🇮🇹Leonardo
da Vinci

He was fourteen years old when his father walked him into Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop in Florence in 1466, and within months the master's apprentice had surpassed everyone else in the room. Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci had been born illegitimate on April 15, 1452, in the small town of Vinci in Tuscany — the son of a notary named Ser Piero and a peasant woman named Caterina. His illegitimacy barred him from inheriting his father's profession or entering the guilds as a full citizen, so art became both his calling and his only avenue. It turned out to be enough. By the time he was twenty, he had already contributed the figure of an angel to Verrocchio's painting Baptism of Christ that was so astonishingly superior to his master's own figures that Verrocchio, according to Giorgio Vasari, laid down his brush and never painted again. The story may be embellished. The painting survives, and the angel speaks for itself.

Verrocchio's bottega was one of the great creative workshops of the Renaissance — a place where painting, sculpture, goldsmithing, and mechanical invention converged. Leonardo absorbed all of it with an intensity that seemed less like study than like the operation of some natural law. He was ambidextrous, capable of writing in mirror script with one hand while drawing with the other. He was left-handed but learned to write right-to-left across the page in a manner that required a mirror to read, either for privacy or simply because it was more comfortable. He had no formal education in Latin or classical languages, which meant that most of the scholarly literature of his era was closed to him — and he seems to have used this as a spur, developing his own observational methods from first principles. "My teacher is experience," he wrote. "Though I am not able, like them, to cite other authors, I shall rely on a greater and more worthy thing — on experience, the mistress of their masters."

In 1472, Leonardo was registered as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, Florence's painters' guild. He remained in Verrocchio's workshop for several more years, developing the technique that would define his mature work: sfumato, a method of blending tones so gradually that outlines dissolved into atmosphere, giving his figures a quality of presence and interiority that had no precedent in European painting. He also began the notebooks that would occupy him for the rest of his life. Thousands of pages survive, covering anatomy, hydraulics, optics, geology, botany, military engineering, architecture, music theory, and the flight of birds. He dissected more than thirty human corpses, producing anatomical drawings of such accuracy that they were not surpassed for three centuries. He designed tanks, solar power collectors, calculators, and a rudimentary helicopter. He had no mechanism to build most of them.

In 1482, Leonardo left Florence for Milan, entering the service of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, primarily as a military engineer and court entertainer. He remained in Milan for nearly two decades, during which he painted The Virgin of the Rocks, the portrait Lady with an Ermine, and his most celebrated mural: The Last Supper, completed around 1498 on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The painting, nearly nine meters wide, was immediately recognized as a revolution in the depiction of narrative — every figure caught in a different emotional state at the moment Christ announces that one of them will betray him, each gesture and expression distinct, psychologically precise in a way that European art had never achieved. It was applied in tempera on dry plaster, an experimental technique that began deteriorating almost immediately. Five hundred years later, despite centuries of damage, overpainting, and a wartime bomb that destroyed the surrounding wall, it still stops people cold.

The Mona Lisa was begun around 1503 and Leonardo never gave it away. He carried it with him to France when he accepted the invitation of King Francis I in 1516, and it was found in his possessions when he died on May 2, 1519, at the Chateau du Clos Luce in Amboise. He was sixty-seven. Francis I, who called him "the greatest man of his age," is said to have held him in his arms as he died. Leonardo left behind no school, no students who approached his level, and no finished theory of anything — only the notebooks, the paintings, and the faint outlines of possibilities that the world would spend the next four centuries making real.

What makes Leonardo genuinely singular — and not merely very good at many things — is that his art and his science were not separate projects. His anatomical studies made him a better painter; his understanding of light and optics informed both his canvases and his engineering designs; his observations of water flowing around obstacles appeared both in notebooks on hydraulics and in the backgrounds of his portraits. The unity of his curiosity was the method. He was trying to understand one thing — how the world works — and art and science were simply different languages for describing the same reality. No one before or after has held both languages with equal fluency at the highest level. That is why, five centuries after his death, his notebooks still feel ahead of the moment. He was not working toward something. He was working at the limit of what a human being can know.