Leonardo da Vinci
Key Facts
- Apprenti chez Verrocchio à Florence dès 1466 ; surpasse son maître dès ses débuts
- Peint La Cène (1495-1498) au couvent Santa Maria delle Grazie de Milan, chef-d'oeuvre de la composition narrative
- Auteur de la Joconde (vers 1503-1506), tableau le plus célèbre et le plus visité du monde
- Conçoit des machines volantes, un ancêtre du tank et du sous-marin dans ses carnets d'ingénieur
- Réalise des planches anatomiques sur cadavres d'une précision inégalée pour l'époque
- Invité en France par François Ier en 1516, meurt au Clos-Lucé (Amboise) le 2 mai 1519
- Ses carnets (plus de 7 200 pages) anticipent de nombreuses inventions des XIXe et XXe siècles
Biography
Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, Tuscany, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant woman. The absolute embodiment of the Renaissance ideal, he was simultaneously a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, anatomist, musician, and mathematician. No other man of his era — and perhaps in all of history — embraced so many disciplines with equal genius.
At fourteen, his father placed him in the workshop of Florentine master Andrea del Verrocchio, where he quickly surpassed his mentor. Florence, under the enlightened patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, was a hotbed of ideas. There Leonardo established his method: the rigorous observation of nature as the only worthy teacher. His notebooks, written in mirror script with his left hand, accumulate thousands of anatomical, botanical, hydraulic, and mechanical sketches revealing boundless curiosity.
In 1482, he entered the service of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, as court engineer. It was in Milan that he painted The Last Supper (1495-1498), a mural in the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie — a masterpiece of dramatic composition and psychological study of faces. His studies of bird flight led him to design flying machines — an ornithopter and an early helicopter — far ahead of their time. He also drew war machines, mobile bridges, and an ancestor of the tank.
After the fall of the Sforzas, Leonardo wandered between Florence, Venice, Rome, and Milan, painting the Mona Lisa (c. 1503-1506), whose enigmatic smile and sfumato technique revolutionized the depiction of the human face. He studied anatomy on cadavers, produced surgical plates of unmatched precision, and developed theories on hydrodynamics and geology. In 1516, Francis I invited him to France and offered him the Château du Clos-Lucé near Amboise, where he spent his final years surrounded by honour and intellectual curiosity.
Leonardo da Vinci died on 2 May 1519 in Amboise at sixty-seven, leaving a small body of paintings (fewer than twenty completed works) but of immense influence. His notebooks, rediscovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reveal a man who had imagined the aeroplane, submarine, and steam engine centuries before their invention. He remains the universal symbol of polymathic genius.