Painter, sculptor, architect, engineer. Born April 15, 1452, in Vinci final Florence, Italy. One of the supreme masters of the High Renaissance, Leonardo was celebrated as an player and scientist. His innovations in the line of painting influenced the survey of Italian art for supplementary than a century after his death, and his technical studies--particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics--anticipated plentiful of the developments of piece science.

The little one of a rolling Florentine notary and a peasant woman, Leonardo acknowledged virtually no formal education as a boy, yet avidly paraphrase the works of modern scholars. About 1466, he was an novice to Andrea del Verrocchio, the nonpareil Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. By 1478, Leonardo had turn out an outermost master. His boon colossal painting, Adoration of the Magi, was reclusive unfinished. Other plant ascribed to his immaturity are the so-called Benois Madonna, the likeness Ginevra de Benci, and the young Saint Jerome.

About 1482, Leonardo entered the reinforcement of the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, capable as architect, mathematician and ace maintain in the duke's inordinate military enterprises. His much crucial paintings during the virgin
 Milan term were Virgin of the Rocks and his masterpiece, the Last Supper. Leonardo besides began to communicate what became well-known as Leonardo's notebooks in Milan in the 1490s. Consisting of 1119 sheets on the thorough affiliate of Leonardo's interests, the Codex was compiled by the Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni at the actualize of the 16th century and was restored in the 1960s.

In 1502, Leonardo entered the aid of Cesare Borgia as architect and engineer, supervising happening on the fortresses of the papal territories in central Italy. During this succour Florentine period, Leonardo painted unalike portraits, but the peculiar one that survives is the murder Mona Lisa. One of the abundantly conscious portraits notably painted, it is also avowed as La Gioconda, coterminous the presumed present of the woman's husband. Leonardo seems to have had a innate attentiveness for the picture, for he took it with him on all of his eventual travels.

In 1506, Leonardo returned to Milan and was named hizzoner painter to King Louis XII of France, who was residing there. For the looked toward six age Leonardo divided his connection between Milan and Florence, where he much visited his half brothers and half sisters and looked subsequent his inheritance. From 1514 to 1516, Leonardo lived in Rome unbefitting the patronage of Pope Leo X: he was housed in the Palazzo Belvedere in the Vatican and seems to have been swamped principally with specialist experimentation. In 1516, he traveled to France to accommodate the assistance of King Francis I. He exhausted his live on caducity at the Chteau de Cloux, impending Amboise, where he died on May 2, 1519.