Who was Leonardo da Vinci?

In 1482, Lorenzo de' Medici sent Leonardo to Milan as an ambassador to Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo had written Sforza a letter emphasising his abilities in engineering and weapon design, mentioning his painting almost as an afterthought. He remained in Milan until 1499, working across an extraordinary range of projects. These included designing pageants and floats, producing a model for a cupola competition for Milan Cathedral, and planning a colossal bronze equestrian statue honouring Ludovico's predecessor Francesco Sforza. The metal set aside for that statue was ultimately handed over to be cast into a cannon to defend against the advancing forces of Charles VIII of France.

The most celebrated work of this period was The Last Supper, painted for the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Rather than using the durable technique of true fresco, Leonardo applied tempera over a gesso ground, a choice that caused the painting to deteriorate within decades. The composition depicted the moment Christ announced that one of his disciples would betray him, capturing each figure's individual reaction. A contemporary writer observed Leonardo sometimes painting without pause from dawn to dusk, then not picking up a brush again for several days. The painting was immediately recognised as a masterpiece of characterisation and design, and it remains the most reproduced religious painting ever made.

After French forces ousted Ludovico Sforza in 1499, Leonardo moved to Venice before returning to Florence. By October 1503 he had begun a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the work now known as the Mona Lisa. He continued refining it for years, and it remained with him until his death. The painting became renowned for the elusive quality of the sitter's expression, produced through Leonardo's technique of softly blurring the corners of the mouth and eyes. This approach, which came to be called sfumato, gave the work a shadowy, atmospheric depth unlike anything in earlier portraiture.

Across these same years, Leonardo pursued anatomy with the same intensity he brought to painting. He obtained permission to dissect human corpses at hospitals in Florence, Milan, and Rome, producing more than 240 detailed drawings of the skeleton, muscles, organs, and vascular system. He made one of the first scientific illustrations of a foetus inside the womb and was the first to identify atherosclerosis and liver cirrhosis. Working briefly with the anatomist Marcantonio della Torre at the University of Pavia between 1510 and 1511, Leonardo assembled material toward a comprehensive treatise. None of it was published in his lifetime, meaning these advances had no direct influence on medical science until much later.

Leonardo's notebooks, amounting to roughly 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, cover subjects from geology and optics to hydraulics, architecture, and the flight of birds. He designed flying machines including a flapping ornithopter and a device with a helical rotor. He conceptualised an armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, and a double-hulled boat. Most of these designs were never built, partly because the metallurgy and engineering of the Renaissance were not yet capable of realising them. A few smaller inventions did enter practical use without fanfare, among them an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire.

In 1493 Leonardo recorded in his notebooks what are now recognised as the foundational laws of sliding friction, arrived at partly through his attempts to understand why perpetual motion was impossible. These findings were never published, and the same laws were independently rediscovered by Guillaume Amontons in 1699. This pattern repeated itself across many fields: Leonardo made genuine discoveries in anatomy, hydrodynamics, optics, and geology, yet because he did not publish, his work had little measurable effect on the scientists who followed him.

In 1516 Leonardo accepted an invitation from King Francis I of France and relocated to the manor house of Clos Lucé, near the royal residence at the Château d'Amboise. He was given a generous pension and was frequently visited by the king himself. Leonardo drew plans for an enormous castle town Francis intended to build at Romorantin and constructed a mechanical lion that walked toward the king during a pageant and opened its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. His companion throughout this period was Francesco Melzi, a Lombard aristocrat who had become his favourite pupil and who would eventually inherit Leonardo's paintings, tools, and library.

By around 1517, Leonardo's right hand was recorded as paralytic, which may explain why several works including the Mona Lisa were never brought to a state he considered finished. He continued working in some capacity until illness confined him to bed in his final months. Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67. He was buried at the collegiate church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise, though the church was demolished in 1802 and the precise location of his remains has been uncertain ever since. Some years after his death, Francis I reportedly told the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini that no other man born into the world had known as much as Leonardo.