Leonardo da Vinci

Italian polymath of the High Renaissance.

He is widely regarded as a genius who epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal.^[1] Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, born 15 April 1452 and deceased 2 May 1519, was a High Renaissance Italian polymath whose activities included painting, draughtsmanship, engineering, science, theorizing, sculpture, and architecture.^[2] His initial renown came from painting, but he later gained fame for his notebooks, which contain drawings and notes on anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and palaeontology.^[2]

Quick Facts

Birth name: Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Born: 15 April 1452
Education: Studio of Andrea del Verrocchio
Years active: c. 1470–1519
Died: 2 May 1519
Place of death: Clos Lucé, Amboise, France
Resting place: Château d'Amboise
Family: Da Vinci

Facts from the source article.

Life and work

Leonardo was born out of wedlock on 15 April 1452 in or near Vinci, Tuscany, to a successful notary and a lower-class woman.^[3][4] He was educated in Florence by the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio.^[3] He created some of the most influential paintings in the Western canon, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.^[5][6] He conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, and the double hull.^[7]

Francis I invited him to France, where he resided for his final three years and died in 1519.^[3] The Vitruvian Man drawing is considered a cultural icon.^[6]

What the cited sources add

A Guardian article by Jones notes that Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists suggests Leonardo was besotted with his male assistant Salaì.^[8] The same article states that documents found at the start of the 1900s show Leonardo was accused of sodomy before Florentine magistrates in 1476.^[8] Jones reports that the sodomy accusation was made to the Office of the Night, a sex crime agency set up in 1432.^[8] Jones further notes that modern biographer Charles Nicholl tried to resuscitate the claim by noticing the word "Cremonese" in a list of names.^[8]

An Italian writer asserted that Leonardo's notebooks contained a reference to a female lover called "La Cremona," but no surviving notebook includes such a passage.^[8]

References

Wikipedia, "Leonardo da Vinci" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Heydenreich 2020; Kemp 2003; Heydenreich 2020 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Leonardo da Vinci" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Kemp 2003 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Leonardo da Vinci" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Kemp 2003; Heydenreich 2020 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Leonardo da Vinci" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Brown 1998, p. 7; Kemp 2006, p. 1; Brown 1998, p. 7; Nicholl 2005, p. [https://archive.org/details/leonardodavinci00char/page/17 17]; Bambach 2019, p. 16, 24; Brown 1998, p. 7 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Leonardo da Vinci" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Kemp 2003; Kemp 2003 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Leonardo da Vinci" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Zöllner 2019, p. 20 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Leonardo da Vinci" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Kaplan, "Roberto Guatelli's Controversial Replica of Leonardo da Vinci's Adding Machine", 1996; Kaplan, "Anecdotes", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Apr 1997, p. 62–69 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Jones, "Leonardo, ladies' man: why can't we accept that Da Vinci was gay?", The Guardian, 26 March 2021. facts only, no text reused. theguardian.com

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Leonardo da Vinci (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.