Short answers, pulled from the story.
Leonardo da Vinci created the Vitruvian Man around 1490 during his first Milanese period. Art historians debate the precise date, with Martin Kemp placing it at around 1487 and Carmen C. Bambach arguing the earliest defensible date is 1488, with a broader scholarly consensus around 1490-1491.
The Vitruvian Man is held in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, where it has been since 1822. Because extended light exposure would cause fading, it is stored in a locked room on the fourth floor and is rarely displayed to the public.
Leonardo was inspired by the Roman architect Vitruvius, whose treatise De architectura described ideal human proportions using a man inscribed in a circle centred on the navel and a square whose side equals his height. Leonardo also drew on Leon Battista Alberti's De pictura and may have been influenced by the architect Giacomo Andrea, with whom he dined in 1490.
Earlier artists placed the circle and square with a shared centre at the navel, following Vitruvius literally. Leonardo corrected proportional inaccuracies by using the man's genitals as the centre of the square and the navel as the centre of the circle, a refinement drawn from Alberti's De pictura.
The Gallerie dell'Accademia sued German puzzle manufacturer Ravensburger in 2022 for reproducing the Vitruvian Man in a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle sold in Italy from 2009 onward. An Italian court ruled in the museum's favour on the 17th of November 2022 and imposed a fine of 1,500 euros per day for continued sales; a German court reached the opposite conclusion in March 2024, holding that Italy's Cultural Heritage Code does not apply outside Italian territory.
Yes. In 2019 the drawing was loaned to the Louvre in Paris for its Leonhard de Vinci exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death. The heritage group Italia Nostra filed a lawsuit to block the loan, but a judge ruled on the 16th of October 2019 that the group had not proven the drawing too fragile to travel, allowing the loan to proceed under strict light-exposure limits.