Page 1 of 20: Leonardo da Vinci. The Art of Asking Questions Page 2 of 20: Near Vinci, 1452. Leonardo was born near Vinci, in Tuscany, on April 15, 1452. His father was a notary named Ser Piero; his mother was Caterina. Little is securely known about his childhood. The familiar story begins with a real landscape, but many details of the boy remain unknown. Page 3 of 20: Learning in Florence. As a young man, Leonardo trained in Andrea del Verrocchio’s busy Florence workshop. Painting and sculpture belonged to a shared world of materials, measurement, and skilled hands. Here, an apprentice learned by working beside others. Leonardo’s extraordinary career began with the practical work of becoming an artist. Page 4 of 20: A Painting Made Together. Verrocchio’s workshop produced The Baptism of Christ with help from several hands. Leonardo painted the angel at the left, and scholars identify further contributions by him. Its turning body and delicate modeling reveal his growing skill. Great Renaissance paintings could emerge through collaboration, not simply from a solitary genius. Page 5 of 20: Looking at Nature. A landscape drawing dated August 5, 1473, shows another side of Leonardo’s attention. Hills, water, buildings, and distance become marks on paper. Drawing was more than preparation for a painting. It could be a way to examine the world, recording both what he saw and what he wanted to understand. Page 6 of 20: An Unfinished Beginning. In 1481, Leonardo received the commission for the Adoration of the Magi. He planned a crowded scene of figures, gestures, animals, and architecture. But the painting remained unfinished. Ambition and completion did not always move together in his career. Around 1482, he left Florence for new opportunities in Milan. Page 7 of 20: Working for a Court. In Milan, Leonardo eventually entered the service of Ludovico Sforza. A court needed more than portraits. It wanted impressive monuments, entertainments, buildings, and engineering schemes. Leonardo moved between these demands, bringing the same habits of drawing and investigation to projects that could delight a patron or advertise his power. Page 8 of 20: The Horse That Was Never Cast. For a monument honoring Francesco Sforza, Leonardo studied horses and prepared an enormous clay model. Turning it into bronze posed formidable problems. The bronze intended for the sculpture was diverted to cannon. The great horse was never cast, and invading French forces destroyed the model in 1499. Page 9 of 20: A Supper Becomes a Drama. During the 1490s, Leonardo painted The Last Supper on a dining-hall wall at Santa Maria delle Grazie. Christ’s announcement of betrayal sends reactions through the apostles. Hands, faces, and groups carry the drama. Perspective draws the viewer toward the center, making a painted room seem to extend the real one. Page 10 of 20: The Cost of Experiment. Leonardo did not paint The Last Supper as a traditional fresco on wet plaster. He worked on a prepared, dry wall. The experiment allowed his particular approach to painting, but the surface proved fragile and began deteriorating early. Its survival required generations of care, and its present appearance bears that history. Page 11 of 20: A Mind on Paper. Leonardo’s pages mixed questions, calculations, sketches, and practical reminders. Water-lifting devices might share space with geometry or studies of a body. Much of his writing runs from right to left. This mirror writing is not proof of a secret code. The pages preserve working thoughts, not a finished encyclopedia. Page 12 of 20: Milan Falls. French forces took Milan in 1499, bringing Leonardo’s long association with Ludovico’s court to an end. He left the city and traveled through northern Italy before returning to Florence. His career depended on patrons, but patrons could lose power. Political upheaval repeatedly changed where, and for whom, he worked. Page 13 of 20: Drawing a City from Above. In 1502, Leonardo worked for Cesare Borgia as an engineer and surveyor. His map of Imola organizes streets, walls, and buildings into a clear overhead view. Such work joined observation with measurement. It also served political and military power: knowing a place could help a ruler control it. Page 14 of 20: The Woman in the Painting. Back in Florence, Leonardo began the portrait now known as the Mona Lisa, around 1503. The Louvre identifies its sitter as Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo worked on the painting over many years. Its quiet pose, distant landscape, and softly changing tones invite unusually sustained looking. Page 15 of 20: Birds and the Problem of Flight. Around 1505–1506, Leonardo filled a notebook with studies of birds and flight. He examined wings, air, balance, and motion while imagining flying devices. The drawings are remarkable investigations, but they are not evidence of successful aircraft. As far as historians know, his flying machines were never built in his lifetime. Page 16 of 20: Beneath the Surface. Leonardo’s study of bodies grew beyond the needs of painting. Through dissections, he investigated bones, muscles, organs, and the heart. Drawings combined different views to explain complicated structures. His work joined close observation with inherited ideas, and it included mistakes. Understanding developed through investigation, rather than arriving complete. Page 17 of 20: Knowledge Left Unpublished. Leonardo hoped to assemble an illustrated work on anatomy, but he never completed its publication. His investigations therefore did not transform medicine in his own lifetime as a widely available book might have done. The surviving pages show both extraordinary achievement and a limit: knowledge must reach others to become shared knowledge. Page 18 of 20: One More Journey. After further years in Milan and a period in Rome, Leonardo accepted the invitation of Francis I of France. In 1516, he moved to Amboise. The aging artist received a home at Clos Lucé and a place at court, continuing to devise projects for a king who valued his imagination. Page 19 of 20: Papers for the Future. Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on May 2, 1519, aged sixty-seven. He left his drawings and manuscripts to his pupil Francesco Melzi. Those papers carried much that his paintings could not: questions, experiments, unfinished plans, and records of observation. Preserving them helped later generations discover the breadth of his work. Page 20 of 20: A Way of Looking. Leonardo left relatively few finished paintings, but a vast record of inquiry. His reputation now reaches far beyond the workshops and courts that supported him. The lasting lesson is not that every idea worked. It is that careful looking, skilled making, and difficult questions can belong to the same life.

Behind the Panels

Reading time: about 8–10 minutes, including the illustrations.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) worked across painting, drawing, engineering and the study of nature. This chapter follows his workshop training, court employment, unfinished projects and close observation, without treating every proposed machine as a working invention.

This illustrated biography draws on collection records and research from the Museo Leonardiano, Uffizi Galleries, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Royal Collection Trust, Louvre, V&A, Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and other institutions linked below. Scenes are artistic reconstructions, not documentary images. Insets of artworks, maps, manuscripts, and anatomical studies are interpretive illustrations, not facsimiles. Dialogue has not been invented. Dates are approximate where the evidence differs.

Leonardo’s machine drawings should not be confused with working inventions: there is no known evidence that he built and flew his proposed aircraft. His anatomical investigations remained unpublished at his death. The Last Supper is a dry-wall painting, not a traditional fresco.

The familiar red-chalk head in Turin is traditionally identified as a self-portrait, but that identification is disputed. This biography’s character design is interpretive, informed by historical portrait traditions rather than presented as a certain likeness. The portrait attributed to Francesco Melzi offers another historical reference.

Sources and further reading

Continue reading

Explore the visual imagination of Hokusai: A Lifetime of Looking, or follow a later investigation of nature in Isaac Newton: The Rules Behind the World.