Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, engineer and draftsman. He was born near the village of Vinci in Tuscany on April 15, 1452, and died in France on May 2, 1519.
His fame rests on two pictures, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and on thousands of notebook pages that show how little he cared about finishing things. Fewer than twenty of his paintings survive.
Today he is a household name. Yet for much of his life he tried to be hired as something else, as an engineer, an architect or a builder of war machines.
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The boy was born at Anchiano, a hamlet in the hills west of Florence. His father, Ser Piero da Vinci, was a Florentine notary, Ser being the title notaries carried.
His mother was a young peasant woman, most likely named Caterina, and his parents were not married. An illegitimate son could not follow his father into the profession or enter the university.
So the boy never learned proper Latin, the language of scholars, and later called himself a man without letters, omo sanza lettere. His father sent him to learn a trade instead.
Around the age of fifteen he entered the Florence workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, a painter and sculptor who also cast bronze and built festival machinery.
By 1472 he was registered as a master in the painters' guild, named for Saint Luke, their patron saint. Even so, he stayed on with Verrocchio for several more years.
One story from that workshop is repeated everywhere. It was told by Giorgio Vasari, a painter and biographer who published his Lives of the Artists in 1550, long after both men were dead.
According to Vasari, Verrocchio let his pupil paint one angel in The Baptism of Christ. It came out so much softer and more alive than the rest that the master put down his brush for good.
The kneeling angel on the left is indeed generally given to Leonardo. The master's retirement, however, rests on Vasari's word alone.
Those workshop years also brought the young man before the law. Florence kept boxes where anyone could drop an accusation, and on April 9, 1476, an unsigned note left in one of them accused him of sodomy, then a crime in the city.
The note named him, at twenty-four, along with three other young men, and concerned a seventeen-year-old called Jacopo Saltarelli. The law did not accept unsigned accusations, and Leonardo was cleared that June.
A panel left in brown
Around 1481, now working on his own, he took on his first great commission: an Adoration of the Magi for a monastery, the scene of the three kings kneeling before the newborn Christ. The panel survives, and it looks like no finished altarpiece of its day.
What You'll Discover
What he promised a duke besides painting.
What he abandoned before leaving Florence.
What went wrong with his wall.
Who really owned the Mona Lisa.
What became of the notebooks.
What stopped his right hand.