Born to an unmarried notary and a peasant woman, Leonardo received no formal classical education, apprenticing instead as a painter in Florence. He would go on to paint the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper while filling notebooks with anatomical studies, flying-machine sketches, and engineering designs centuries ahead of their time. His restless curiosity made him the archetype of the Renaissance man.
Leonardo's illegitimacy actually freed him from the expected path of joining his father's notarial profession, which was closed to those born outside marriage. Instead he was apprenticed around age fourteen to the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio, where he learned not just painting but metalworking, drafting, and engineering—skills that would fuse into his unique way of seeing.
His notebooks, running to thousands of pages, show a mind that refused to separate art from science: studies of turbulence in water sit beside sketches for helicopters and tank-like war machines, and meticulous dissections of muscle and tendon underpin the anatomical precision of his paintings. He left most projects unfinished, distracted by new obsessions, yet the surviving works—fewer than twenty paintings—remain among humanity's most studied objects. The Mona Lisa alone draws over 30,000 visitors a day to the Louvre.
Key people: Leonardo da Vinci