Leonardo Da Vinci Biography

Born: 1452-04-15
Birthplace: Vinci, Italy
Died: 1519-05-02
Location of Death: Cloux, Amboise, France
Remains: Buried, Monastery of St. Florentine, Amboise, France

Race: White
Religion: Roman Catholic
Field: Artist, Scientist, Inventor
Famous for: Mona Lisa, The Last Supper

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 - May 2, 1519) was a celebrated Italian Renaissance architect, inventor, engineer, sculptor and painter. He can be seen as the archetype of the Renaissance Man and has been described as a genius.

His life was described in Giorgio Vasari's "Vite". Leonardo was born in Vinci, Italy. This was before modern naming conventions developed in Europe. Therefore, his full name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", which means "Leonardo, son of Piero, from Vinci". Leonardo himself simply signed his works "Leonardo" or "Io, Leonardo" ("I, Leonardo"). Presumably he did not use his father's name because he was an illegitimate child.
His father Ser Peiro da Vinci was a well-off landowner or craftsman and his mother a peasant girl called Caterina. It has been suggested that Caterina was a slave of middle eastern origin owned by Peiro, but the evidence is scant.

Leonardo grew up with his father in Florence. He became a painter's apprentice and later an independent painter in Florence.

From 1482 to 1499 he worked for the Duke of Milan and maintained his own workshop with apprentices there.

When the French invaded Milan, he returned to Florence and entered the services of Cesare Borgia (also called "Duca Valentino" and son of Pope Alexander VI) as military architect and engineer. In 1506 he returned to Milan.

From 1513 to 1516 he lived in Rome, where painters like Raphael and Michelangelo were active at the time; he did not have much contact with these artists however. In 1516, he entered the services of king Francois I of France at the Royal Chateau at Amboise.

He died in Cloux, France and is buried in the Chapel of St. Hubert in the castle of Amboise.

Leonardo appears to never have had intimate relations with women. In 1476 he was anonymously accused of homosexual contact with a 17-year-old model, Jacopo Saltarelli, a notorious prostitute. He was, together with three other young men, charged with homosexual conduct and acquitted because of lack of evidence. For a time Leonardo and the others were under the watchful eye of Florence's "Officers of the Night" - a kind of Renaissance vice squad.

Leonardo is well known for his paintings, such as Mona Lisa (La Gioconda, now at the Louvre in Paris) and the Last Supper (Ultima Cena or Cenacolo, in Milan). Only seventeen of his paintings, and none of his statues, survive.

Leonardo often planned grand paintings with many drawings and sketches, only to leave the projects unfinished in the end.

In 1481 he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece "The Adoration of the Magi". After grand plans and many drawings, the painting was left unfinished and Leonardo left for Milan.

There he spent many years making plans and models for a monumental 8 metre (27 feet) high horse statue in bronze, to be erected in Milan. Because of war with France, the project was never finished. Based on private initiative, a similar statue was completed according to his plans in 1999 in New York, given to Milan and erected there.

Back in Florence, he was commissioned for a large public mural; Michelangelo was to paint the opposite wall. After producing a fantastic variety of studies preparing for the work, he left town.

Maybe even more impressive than his artistic work are his detailed studies in anatomy (see "Vitruvian Man" below), engineering, bird flight and many other areas. He recorded his results in detailed notebooks which combine art and science. He was left-handed and used mirror writing throughout his life.

Vitruvian man: Leonardo da Vinci draws the human body

In 1502 Leonardo da Vinci produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Sultan Bajazet II of Constantinople. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosphorus known as the Golden Horn. The bridge was never built, but Da Vinci's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway.

His approach to science was an observatory one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanations. Throughout his life, he planned a grand encyclopedia based on detailed drawings of everything.

His notebooks contain drawings of several innovative machines, among them various flying machines and a helicopter, machine guns, an armored tank, a submarine, and a cog-wheeled device that has been interpreted as a mechanical calculator. On January 3, 1496 he unsuccessfully tested a flying machine he had constructed.

Leonardo did not publish or otherwise distribute the contents of these notebooks. The notebooks remained obscure until the 19th century, and were not directly of value to the development of science and technology until that time. On this basis, L. Sprague de Camp, in his book, The Ancient Engineers, considered Leonardo not the first modern engineer, but "the last of the ancient ones", pointing out that after Leonardo's time the practice of disseminating and publishing scientific discoveries began in earnest. In 1994, one of da Vinci's notebooks was purchased by American entrepreneur Bill Gates Chairman of Microsoft Corporation, for US$25 million.