Leonardo da Vinci, (born April 15, 1452, Anchiano, Republic of Florence—died May 2, 1519, Cloux, France), Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, draftsman, architect, engineer, and scientist.
The son of a landowner and a peasant, Leonardo received training in painting, sculpture, and mechanical arts as an apprentice to Andrea del Verrocchio. In 1482 he entered the service of the duke of Milan as “painter and engineer.” During his 17 years in Milan, Leonardo completed six artworks, including The Virgin of the Rocks (1483–86) and one of his most famous works, the monumental wall painting Last Supper (1495–98) in the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. About 1490 Leonardo began a project of writing treatises on the “science of painting,” architecture, mechanics, and anatomy. His numerous surviving manuscripts are noted for being written in a backward script that requires a mirror to be read.
In 1502–03, as military architect and engineer for Cesare Borgia, Leonardo helped lay the groundwork for modern cartography. During the next five years in Florence (1503–08) he began another famous piece, the Mona Lisa (c. 1503–19). Leonardo then returned to Milan, where he created very little as a painter—but his scientific work flourished. In 1516, after an interlude under Medici patronage in Rome, he entered the service of Francis I of France; he never returned to Italy.
Though only some 17 completed paintings survive, they are universally seen as masterpieces. The power of The Last Supper comes in part from its masterly composition. In the Mona Lisa the features and symbolic overtones of the subject achieve a complete synthesis. The unique fame that Leonardo enjoyed in his lifetime and that, filtered by historical criticism, has remained largely intact to the present day rests on his unlimited desire for knowledge, a trait that guided all his thinking and behaviour.
