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. He 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 was a painter, a sculptor, an architect and an engineer. Until the nineteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci was generally known only as a painter. Leonardo arrived in Milan in 1482 and introduced himself to the court as a war engineer, architect, sculptor, painter and even musician. He loved nature and explored the mountains near Milan.

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. He designed devices to entertain guests at courts, especially water clocks and fountains, and one design had a mechanical man as a bell-ringer. He drew plans for new musical instruments. He also drew a plan for an ideal city with wide streets and underground waterways. Leonardo kept notebooks filled with drawings and notes, and over 7,000 pages of them have survived. He was left-handed, and he wrote his notes backwards, in mirror writing, so they read from right to left. He filled pages of his notebooks with ideas about water and rivers. He wrote short fables about plants, animals and natural elements, often with tiny sketches.

In the winter of 1510-11 Leonardo worked in the medical school of the University of Pavia, alongside a professor of anatomy. His notebooks have been described as a 'visual laboratory', and the Science Museum has built models of some of his ideas. The Codex Atlanticus is a collection of 1,119 sheets of Leonardo's drawings and notes, and it covers his whole career, from 1478 in Tuscany to 1519 in France. The Codex Leicester has 18 double sheets, or 72 pages, put together mostly in Florence between 1504 and 1508. As of November 2026, the V&A in London holds five of Leonardo's notebooks, bound into three volumes called the Forster Codices. The Codex Arundel is one of his notebooks, kept at the British Library in London as of November 2026. Leonardo's notebooks were hidden away for a long time, and people learned about them long after he died.

Leonardo studied how birds fly and drew designs for flying machines. Many of his flying machines were ornithopters, machines with flapping wings. 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. He 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. He designed a flying machine that worked like a helicopter, but it was never built. He drew an idea for a parachute, and a modern full-size version was built in 2000 and tested by jumping from a balloon. Some of his ideas, especially his flying machines, may not have worked in his lifetime.

Before beginning a painting, Leonardo would work out his composition in a drawing. He painted The Last Supper on a wall in Milan between 1494 and 1498. The Last Supper is painted on a wall, but it is not a fresco. He used a method that let him paint on dry plaster and work slowly, so he could make changes. The Last Supper, with its church and monastery, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since September 1980. Leonardo's interests were so broad, and he was so often drawn to new subjects, that he usually left projects unfinished. He finished very few paintings. He painted the Mona Lisa, which 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, and the Louvre says it holds the largest collection of Leonardo's paintings in the world, as well as 22 drawings. In 1966 the Mona Lisa was moved to the Louvre's largest room, where it sits in a temperature- and humidity-controlled glass case. 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
• sfumato: a misty style
• ornithopters: flapping machines
• composition: how things fit
• fresco: wall painting