Leonardo left fewer than twenty-five major paintings—and remade art
A notary's illegitimate son from a Tuscan hill town left fewer than 25 major paintings, several unfinished, yet one of them, the Mona Lisa, is counted the most famous picture on Earth. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) also crammed notebooks with flying machines and anatomy he never published, and died in France as the guest of Francis I.
Born near Vinci to Ser Piero and Caterina, he grew among many younger half-siblings after only informal schooling, then entered Verrocchio's Florence workshop around fourteen for seven years among Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Botticelli. Guild mastery by 1472 still left him collaborating with Verrocchio; legend says his angel in The Baptism of Christ shamed the master into quitting paint. Abandoned altarpieces for the Signoria and San Donato monks preceded a self-advertising letter of military and artistic skills to Milan.
Fewer than twenty-five major works survive, many unfinished, yet Mona Lisa is often called the world's most famous painting, The Last Supper the most reproduced religious image, and Vitruvian Man a cultural emblem. In 2017 Salvator Mundi, attributed wholly or partly to him, auctioned for 450.3 million dollars. Notebooks invent flying machines, armoured wagons, and double hulls that Renaissance metallurgy could not build, while wire testers and bobbin winders slipped quietly into workshops.
Because he kept his findings in anatomy, optics, geology and hydrodynamics to himself, later scientists built almost nothing on them. His earliest dated work is a pen drawing of the Arno valley from 1473, and Vasari credits the young man with first proposing that the river be made navigable all the way between Florence and Pisa. Around 1530, a decade after he died, anonymous followers were still copying horse and dromedary legs and unicorn heads in brown ink in his manner.
The myth-making began early. Vasari says a peasant asked Ser Piero to get a round wooden shield decorated; the boy painted a fire-breathing monster modelled on Medusa, so frightening that his father quietly bought the peasant a different shield and sold Leonardo's to a dealer for 100 ducats, from whom it passed to the Duke of Milan. Leonardo himself, writing about bird flight in what is now the Codex Atlanticus, recalled a kite landing on his cradle and pushing its tail between his lips; scholars still argue whether that was memory or invention. When he went north in 1482, Lorenzo de' Medici sent him as an envoy, carrying a silver lute or lyre shaped like a horse's head.
Source: Leonardo da Vinci
