Leonardo da Vinci

Their life

Renaissance polymath — painter of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, anatomist, engineer, and obsessive observer whose notebooks brim with inventions centuries ahead of their time.

Known for

• The Mona Lisa
• The Last Supper
• Vitruvian Man
• Anatomical and engineering notebooks
• Designs for flying machines
• Uniting art and empirical observation

The road they walked

Leonardo was born in 1452 in the small Tuscan town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a peasant woman, a circumstance that barred him from university and the traditional professions but left him free to apprentice instead in a workshop. At around fourteen he entered the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence, then one of the busiest ateliers in Italy, grinding pigments, casting bronze, and learning drawing alongside painting, sculpture, and mechanical craft — a training that never separated art from engineering, which is why his notebooks move so easily between a face and a flying machine.

Florence in these decades was a city of bankers, humanists, and fierce artistic competition, and Leonardo came of age watching Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and later Michelangelo vie for commissions under Medici patronage. He left Florence in 1482 for Milan, offering his services to Duke Ludovico Sforza not primarily as a painter but as a designer of weapons, canals, and pageantry — patronage in Renaissance Italy ran on usefulness, and Leonardo marketed himself accordingly, even as he quietly filled thousands of pages with studies of water, flight, and the human body that had no patron at all. It was in Milan that he painted The Last Supper for a monastery refectory, and later, back in Florence, that he began the Mona Lisa, a portrait he kept revising and carried with him for the rest of his life rather than delivering to a client.

His restlessness became legendary even in his own time: he left many works unfinished, moved between Florence, Milan, Rome, and finally France, and pursued anatomy, geology, and hydraulics with the same intensity he gave to painting, dissecting cadavers to understand the mechanics of a smile or a heartbeat. Fewer than twenty finished paintings survive, a small output that has only sharpened his reputation, since the notebooks — some 7,000 pages of drawings, mirror-written notes, and unrealized designs — reveal a mind that treated observation itself as a discipline, decades before science had a name for what he was doing.

How their story ended

Leonardo died in 1519 at Clos Lucé, a manor near Amboise in France, where he had spent his final years as 'First Painter, Architect, and Engineer' to King Francis I, who had granted him a pension and, by tradition, sat with him at the end. He was sixty-seven. The cause is generally attributed to a stroke or related illness, consistent with accounts of failing health in his last years, though contemporary records are thin enough that some details remain uncertain. He left behind the Mona Lisa, still unfinished by his own exacting standard, and notebooks whose full scope would not be appreciated for centuries.

In their words

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Tables where Leonardo sits

The Founder’s Table

For building something from nothing — and keeping your nerve.

The Inventors’ Bench

For chasing curiosity and building what doesn’t exist yet.

The Renaissance Studio

For making work that outlives you.

From the Journal