Leonardo Da Vinci: a Complete Biography

Introduction

Leonardo da Vinci stands as one of the most extraordinary human beings who has ever lived. To call him simply a painter does a profound injustice to the astonishing breadth of his mind. To call him a scientist alone fails to capture the exquisite beauty of his art. To describe him as an inventor ignores the depth of his philosophical thinking. He was all of these things simultaneously, and in being all of them at once he became something that transcends any single category of achievement. His name has become synonymous with genius, with curiosity, with the restless and insatiable appetite for knowledge that defines the greatest human minds.

Born in the small Tuscan hill town of Vinci in the middle of the fifteenth century, Leonardo grew up in a world on the cusp of profound transformation. The Italian Renaissance was remaking European culture from the ground up, rediscovering the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome while simultaneously pushing beyond it into new territories of art, philosophy, and natural inquiry. Leonardo did not merely participate in this renaissance; in many respects he personified and accelerated it, dragging whole fields of investigation forward by sheer force of his intellect and his imagination.

What makes Leonardo so compelling across the centuries is not merely that he was exceptionally good at many different things, though he was extraordinary at virtually everything he attempted. What sets him apart from other polymaths and other geniuses is the particular manner in which he integrated his various pursuits into a single unified project of understanding. He did not paint as one separate activity and study anatomy as another and design machines as a third and investigate geology as a fourth. For Leonardo, all of these activities were expressions of the same deep desire to comprehend how the world worked, how light fell upon curved surfaces, how muscles moved bones, how water flowed around obstacles, how birds navigated the invisible currents of the wind. Art and science were not separate endeavors for him but different aspects of a single comprehensive investigation into the nature of reality.

His paintings are among the most celebrated in the world. The Mona Lisa and The Last Supper have achieved a kind of cultural saturation that makes it genuinely difficult to see them freshly, to experience the shock of radical originality that must have struck viewers who encountered them for the first time. Yet even beneath the accumulated weight of their fame, even beneath centuries of reproduction, parody, and commentary, these works retain a power that repays the closest attention. They demonstrate a mastery of light and shadow, a subtlety of psychological portraiture, a command of composition and pictorial space that remained unsurpassed for generations after Leonardo's death and that still hold their own against everything that has been produced in the centuries since.

His notebooks are equally extraordinary, and in some ways more so, since they were not known to the wider world for centuries after he filled them with his characteristic mirror-writing and packed them with drawings, diagrams, calculations, and observations. Thousands of pages survive, and they contain anticipations of many of the central discoveries of modern science and engineering. He envisioned flying machines, armored vehicles, solar concentrators, hydraulic machinery, and anatomically accurate representations of the human body at a time when most of these ideas were virtually unthinkable to his contemporaries. He studied the movement of water with the same intensity he brought to the study of human expression. He dissected human corpses to understand how the body actually functioned rather than simply accepting what ancient authorities had written about it centuries before.

His life spanned more than six decades of extraordinary intellectual and artistic productivity, though it was not without its frustrations, disappointments, and projects left magnificently incomplete. He abandoned a great many works before they were finished, either because his restless mind was perpetually moving to the next question before the current one was resolved, or because the projects themselves proved technically or logistically impossible given the materials and resources of his era. He was, by all accounts, a compelling and charismatic personality, tall in his youth and handsome throughout his life, gifted in conversation, accomplished as a musician, possessed of a personal magnetism that drew patrons, students, rivals, and admirers throughout his long career.