Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was the supreme exemplar of the Renaissance ideal of the universal man — painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, anatomist, botanist, geologist, and musician. The range of his curiosity and the quality of his achievement across so many disciplines make him one of the most remarkable human beings who ever lived.
Origins
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the village of Vinci, near Florence, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary named Ser Piero da Vinci and a peasant woman named Caterina. His illegitimate birth barred him from the learned professions his father practiced, but it also freed him from the expectation that he would follow his father into the law. He was apprenticed in his teens to the painter, sculptor, and goldsmith Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence.
Verrocchio's workshop was the finest in Florence — Leonardo worked alongside future masters including Perugino and Botticelli. He quickly surpassed his teacher. According to Vasari, when Leonardo contributed an angel to Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ, the older painter recognized that his pupil had outdone him and put down his brushes. Whether literally true or not, the story captures something real: Leonardo's technique, his grasp of light and form, his ability to suggest inner life through the subtleties of posture and expression, were already extraordinary.
Milan: The Scientist-Engineer
Around 1482, Leonardo left Florence for Milan, offering his services to Ludovico Sforza, the duke. His letter of application — one of the most remarkable job applications in history — listed his abilities primarily as a military engineer: he could design portable bridges, mortars, armored vehicles, ships, and catapults. He mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that he could also paint and sculpt.
In Milan he flourished under Sforza's patronage. He organized court entertainments and theatrical spectacles. He designed a colossal bronze equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, the duke's father — an enormous project that consumed years, for which he constructed a full-size clay model, and which was never cast (the bronze intended for it was melted down for cannons when the French invaded in 1499). He painted The Virgin of the Rocks and the devastating Lady with an Ermine.
And he began filling his notebooks.
The notebooks — some 7,200 pages survive, about a third of what he produced — are the record of a mind in perpetual motion. Leonardo wrote in mirror-script, right to left, a habit that has been variously explained as self-concealment, left-handedness, or simple convenience for a left-handed writer using wet ink. The notebooks contain designs for flying machines based on the wings of birds, descriptions of the circulation of the blood decades before William Harvey's formal demonstration, careful maps of geological strata with an understanding of erosion, detailed anatomical drawings (he dissected at least thirty human bodies), designs for machines — tanks, hydraulic lifts, swing bridges, mechanical looms, musical instruments — that would not be built for centuries.
The Last Supper
Between approximately 1495 and 1498, Leonardo painted the Last Supper on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. It is not a fresco — Leonardo, unhappy with the constraints of painting on wet plaster, experimented with tempera and oil on a dry plaster surface. The technique failed catastrophically: the paint began flaking within years. The Last Supper has spent five centuries slowly decaying and being periodically restored.
What has survived is enough to understand why it changed Western art. The composition — Christ as the calm center, the twelve apostles rippling outward in groups of three, each responding differently to his announcement that one among them will betray him — gave narrative painting a new psychological depth. Every figure is individuated, every gesture legible. The architecture of the room opens into a landscape behind Christ's head, creating a natural halo. It is theater and theology and portraiture simultaneously.
Florence: The Last Works
When the French invaded Milan in 1499, Sforza fled and Leonardo returned to Florence. He spent a decade there producing some of his greatest work: the cartoon for The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, the Battle of Anghiari fresco (now lost, known only through copies), and, beginning around 1503, the Mona Lisa.
The Mona Lisa — probably the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine merchant — exemplifies Leonardo's technique of sfumato, the subtle gradation of light and shadow that eliminates hard outlines and gives his figures their uncanny, living quality. The subject's expression shifts depending on where the viewer looks. The atmospheric landscape behind her, with its retreating mountains and winding river, applies Leonardo's understanding of how air diffuses light with distance. It is a scientific achievement as much as an artistic one.
Leonardo worked on it for years and never gave it to the man who commissioned it. He carried it with him to France.
Rome and France
After a period in Rome under the patronage of the Medici Pope Leo X — where he was given a studio and assistants but apparently produced little — Leonardo accepted an invitation from the young King Francis I of France in 1516. He was sixty-three, his right hand partially paralyzed by a stroke (he had always been left-handed; he now drew exclusively with his left). He settled at the Château du Clos Lucé, near the royal chateau of Amboise, with the title of Premier peintre, architecte et ingénieur du roi and a generous pension.
He spent his last three years in France — designing festivals, advising on canal projects, and continuing to fill his notebooks. King Francis reportedly visited him constantly, holding his head in his arms when he died on May 2, 1519, at sixty-seven. Vasari, writing thirty years later, records Francis saying that "no other man had been born who knew as much as Leonardo, not only in sculpture, painting, and architecture, but in philosophy."
Legacy
Leonardo's notebooks were not published in his lifetime. They were scattered, acquired by various collections, and gradually became known to scholars only from the nineteenth century onward. What he knew, he mostly kept to himself — or confined to his notebooks, in mirror-script, without publication or teaching. The science died with him; it had to be rediscovered.
What survived was the art: a handful of finished works, fewer than twenty paintings confidently attributed to him, each a masterpiece. The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa are among the most reproduced images in human history. The Virgin of the Rocks, the Lady with an Ermine, the St. John the Baptist — each exhibits that quality that contemporaries struggled to name and that we still struggle to explain: a sense that the figures are alive, that they are thinking, that they exist in a world with depth and weather and time.
He was, and remains, the most astonishing example of what a single human mind, at full stretch, is capable of.