Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci lived from 15 April 1452 to 2 May 1519. An Italian polymath during the High Renaissance, he worked as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. People first knew him for his painting, but his notebooks later brought him fame too; those books hold drawings and notes on anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and palaeontology. Many consider him a genius who perfectly represented the Renaissance humanist ideal. His body of work shaped European art in a way that only Michelangelo, a younger contemporary, could match.

Born outside marriage to a successful notary and a woman from the lower class, he grew up in or near Vinci, Tuscany. Andrea del Verrocchio, an Italian painter and sculptor, taught him in Florence. Leonardo started his career there, then served Ludovico Sforza in Milan for a long stretch. He later worked again in Florence and Milan, and briefly in Rome, gathering many imitators and students along the way. Francis I invited him to France, where he spent his final three years and died in 1519. Since his death, people have never stopped being curious about his achievements, wide-ranging interests, personal life, and empirical thinking. That has made his name and image appear frequently in culture.

He ranks among the greatest painters in Western art history and is often called the founder of the High Renaissance. Though many of his works are lost, and fewer than 25 major pieces survive—including several unfinished ones—those that remain include some of the most influential paintings in the Western canon. The *Mona Lisa* is considered the most famous painting in the world. *The Last Supper* is the most reproduced religious painting ever, and his *Vitruvian Man* drawing has become a cultural icon. In 2017, *Salvator Mundi*, attributed partly or fully to Leonardo, sold at auction for $450.3 million, setting a record for the most expensive painting ever sold publicly.

His technological ideas are also admired. He imagined flying machines, an armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, a ratio machine usable in an adding machine, and the double hull. Few of these designs were built or even possible during his lifetime, because modern metallurgy and engineering were just beginning in the Renaissance. Some smaller inventions, though, quietly entered manufacturing, like an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing wire tensile strength. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, but he never published them, so they had little direct impact on later science.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci—his full name meaning "Leonardo, son of ser Piero from Vinci"—was born on 15 April 1452 in or near the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, about 20 miles from Florence. He was illegitimate, the child of Piero da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi, who came from a lower class. Exactly where he was born is uncertain. A local oral tradition, recorded by historian Emanuele Repetti, says he was born in Anchiano, a country hamlet offering privacy for an illegitimate birth. But he might have been born in a Florence house that Ser Piero almost certainly owned. The year after his birth, both parents married other people. Caterina—whom Leonardo later referred to in his notes only as "Caterina" or "Catelina"—is usually identified as Caterina Buti del Vacca, who married local artisan Antonio di Piero Buti del Vacca. Ser Piero, already betrothed to her the previous year, married Albiera Amadori; after her death in 1464, he married three more times. From all these marriages, Leonardo eventually had 16 half-siblings (11 survived infancy), much younger than him—the last was born when he was 46—and he had little contact with them.

Very little is known about his childhood, and much of it is wrapped in myth, partly because of Giorgio Vasari's often unreliable biography in *Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects* (1550). Tax records show that by at least 1457 he lived with his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci. But he may have spent earlier years with his mother in Vinci, either in Anchiano or Campo Zeppi in the parish of San Pantaleone. He is thought to have been close to his uncle, Francesco da Vinci, while his father was probably in Florence most of the time. Ser Piero, descended from a long line of notaries, set up an official residence in Florence by at least 1469 and had a successful career. Despite this family background, Leonardo received only a basic, informal education in vernacular writing, reading, and mathematics. Possibly his artistic talents were recognized early, so his family focused on that.

Later in life, Leonardo recorded his earliest memory in the *Codex Atlanticus*. While writing about bird flight, he recalled that as an infant a kite came to his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail. Commentators still debate whether this was a real memory or a fable.