Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, engineer and anatomist whose surviving output is small, unfinished and disproportionately influential. Born out of wedlock near Vinci in 1452 to a notary and a peasant woman, he was barred from the professions his father practised and apprenticed instead to Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence around 1466, where he learned casting, metalwork and painting. He worked for Ludovico Sforza in Milan from about 1482, having offered himself in a letter chiefly as a military engineer and mentioning painting last. There he produced the Last Supper in 1495-98, painted experimentally in tempera on dry plaster so that it began deteriorating within his lifetime. The Mona Lisa, begun around 1503, he kept and reworked until his death. Fewer than twenty paintings are securely his, and several were abandoned; the bronze horse for Sforza was never cast, its metal taken for cannon. The notebooks are the larger achievement — some 7,000 surviving pages, written in mirror script, covering flight, hydraulics, geology and fortification. His anatomical drawings, made from perhaps thirty dissections and including a wax cast of the heart's ventricles, correctly described the aortic valve's function; they were not published, and the knowledge was lost until rediscovered independently centuries later. This is the pattern of his working life: he solved problems and did not transmit the solutions. He drew flying machines and a helical rotor that could not have flown, and designed diversions of the Arno that were attempted and failed. He served Cesare Borgia as a military engineer in 1502, and moved to France under Francis I in 1516, dying at Amboise in 1519 with the Mona Lisa still in his possession.

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