Who was Leonardo da Vinci?
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance artist, scientist and inventor. He painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with ideas far ahead of his time.
Leonardo was born in 1452 near the town of Vinci, in Tuscany. He trained as an artist in Florence in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. He later worked in Milan for the Duke Ludovico Sforza, where he painted The Last Supper on the wall of a monastery dining hall in the 1490s.
He began the Mona Lisa in the early 1500s and worked on it for many years. It now hangs in the Louvre in Paris and is perhaps the most famous painting in the world. Leonardo completed relatively few paintings, partly because he was constantly studying other subjects.
A curious mind
His notebooks, written in mirror writing from right to left, contain thousands of pages on anatomy, engineering, water, flight and geology. He sketched flying machines, armored vehicles and detailed studies of the human body. He died in France in 1519, where he worked for King Francis I.
Did You Know?
Leonardo's drawing the Vitruvian Man, showing a man inside a circle and a square, appears on Italy's one euro coin.