The notary’s son
Leonardo was born in 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a notary — a status that closed the universities and professions and left him, by lucky default, to apprenticeship in Verrocchio’s Florentine workshop, where painting was learned alongside metallurgy, mechanics, and anatomy for artists. The exclusion became the method: barred from the Latin book-learning of the schools, he made experience his authority — “disciple of experience,” he called himself — and interrogated everything: why the sky is blue, how a woodpecker’s tongue works, what the fossil shells in mountain rock imply about the Earth’s age (his answer, centuries early: not Noah’s flood, but ancient seas).
Painter of thresholds
He painted little and changed everything. The Last Supper in Milan (c. 1495-98) caught the instant after “one of you will betray me” detonates down the table — psychology as composition — in an experimental technique that began flaking within his lifetime. The Mona Lisa, begun about 1503 and carried with him, unfinished-perfect, until death, weaponised his sfumato — edges dissolved in smoke-soft gradations — into the smile that has organised crowds ever since. A dozen-odd surviving paintings; each one a hinge.
His patrons — the Sforza of Milan, the Borgia (for whom he served as military engineer beside Machiavelli), France’s kings — mostly hired the engineer and pageant-master and received the painter reluctantly. The notebooks got the rest: some 7,000 surviving pages in mirror-script Italian — flying machines and armoured vehicles, water studies, grotesques, the Vitruvian Man, and an anatomical corpus built on some thirty dissections, including the first accurate renderings of the human spine, the fetus in the womb, and the heart’s valves in action (his model of aortic blood flow was confirmed by imaging in the twentieth century). None of it was published in his lifetime; the pages scattered, and their sciences had to be re-invented by others.
Amboise
He died on 2 May 1519 at Amboise, honoured guest of the French king Francis I — who had bought, or received, the Mona Lisa, which is why she lives in the Louvre. His reputation has survived even its own cult: the codes and conspiracies grafted onto him say less than one plain notebook entry among the machines and dissections, a to-do list item that reads, simply, “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.” He wanted to know everything, and left the want itself as the monument.