Da Vinci Born: The Ultimate Renaissance Genius

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a peasant woman named Caterina. His illegitimate birth barred him from his father's profession and from most guilds, forcing him to find an alternative path. He was apprenticed to the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence at fourteen, and legend holds that when young Leonardo painted an angel in one corner of Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ with such skill that the master put down his brush and never painted again. He left Verrocchio's workshop and spent the next four decades moving between Florence, Milan, Rome, and France, serving as painter, engineer, architect, and military advisor to a succession of patrons including Ludovico Sforza, Cesare Borgia, and Francis I of France. He started far more projects than he finished. The notebooks he left behind, approximately 7,200 surviving pages written in mirror script from right to left, contain designs for tanks, flying machines, solar concentrators, a mechanical calculator, and anatomical studies more detailed and accurate than anything produced until the nineteenth century. He performed dissections of human cadavers to understand the body's internal structure, filling notebooks with drawings of muscles, bones, and circulatory systems that modern anatomists still cite. He painted perhaps fifteen surviving works. The Mona Lisa, which he carried with him for sixteen years and was still retouching on his deathbed, was never delivered to the person who commissioned it. He died in Amboise, France, on May 2, 1519, at the age of sixty-seven, reportedly in the arms of King Francis I, though that detail may be apocryphal.