Italy · 1452–1519

Leonardo da Vinci: Facts Behind the Genius

By William Souef · Published August 19, 2026

The workshop, not the university

Leonardo's illegitimacy closed the doors his father's profession would have opened — and the closure made him. Apprenticed around 14 to Andrea del Verrocchio, one of Florence's leading workshops, he learned painting as a craft embedded in engineering: casting bronze, building pageant machinery, grinding pigments, studying drapery and anatomy from life. Vasari's famous story — that the young Leonardo's angel in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ so surpassed the master that Verrocchio gave up painting — is embellished, but the angel is visibly another order of talent.

Denied Latin schooling, he taught himself from books and called himself an omo sanza lettere — an unlettered man — turning the insult into a method: experience first, authorities second. "Though I have no power to quote from authors as they have," he wrote, "I shall rely on a far bigger and more worthy thing — on experience."

Milan: the engineer who also painted

In 1482 Leonardo left Florence for Milan and the court of Ludovico Sforza, selling himself in a letter that reads like a weapons catalogue — portable bridges, siege machines, armored vehicles — with painting appended almost as a footnote. He stayed seventeen years: court engineer, pageant designer, student of everything. There he painted The Virgin of the Rocks and, on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie, The Last Supper — choosing the psychological instant after "one of you will betray me" detonates around the table. His experimental dry-wall technique doomed the surface almost immediately; what survives is a ruin that still organizes how the West imagines that scene.

When the French took Milan in 1499, his colossal clay model for the largest equestrian statue ever attempted — the bronze already diverted to cannon — was used as target practice by archers. He spent his later years between Florence (the Mona Lisa, begun around 1503, never delivered to its patron), a stint as military engineer to the ruthless Cesare Borgia, Rome, and finally France.

The notebooks: a parallel career no one saw

Leonardo's true life's work may be the roughly 7,000 surviving notebook pages — estimated at perhaps half or less of what he wrote — covering anatomy, optics, hydraulics, geology, flight, geometry, grocery lists, and designs for machines centuries premature: gliders, a parachute, an armored vehicle, an automated loom. He recognized that fossil shells on mountaintops recorded ancient seas, studied turbulence with an accuracy fluid dynamicists still admire, and drew the heart's aortic valve vortices that imaging confirmed in the 20th century.

Almost none of it was published in his lifetime or for centuries after; the pages scattered through European collections (one, the Codex Leicester, was bought by Bill Gates in 1994 for $30.8 million). That silence is the tragedy inside the legend: the most advanced empirical mind of his age, invisible to the sciences it anticipated. He died on 2 May 1519 at Amboise, in France, as honored guest of King Francis I — with the Mona Lisa, still unfinished to his eye, in his baggage. That is why she hangs in the Louvre.

Frequently asked questions

How many Leonardo da Vinci paintings survive?

Fewer than 20 are generally attributed to him, several unfinished and a few still debated — the 2017 auction record-holder Salvator Mundi among the disputed. The scarcity reflects how he worked: painting was one investigation among many, commissions were abandoned, and experiments with technique destroyed some of what he did finish.

Why did Leonardo write in mirror script?

Almost certainly because he was left-handed: writing right-to-left kept his hand out of the wet ink. The writing reads normally in a mirror and was never a serious cipher — contemporaries who mattered could read it — though it did discourage casual readers, which may have suited him.

Was Leonardo da Vinci a scientist?

By method, remarkably close to one — systematic observation, experiment, and dissection, recorded obsessively. What he lacked was publication: his findings stayed in private notebooks for centuries, so his anatomy, geology, and fluid dynamics — often generations ahead — had almost no influence on the sciences they anticipated.