Leonardo grew up in an environment rich with scholarly texts and art, provided by his father, who himself taught Leonardo how to paint. Famous renaissance sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio was among his early teachers.

Leonardo spent his next sexteen years in Milan. He for the period went on to be in the service of the Duke Ludovico Sforza.  He not only paint for the Duke, but also designed machinery, weapons, and a fair bit of architecture. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.

Leonardo is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, “the Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper”, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

On May 2, 1519, at the age of 67, Leonardo da Vinci died. He was burried with King Francis at his side. The famous lines of Leonardo da Vinci are quotable when he said,”As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was born in Vinci, Italy. He was an illegitimate son of a young notary named Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence. He was an Italian polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer.

Leonardo grew up in an environment rich with scholarly texts and art, provided by his father, who himself taught Leonardo how to paint. Famous renaissance sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio was among his early teachers.

Leonardo spent his next sexteen years in Milan. He for the period went on to be in the service of the Duke Ludovico Sforza.  He not only paint for the Duke, but also designed machinery, weapons, and a fair bit of architecture. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.

Leonardo is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, “the Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper”, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Leonardo’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

On May 2, 1519, at the age of 67, Leonardo da Vinci died. He was burried with King Francis at his side. The famous lines of Leonardo da Vinci are quotable when he said,”As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.”