Leonardo da Vinci

• 1. The Man Who Wrote Backwards

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  Leonardo da Vinci left behind 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, and almost none of it was written the way you would expect. Most of his writing runs in mirror-image cursive, right to left, the work of a left-handed mind recording the world in private. On those pages sit lists of groceries, names of people who owed him money, designs for wings, and sketches of shoes for walking on water. He was born on the 15th of April 1452 near the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, 20 miles from Florence. He died on the 2nd of May 1519 at the age of 67. In between, he became a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect, a polymath of the High Renaissance who fewer than 25 attributed major works could not contain. How does a man with only a basic, informal education in reading, writing, and mathematics come to be called the universal genius? Why did so much of what he conceived stay locked inside his notebooks, unpublished and unbuilt? And what happened to the bones of a man whose tomb today carries a plaque admitting its contents are only presumed to be his?

• 2. Born Out Of Wedlock

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  Piero da Vinci was a Florentine legal notary, the descendant of a long line of notaries, and the year after Leonardo's birth he married a woman named Albiera Amadori. Leonardo's mother was Caterina di Meo Lippi, a woman from the lower class, and the two never married each other. Leonardo was born out of wedlock, and the exact spot remains uncertain. A local oral tradition recorded by the historian Emanuele Repetti placed the birth at Anchiano, a country hamlet private enough for an illegitimate child, though Ser Piero almost certainly had a house in Florence too.

  Tax records indicate that by at least 1457, Leonardo lived in the household of his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci. His father pursued a successful career and was probably in Florence most of the time, establishing an official residence there by at least 1469. Leonardo is thought to have been close to his uncle, Francesco da Vinci. From his father's four marriages, Leonardo eventually had 16 half-siblings, of whom 11 survived infancy, all much younger and with whom he had very little contact. The last was born when Leonardo was 46.

  Much of his childhood is shrouded in myth, partly because of Giorgio Vasari's frequently apocryphal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, published in 1550. One memory came from Leonardo's own hand, recorded in the Codex Atlanticus. Writing about the flight of birds, he recalled an infant moment when a kite came to his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail. Commentators still debate whether it was real or a fantasy.

• 3. Verrocchio's Workshop

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  Around the age of 14, Leonardo became a garzone, a studio boy, in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his time. He became an apprentice by the age of 17 and trained for seven years. The workshop taught him drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and woodwork, alongside drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling. Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi all apprenticed there or were associated with it.

  Vasari tells that Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on The Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe so far above his master's skill that Verrocchio purportedly put down his brush and never painted again. That last claim is probably apocryphal. The new technique of oil paint appears in the landscape, the rocks seen through the brown mountain stream, and much of Jesus's figure, marking Leonardo's hand on a mostly tempera work.

  A story from Vasari captures the young man's gift for terror. A local peasant asked Ser Piero to have a round buckler shield painted. Leonardo, inspired by the story of Medusa, painted a monster spitting fire so frightening that his father bought a different shield for the peasant. He sold Leonardo's to a Florentine art dealer for 100 ducats, who in turn sold it to the Duke of Milan.

• 4. Patrons And Courts

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  Ludovico Sforza ruled Milan between 1479 and 1499, and Leonardo abandoned two unfinished Florentine commissions to enter his service. He had sent Sforza a letter describing the machines he could build for engineering and weapon design, mentioning almost as an afterthought that he could also paint. He arrived carrying a silver string instrument shaped like a horse's head. From 1482 until 1499 he worked in Milan, where he was also commissioned to build a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, the Gran Cavallo. He completed a model and detailed casting plans, but in November 1494 Ludovico gave the metal to his brother-in-law for a cannon.

  When France overthrew Ludovico in 1500, Leonardo fled to Venice with his assistant Salai and his friend the mathematician Luca Pacioli. In Cesena in 1502, he entered the service of Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, as a military architect and engineer. He drew a town plan of Imola so precise that Cesare hired him as chief military engineer, and later mapped the Chiana Valley to give his patron strategic advantage.

  King Francis I of France recaptured Milan in October 1515. The following year Leonardo entered Francis's service and was given the manor house Clos Luce near the royal Chateau d'Amboise. He drew plans for an immense castle town the king meant to build at Romorantin. He also built a mechanical lion that walked toward the king and, struck by a wand, opened its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies.

• 5. Fewer Than Twenty-Five Works

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  The Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda, the laughing one, is arguably the most famous painting in the world. Its fame rests on the elusive smile, its mystery owed to the subtly shadowed corners of the mouth and eyes. That shadowy quality came to be called sfumato, or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari wrote that the smile was so pleasing that it seems more divine than human. Leonardo began the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo around October 1503 and kept working on it for years. The painting's perfect state of preservation, with no sign of repair or overpainting, is rare for a panel of its date.

  The Last Supper, commissioned for the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, shows the moment Jesus says one of you will betray me. The writer Matteo Bandello watched Leonardo paint from dawn till dusk without eating, then leave the work untouched for three or four days. Instead of reliable fresco, Leonardo used tempera over a mainly gesso ground, and the surface began to mould and flake. Within a hundred years one viewer called it completely ruined, yet it remains the most reproduced religious painting of all time.

  The Virgin of the Rocks was painted in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, depicting the infant John the Baptist meeting the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. Two versions were finished. One stayed at the chapel and Leonardo took the other to France. The Brothers did not receive their painting, nor the de Predis brothers their payment, until the next century. The Lady with an Ermine, presumed to be Cecilia Gallerani, turned its sitter's head at a sharply different angle from the torso, unusual when many portraits were still rigidly in profile.

• 6. The Anatomy Of Everything

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  Marcantonio della Torre, professor of anatomy at the University of Pavia, collaborated with Leonardo from 1510 to 1511. By permission, Leonardo dissected human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. He made more than 240 detailed drawings and wrote about 13,000 words toward a treatise on anatomy. He drew the heart and vascular system, the internal organs, and one of the first scientific drawings of a foetus in the womb. He was the first to describe atherosclerosis and liver cirrhosis.

  Leonardo built a glass aorta and ran water and grass seed through it to watch blood flow through the aortic valve. He cast the cerebral ventricles in melted wax. He dissected cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, comparing their structure with the human body. He studied the muscular forces applied to the skeleton in a way that prefigured the modern science of biomechanics.

  In his notebooks he first stated the laws of sliding friction in 1493, drawn in part from his study of perpetual motion, which he correctly concluded was impossible. He never published, and the friction laws were not rediscovered until 1699 by Guillaume Amontons, whose name they now carry. Leonardo was later named the first of the 23 Men of Tribology by Duncan Dowson. His scientific findings, unpublished, had little to no direct influence on the science that followed.

• 7. Machines And Flight

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  More than 5,000 pages of Leonardo's codices are filled with machines and devices. He drew their anatomy with a perfected exploded view technique to show internal components, producing the first form of the modern technical drawing. In his 1482 letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed he could build machines for both the protection of a city and for siege. Fleeing to Venice in 1499, he devised a system of moveable barricades against naval attack. In 1502 he created a scheme to divert the Arno river, a project on which Niccolo Machiavelli also worked.

  Flight fascinated Leonardo for much of his life. He produced the Codex on the Flight of Birds around 1505 and designed a flapping ornithopter and a machine with a helical rotor. He also conceptualised a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, and a double hull. Few of his designs were built or were even feasible, since metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy. Smaller inventions slipped quietly into manufacturing, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire.

  Research by Marc van den Broek found older prototypes for more than 100 inventions ascribed to Leonardo, with parallels reaching back to the Middle Ages, Ancient Greece and Rome, China, Persia, and Egypt. Leonardo's innovation was to combine functions from existing drafts into scenes that illustrated their use. By reconstituting old technical ideas, he made something new.

• 8. The Trophy King And The Missing Bones

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  Some 20 years after the artist's death, the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini reported Francis I saying there had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, and that above painting and sculpture he was a very great philosopher. Francis had become a close friend. Vasari records that the king held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, though the story may be legend. In accordance with his will, sixty beggars carrying tapers followed his casket. His pupil Francesco Melzi was the principal heir, receiving the paintings, tools, library, and personal effects.

  Leonardo's notebooks passed to Melzi, then after Melzi's death in 1570 to his son Orazio, who took little interest. In 1587 a household tutor named Lelio Gavardi took 13 manuscripts to Pisa before they were returned. The papers scattered across collections that now include the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, and the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, which holds the 12-volume Codex Atlanticus. The Codex Leicester, the only privately owned major scientific work, belongs to Bill Gates and is displayed once a year.

  The body itself is harder to find. Leonardo was buried in the collegiate church of Saint Florentin at the Chateau d'Amboise on the 12th of August 1519, but the church was demolished in 1802 and the graves disturbed. In 1863, fine-arts inspector Arsene Houssaye excavated the site and found a partial skeleton with a bronze ring, white hair, and stone fragments reading EO, AR, DUS, and VINC, interpreted as Leonardus Vinci. The remains were re-interred in the chapel of Saint Hubert in 1874, beneath a plaque admitting they are only presumed to be his. The ring and a lock of hair, kept quietly by Houssaye, surfaced again and went on display at the Leonardo Museum in Vinci on the 2nd of May 2019, the 500th anniversary of his death.