right hand was weakened, possibly by a stroke, and he could no longer paint as he had. He continued to draw and to write, but the great projects were behind him. He died on 2 May 1519, at the age of sixty-seven, at Cloux. He was buried in the chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise, though his tomb was later disturbed during the French Revolution and the exact location of his remains is not certain. Francis I is said to have held his head as he died, a story that has become one of the legends of the Renaissance, though it is probably an invention of later writers.

After his death, Leonardo's notebooks were scattered. Melzi kept the largest collection and tried to organise it into a treatise on painting, but after Melzi's death the pages were divided, sold and dispersed across Europe, and they were not properly studied until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That delay shaped Leonardo's reputation: for three hundred years he was known mainly as a painter of a handful of famous works, and the full range of his scientific work was only recognised when the notebooks were finally published and studied. The modern image of Leonardo as a universal genius is, in large part, a product of that rediscovery.

7. Why Leonardo still matters

Leonardo matters because he showed what a single mind could do when it refused to accept the boundaries between subjects. In his lifetime, art and science were separate professions, taught in different places and judged by different standards. Leonardo worked across them without noticing the divide, and the result was a body of work — paintings, drawings, notes, designs — that still surprises readers and viewers five hundred years later. His anatomical drawings changed how doctors understood the body. His studies of water and flight anticipated questions that science would take centuries to answer. His paintings changed what a portrait and a religious scene could be.

He also matters because of what he teaches about curiosity. Leonardo's notebooks are not the record of a man who knew the answers; they are the record of a man who kept asking questions, and who was willing to spend years on a problem that had no obvious use. That habit — of observing carefully, drawing what you see, and testing what you think — is the foundation of modern science, and Leonardo practised it before modern science existed. It is also the reason his work still feels modern: he was interested in how things work, not in how they were supposed to work, and that interest never goes out of date.

Finally, Leonardo matters as a reminder that fame is not the same as understanding. The Mona Lisa is the most reproduced image in the world, and yet the painting itself is small, quiet and private, and most of the people who recognise it have never stood in front of it. The notebooks, which Leonardo never published, are in many ways the more important achievement, and they were ignored for centuries. The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life; the best way to meet Leonardo is to look at the paintings and then to look at the drawings, and to notice that the same hand, and the same mind, made both.

Frequently asked questions

When was Leonardo da Vinci born and when did he die?

Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, near Florence in Italy, and died on 2 May 1519 in France, at the age of 67. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, anatomist and inventor. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

Who is the Mona Lisa?

The Mona Lisa is a portrait of a woman, traditionally identified as Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine merchant. Leonardo worked on it for years and carried it with him to France, where it remained after his death. It is now in the Louvre in Paris. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

What is The Last Supper?

The Last Supper, painted in the late 1490s on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, shows Jesus at the moment he tells his disciples that one of them will betray him. Leonardo began experimenting with a new technique, and the painting began to deteriorate within his own lifetime. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

Is Salvator Mundi definitely a Leonardo painting?

No. The attribution of Salvator Mundi, a painting of Christ holding a crystal orb that sold at auction in 2017, is disputed among scholars. Some accept it as a genuine Leonardo, others argue that it was painted largely by his workshop, and the debate continues. This site does not present it as a certain work by Leonardo. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

What did Leonardo's notebooks contain?

Leonardo filled thousands of pages of notebooks with drawings and notes on anatomy, flight, water, geology, optics and engineering. He dissected human bodies, studied the flight of birds, and designed machines including flying devices, a tank and a diving suit — most of them never built in his lifetime. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

Where did Leonardo die?

Leonardo died in France in 1519, at the manor of Cloux near Amboise, where he had been invited by King Francis I. He was buried in the chapel of Saint-Hubert in the castle of Amboise. (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica.)