Leonardo da Vinci — Renaissance Polymath, Painter, and Engineer

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born out of wedlock to a prosperous notary, Ser Piero, and a peasant woman, Caterina. His illegitimacy barred him from his father's profession and from university education in Latin and Greek, leaving him largely self-taught — a background that later shaped his insistence on observation and experience over inherited texts.

Location: Vinci, Tuscany, Italy

Around age 14, Leonardo entered the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of the day. There he learned painting, sculpture, metallurgy, drafting, and mechanics. Early sources record Verrocchio retiring from painting, reportedly after his student's contribution to the "Baptism of Christ" (c. 1472) surpassed his own.

Location: Florence, Italy

Leonardo left Florence for Milan, presenting himself to regent Ludovico Sforza chiefly as a military engineer, though the Sforza court valued him primarily for court pageants and painting. His Milan years produced the "Virgin of the Rocks" and his famed equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza — a project abandoned when its seventy-ton bronze was diverted to cannon casting in 1494.

Location: Milan, Italy

In a drawing later named the Vitruvian Man, Leonardo depicted a male figure in two superimposed positions inscribed in a circle and square, expressing the classical idea that the human body is a model of universal proportion. The drawing became the most recognized image in the intersection of art and science.

Location: Milan, Italy

Painting for the Dominican refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Leonardo depicted the moment Christ announces his betrayal, using a one-point perspective construction centered on Christ's head. He experimented with tempera and oil on dry plaster instead of true fresco, and the surface began deteriorating within his own lifetime — initiating five centuries of restoration.

Location: Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy

After French armies toppled the Sforza regime in 1499 and Leonardo returned to Florence, he began the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of merchant Francesco del Giocondo. His use of layered, nearly transparent glazes produced the soft "sfumato" transitions that made the picture's expression famously ambiguous. He continued working on it until nearly the end of his life; it entered the French royal collection after his death.

Location: Florence, Italy

Between roughly 1507 and 1513, Leonardo conducted systematic human dissections — around thirty by his own count — producing more than 240 drawings and notes on the skeleton, muscles, heart, and reproductive anatomy. He intended a treatise on anatomy, but, like many of his projects, it was never finished; the drawings circulated obscurely for centuries before being recognized as anticipating modern anatomical illustration.

Location: Florence and Pavia, Italy

Accepting the invitation of King Francis I, Leonardo moved to the manor of Clos Lucé near Amboise with the title "first painter, engineer and architect to the King." In France he designed canal projects and court festivities but completed no major paintings.

Location: Amboise, France

Leonardo died at 67, leaving thousands of pages of notebooks — mirror-written, unindexed, and unpublished — covering flight, hydraulics, botany, optics, and war machines. By his own accounting fewer than twenty-five major paintings are attributed to him, many left unfinished; his works and notebooks passed to his assistant Francesco Melzi. Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" (1550) fixed his public image as the archetypal Renaissance genius.

Location: Amboise, France

The Salvator Mundi — a painting whose Leonardo attribution remains debated among scholars — sold at Christie's for 450 million dollars, the highest price paid for any artwork at auction. The sale and its contested authenticity became a modern chapter in the long-running scholarly contest over which works Leonardo actually painted. The Codex Leicester had already sold to Bill Gates for 30.8 million dollars in 1994.

Location: New York, USA