Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and inventor who lived long ago in Italy. Da Vinci means from Vinci, the village where Leonardo was born. Leonardo lived during a time in Italy called the Renaissance. Leonardo learned art in Florence, in the workshop of an artist named Andrea del Verrocchio. Leonardo was a painter, a sculptor, an architect and an engineer. Until the nineteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci was generally known only as a painter. A curator at Milan's science museum says it is better to call Leonardo's drawings 'studies' than 'inventions', because they were often observations of things that already existed. Leonardo's interests were so broad, and he was so often drawn to new subjects, that he usually left projects unfinished. Leonardo arrived in Milan in 1482 and introduced himself to the court as a war engineer, architect, sculptor, painter and even musician.

Leonardo wrote his notes backwards, in mirror writing, so they read from right to left. Leonardo was left-handed. Leonardo probably worked on loose sheets of paper bought from Milan's stationers, which he carried around to record his observations. Because he wrote in mirror writing, Leonardo often began a notebook at what we would call the last page. Leonardo's mirror-writing letter shapes were quite ordinary: he used the kind of script his father, a legal notary, would have used. A curator at Milan's science museum says writing back to front helped the left-handed Leonardo write correctly, and was not a way to hide what he wrote. People still debate why Leonardo used mirror writing: to keep his notes private, or because being left-handed made right-to-left writing easier. Leonardo wrote short fables about plants, animals and natural elements, often with tiny sketches.

Leonardo studied how birds fly. Leonardo drew designs for flying machines. Many of Leonardo's flying machines were ornithopters, machines with flapping wings. Leonardo compared air to water and flying to swimming. People do not have enough muscle power and endurance to fly with flapping wings the way birds do. Scholars studying Leonardo's manuscripts have found that his thinking about flight changed over time, which weakens the myth that he simply dreamed of flapping wings. Leonardo's 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds discusses the relationship between a bird wing's center of gravity and its center of lifting pressure. Leonardo designed a flying machine that worked like a helicopter, but it was never built. Leonardo filled pages of his notebooks with ideas about water and rivers. In the Codex Leicester Leonardo argued that flowing waters explain marine fossils on mountain tops and the constant changes of the Earth's surface. In Milan Leonardo studied the canals and paid special attention to the locks that carry boats across differences of level.

Leonardo designed devices to entertain guests at courts, especially water clocks and fountains, and one design had a mechanical man as a bell-ringer. The robotic knight Leonardo apparently built was run by pulleys and cables, and could stand, sit, raise its visor and wave. Leonardo's notebook diagram of an armored tank has gearing that would make its front wheels turn the opposite way to its rear wheels, so it could not have moved. Leonardo's drawings of the self-propelled cart in his notebooks do not fully show its mechanism, so modern engineers have had to guess how it worked. Leonardo made several thorough studies of perpetual motion, but eventually rejected the idea. Leonardo drew a plan for an ideal city with wide streets and underground waterways. Leonardo's notes on solid bodies in one of his notebooks deal with a branch of mathematics now called topology. Leonardo used 'transparent' and 'exploded' views to show his underwater breathing apparatus, techniques he had explored in his studies of human anatomy.

The Codex Atlanticus is a collection of 1,119 sheets of Leonardo's drawings and notes. The Codex Atlanticus was not assembled by Leonardo: the sculptor Pompeo Leoni gathered the papers in the late 16th century and sorted them into two huge volumes. In 1796 Napoleon's troops took the Codex Atlanticus to Paris, and it was returned to Milan after 1815. As of November 2026, the Codex Atlanticus has been kept at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan since 1637, when Marquis Galeazzo Arconati donated it. Leonardo's Codex Leicester was bought in Rome in 1717 by Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, and stayed with his descendants until 1980. The history of the Codex Leicester after 1519 is obscure. The Codex on the Flight of Birds passed through at least ten owners and as many as nine places before reaching the Biblioteca Reale in Turin.

Before beginning a painting, Leonardo would work out his composition in a drawing. Leonardo painted The Last Supper on a wall in Milan. Leonardo used a method that let him paint the Last Supper on dry plaster and work slowly, so he could make changes. In a notebook from about 1495, Leonardo wrote about how a group of people sitting at a table might be posed, possibly for his Last Supper. Leonardo believed that poses, gestures and facial expressions should reflect the 'motions of the mind', and the National Gallery says The Last Supper shows this. The Royal Collection Trust calls the Last Supper a ground-breaking exploration of how emotions affect a person's attitudes and expressions. Leonardo built up his painted figures over layers of black and white underpainting, using what he knew about how light and shadow show us shapes. Leonardo knew that colors look different at a distance, and painted far-off mountains blue so they seem to be in the far distance.

The Last Supper is painted on a wall, but it is not a fresco. The restoration of the Last Supper completed in 1999 revealed its original colors and delicate light effects, after restorers over the centuries had repainted lost details. Leonardo's Last Supper has survived centuries, political upheaval and bombing in World War II, but air pollution in Milan has been a risk to it. In late 2009 the refectory holding the Last Supper installed a heating, ventilation and air conditioning system to protect the painting from Milan's polluted air. The Last Supper, with its church and monastery, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since September 1980. As of November 2026, at the Last Supper's church in Milan today, visits last 15 minutes and are limited to 40 people at a time, to protect the painting.

Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is famous for the sitter's smile. The Mona Lisa is painted in the sfumato style, which wraps the figure in a misty haze. As of November 2026, the Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre museum in Paris. In 1966 the Mona Lisa was moved to the Louvre's largest room. As of November 2026, it sits in a temperature- and humidity-controlled glass case. As of November 2026, the Louvre says it holds the largest collection of Leonardo's paintings in the world, as well as 22 drawings. Leonardo da Vinci moved to France and spent the rest of his life there. The king of France gave Leonardo a manor house and an income near the royal château at Amboise. The Château du Clos Lucé in Amboise, France, was Leonardo's last home.

Words to know

• Renaissance: a time
• fresco: wall painting
• sfumato: a misty style
• ornithopters: flapping machines