Leonardo da Vinci

1452-1519

Leonardo da Vinci was a Florentine polymath whose curiosity spanned painting, sculpture, engineering, mathematics, anatomy, and natural philosophy. Born in 1452 in Anchiano, he trained under the Florentine painter Verrocchio before entering the court of Ludovico il Moro in Milan as a young man. There he created some of his most celebrated works while pursuing investigations into human anatomy, mechanics, and the natural world with the same intensity he brought to art. He later worked in Rome, Bologna, and Venice, and spent his final years in France as a guest of King Francis I, dying at Clos Lucé in 1519. His paintings are among the most admired in history; his notebooks reveal a mind that saw no boundary between art and science, making him a defining figure of the High Renaissance.