Leonardo da Vinci was an artist and inventor who lived long ago in Italy. 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. Verrocchio's workshop took on many kinds of work, including sculpture and decorative metalwork as well as paintings. Leonardo arrived in Milan in 1482 and introduced himself to the court as a war engineer, architect, sculptor, painter and even musician. In a letter draft to the Duke of Milan, Leonardo listed nine points on his skills as a military engineer and described his skills as an artist and architect in a tenth point. Leonardo's interests were so broad, and he was so often drawn to new subjects, that he usually left projects unfinished. Leonardo seems to have begun recording his thoughts in notebooks from the mid-1480s, when he worked as an engineer for the Duke of Milan.
Leonardo kept notebooks filled with drawings and notes. 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 wrote his notes backwards, in mirror writing, so they read from right to left. 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's mirror writing once led an official to mistake the Codex Atlanticus for a manuscript in Chinese. A notebook that Leonardo began in Florence in 1508 was called, in his own words, 'a collection without order', to be arranged by subject later.
In the winter of 1510-11 Leonardo worked in the medical school of the University of Pavia, alongside a professor of anatomy. Leonardo's anatomical drawings stayed among his private papers, and were not fully published and understood until the modern era. A review of the Royal Collection's anatomy exhibition says Leonardo found that the heart, not the liver, was at the core of the blood system. Why Leonardo never published his anatomical notes is a mystery, a reviewer of a Royal Collection exhibition wrote. Leonardo's notes on solid bodies in one of his notebooks deal with a branch of mathematics now called topology. In the Codex Leicester, one of his notebooks, 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 filled pages of his notebooks with ideas about water and rivers.
Leonardo designed devices to entertain guests at courts, especially water clocks and fountains, and one design had a mechanical man as a bell-ringer. 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'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. The robotic knight Leonardo apparently built was run by pulleys and cables, and could stand, sit, raise its visor and wave. 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. A curator at Milan's science museum names the technical drawing, with perspective, sections, shading and cross-hatching, as her favorite Leonardo 'invention'. Leonardo used 'transparent' and 'exploded' views to show his underwater breathing apparatus, techniques he had explored in his studies of human anatomy.
Many of Leonardo's flying machines were ornithopters, machines with flapping wings. Leonardo's flying-machine ideas came mainly from his work on military technology for the court of Milan, which led him to think of aerial reconnaissance. In Leonardo's ornithopter, the pilot would lie face down and pedal a crank to flap the wings, which were to span more than 33 feet. 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. In the Codex on the Flight of Birds, Leonardo showed a rudimentary understanding of the link between a curved wing and lift, and grasped air as a fluid. Leonardo wrote that a flyer could steer by shifting body weight, as early glider pioneers of the late nineteenth century later did. Leonardo kept returning to flapping-wing designs and did not develop his bird-flight insights in any practical way. Some of Leonardo's wing-flapping drawings may have been for stage machinery to simulate the beating of wings in theatrical performances. 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.
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. The Codex Atlanticus got its name from its size: Pompeo Leoni pasted Leonardo's papers on large sheets of the format used for atlases. As of November 2026, the Codex Atlanticus has been kept at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan since 1637, when Marquis Galeazzo Arconati donated it. In 1796 Napoleon's troops took the Codex Atlanticus to Paris, and it was returned to Milan after 1815. The Codex Leicester has 18 double sheets, or 72 pages, put together mostly in Florence between 1504 and 1508. Leonardo's Codex Leicester was bought in Rome in 1717 by Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester, and stayed with his descendants until 1980. 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. Leonardo's notebooks have been described as a 'visual laboratory', and the Science Museum has built models of some of his ideas.
Before beginning a painting, Leonardo would work out his composition in a drawing. Leonardo painted The Last Supper on a wall in Milan. 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 used a method that let him paint the Last Supper on dry plaster and work slowly, so he could make changes. 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. 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.
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. A 2011 study found that fine and coarse particles around the Last Supper were 88 and 94 percent lower than outdoors. 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. As of November 2026, recent conservation work found that Leonardo painted the National Gallery's Virgin of the Rocks in three phases. Under the paint of Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks in the National Gallery, underdrawing shows he first tried a different design and later changed his mind.
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. A visitor's account records that in October 1517 Leonardo showed visitors a painting of a Florentine lady painted from life, the Mona Lisa, at Clos Lucé. Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is painted in the sfumato style, which wraps the figure in a misty haze. Leonardo completed so few works that a whole industry arose around the search for 'real Leonardos', with many copies passed off as originals. 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.
Words to know
- Renaissance: a time
- topology: a math branch
- sfumato: a misty style
- ornithopter: flapping machine
- composition: how things fit
