Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, engineer and draftsman, born near the village of Vinci in Tuscany on 15 April 1452, who died in France on 2 May 1519. He is remembered for the Mona Lisa, for The Last Supper and for thousands of notebook pages that show how little he cared about finishing things. Fewer than twenty of his paintings survive.
He is now the most famous painter in the world, and for much of his life he tried to be hired as something else.
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Around 1482, when he was thirty, Leonardo wrote to Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan, to ask for a job. The sheet that survives is a draft, and nobody knows whether it was ever sent. It lists what he could do for a duke at war: bridges, tunnels, covered wagons, mortars, catapults, bombs that scatter stones over a besieged town.
Nine of the ten points are about siege and water. Painting arrives at the very end, tucked into the tenth after architecture and works in marble, bronze and clay: "In painting, I can do as much as anyone, whoever he may be."
The duke kept him for about seventeen years. In that time Leonardo painted The Last Supper and Lady with an Ermine, and designed a bronze horse for the duke's father that was never cast. The pattern held for the rest of his life. The man the world calls the greatest painter ever made his name in the gaps between other jobs.
What You'll Discover
Why a notary's son had no Latin.
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.