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On 2 May 1519, near Amboise, in France, Leonardo da Vinci died — today considered the absolute and undisputed genius of the Italian and European Renaissance. His most important works — such as the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and the Virgin of the Rocks — are known and loved throughout the world.

• Leonardo da Vinci: his life
• 10 curiosities about Leonardo
• Leonardo's machines
• Leonardo in pop culture
• Leonardo, a multipotentialite without knowing it

Everything has been said about him: certain aspects of his life, such as the fact that he was left-handed and wrote in mirror script, have even helped fuel mysteries and rumours. Some claim he deliberately wanted to conceal inventions and discoveries; others maintain that, owing to his studies on cadavers, he was practically a sort of wizard, a necromancer. Thanks to the imagery that revolves around his figure, he has even become an icon of pop culture.

One thing is certain: this multifaceted man of manifold genius, perhaps one of the greatest multipotentialites of all time, left his indelible mark across many fields of knowledge: from painting to engineering, from music to botany, from architecture to literature. An exceptional human being, in short. So exceptional as to seem distant, almost off-putting.

Leonardo, an imperfect genius

But let us clear up one point straight away: geniuses, even the greatest of them, like Leonardo, are often closer to the lives of ordinary mortals than we might imagine. For instance: did you know that the master from Vinci loved to lose himself in his own studies and projects, and that for this reason he had serious difficulty meeting deadlines? And that he procrastinated endlessly over his commitments, frequently being branded as someone who never finished anything, even though his behaviour was more a matter of perfectionism than anything else? Did you know that Leonardo, despite being greatly admired for his abilities even by his contemporaries, never completed his greatest and most ambitious project?

Leonardo was an imperfect genius, and that is precisely why we like him. And that is why we too want to tell his story.

Leonardo da Vinci: his life

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, a small village near Florence. He was the illegitimate son — and this would be, for his entire life, his greatest 'flaw' — of a young notary, Ser Piero, scion of the most prominent family in the village, and of a peasant girl, Caterina, the daughter of tenants of the da Vinci family. After his birth, the child was entrusted to his father. And so, while Piero began to contract a series of marriages that allowed him to advance his career in Florence, and Caterina was married off to a brick-kiln worker from the village, Leonardo grew up in his grandparents' home, where they became very fond of him. There he was looked after by Piero's brother, Uncle Francesco, to whom he remained deeply attached throughout his life. Everything he learned, he learned from Francesco, who also taught him to read and above all to write, paying no heed to the fact that he did so with the "wrong" hand — that is, his left. He did not follow a regular course of study and led an almost wild existence, wandering freely through the fields and vineyards of Vinci, which he would then scribble on scraps of paper found in his grandfather's house. And when Ser Piero noticed that his thirteen-year-old son had a talent for drawing, he took him to apprentice with one of the finest artists in Florence: Andrea Verrocchio.

In Florence at Verrocchio's workshop and the accusation of sodomy

At Verrocchio's, Leonardo worked side by side with some of the best artists of the time, such as Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi, and learned everything. To draw and to paint, certainly, but not only that. He learned to recognise and use materials, and also studied goldsmithing and techniques for casting metals. He acquired his first notions of ballistics and engineering. It was here, in short, that Leonardo's interest in everything technical, mechanical and scientific was born.

He became a "master painter", but despite already being very talented, he initially produced very little. He had few commissions, and those he did have he struggled to complete — such as the Adoration of the Magi for the monks of a village near Florence, which remained unfinished. Despite the constant intellectual stimulation, Florence felt too small for Leonardo. Partly because he felt the competitive climate that pervaded the city, partly because he was not at ease at the court of the Medici, which was formed of humanists with little interest in the sciences, and partly because of the rumours about his sexuality. In 1476, at the age of 24, the handsome Leonardo was indeed accused of sodomy together with other apprentices, among whom a cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent also stood out. It is perhaps partly thanks to this coincidence that he was acquitted, but the gossip remained. And so, as soon as he could, he left, seizing the opportunity to have himself recommended by the lord of Florence to a "foreign" nobleman in search of talent: the regent of the Duchy of Milan, Ludovico il Moro.

The twenty Milanese years

It was 1482. Leonardo was thirty years old and eager to prove himself. And to make sure he would "make an impression" on il Moro, he wrote a letter that represents the first truly effective curriculum vitae in history. With great intelligence and initiative, he listed, in ten concise points, not so much his qualities as an artist, but those of a military and civil engineer and an architect, also promising to create something the duke held very dear: an equestrian monument in honour of his father Francesco Sforza. So began Leonardo's twenty-year stay in Milan, a city that gave him a great deal and which he himself considered "home" far more than Florence or Vinci. Ludovico il Moro became not only his patron but also the first lord to place complete trust in his talent, despite some of his evident shortcomings, such as his difficulty in meeting deadlines. The duke demanded a great deal, but also gave the master considerable freedom to develop his interests, to study from the freshly printed volumes in the library of Pavia, and to experiment. And so, for the Sforza court, Leonardo performed as a musician and staged entertainments, applied himself to large paintings — such as the Last Supper, depicted between 1495 and 1498 in the refectory of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie — and small portraits, such as the Lady with an Ermine, which depicts il Moro's mistress, Cecilia Gallerani; he studied the design of an ideal city, designed machines of various kinds, and solved hydraulic problems related to the Lombard canals.

Of the many works planned and conceived by the mind of the genius from Vinci, far more remained on paper than were ever realised. At the time of his departure from Milan, one of these was precisely the equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza that Leonardo had promised il Moro and which was meant to have brought him everlasting glory.

On pilgrimage, in search of another Moro

In 1499, a realignment of alliances among the peninsula's lordships and European courts brought Ludovico Sforza's rule in Milan to an end and saw the French enter the city. Leonardo too fled to avoid being killed. Thus began his wanderings in search — a fruitless one — of a new patron who, like il Moro, could finance him while leaving him free to pursue his studies and interests. He first served as architect and military engineer to il Valentino — that is, Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentinois and condottiere, son of Pope Alexander VI, celebrated by Machiavelli in Il Principe. Then, in 1503, he returned to his Florence in the service of the city's new master, the gonfaloniere Pier Soderini, who even set him in competition with another myth of the Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti, for the decoration of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio. For different reasons, neither artist completed his part of the work, and Soderini was left to resign himself to the fact. After a further period in Milan, between 1506 and 1513, in the service of the Marshal of Amboise — who governed the city on behalf of the King of France and was the first and only patron to pay the old master a proper salary — Leonardo, like many other artists, set out for the Eternal City.

In Rome, if anything, Leonardo found himself even worse off than in Florence: partly because Michelangelo and the very young, very talented Raphael dominated the scene. Partly because his reputation for never finishing anything had spread, and however brilliant he might be, few were willing to entrust work to a slow artist — not even Bramante, who had been his colleague in Milan. And partly because his anatomical studies on cadavers were viewed with suspicion: it was thought he wished to call into question the dogmas concerning the soul, and he was accused of nothing less than necromancy. And yet Leonardo was simply interested in deepening his studies, the pinnacle of which is perhaps the Vitruvian Man, a pen-and-ink drawing held in the Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, representing the ideal proportions of the human body. Disappointed and embittered, Leonardo abandoned Rome as well. It was 1516, and he decided to spend the very last years of his life in exile, accepting the invitation of the King of France, for whom he became "first painter, architect and engineer." Far from Florence, from Vinci, but above all from his beloved Milan, Leonardo died at Amboise on 2 May 1519.

10 curiosities about Leonardo

1. He was a much-loved illegitimate son, but with no inheritance (or almost none)

Leonardo was indeed an illegitimate son, but sui generis. His grandparents and his uncle Francesco, who raised him in place of his father — busy pursuing a career in Florence — loved him dearly, in part because… for a long time they had no other grandchildren. Few people know that Leonardo remained an only child for the first 24 years of his life. His father's first and second wives, both much younger than him, in fact both died in the futile attempt to give him children. Piero finally managed to have several legitimate children — capable, among other things, of carrying on his notarial practice — only with his third and fourth wives, by which point his firstborn was already an adult working in Verrocchio's workshop. Despite his particular circumstances, Leonardo was nonetheless excluded from the family inheritance. His father, who died in the summer of 1504, when the master was over 50 and working in Florence under Soderini, chose not to legitimise him, thus depriving him of any possibility of accessing even a small share of the da Vinci estate. And before dying he also compelled his brother Francesco to do the same. His uncle, however, had no wish to deprive his beloved nephew of what was rightfully his. So, after Piero's death, he rewrote his own will and left almost everything to Leonardo. The master was nevertheless obstructed by every possible means by his brothers, led by Giuliano (the eldest), a notary like his father, and managed to obtain the farmstead at Fiesole left to him by his uncle only after a very lengthy legal battle.

2. The horse exists, but it is not Leonardo's

Despite the promises made to il Moro in his ten-point curriculum ante litteram, Leonardo never created the equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza. The reason? On one hand his pictorial "distractions," on the other his perfectionism and desire to experiment. Leonardo, who wanted to surpass his master Andrea Verrocchio — the creator of the monument to the Venetians' condottiere (and Sforza's rival) Bartolomeo Colleoni — spent years designing his own. In an initial phase, he lost a great deal of time studying and sketching parts of horses in his notes in order to produce the most beautiful statue ever made. He even risked losing the commission on account of his slowness. He then finally produced a seven-metre terracotta horse as a mould for casting the metal. And when he was at last ready to cast the statue in a single pour — something never attempted before — he found the bronze needed for the undertaking taken away by il Moro himself, who used it to make cannons at a moment of political instability and shifting alliances. The unfinished horse was Leonardo's greatest failure. Nevertheless, an equestrian monument based on the master's design does exist. It was made possible through the efforts of an enthusiast, American pilot Charles Dent, who raised two and a half million dollars during the 1970s and 1980s for the casting of the statue. The horse, nearly eight metres tall, was then created by sculptor Nina Akamu in 1999 and donated to the city of Milan. It is now on display at the San Siro racecourse.

3. The Battle of Anghiari was more ill-fated than the Last Supper

What do these two great paintings by the master have in common — one in Milan and a Unesco heritage site, the other in Florence, never finished and today invisible? Leonardo's perfectionism, in all likelihood. For both, da Vinci refused to use the fresco technique, better suited to large walls but requiring swift brushwork and clarity of thought, preferring instead mixed tempera and oil techniques on waterproofed walls, which allowed for endless second thoughts. It should be remembered that the creative process, for Leonardo, could last entire years. In Milan, the result was a magnificent painting: the Last Supper was admired by his contemporaries from the outset, yet it was destined to deteriorate within a very short time. In Florence, where he used a resin known as Greek pitch to waterproof the wall of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, the painting dissolved after just a few brushstrokes. Leonardo never even finished it. Fortunately for him, he did not entirely lose the "contest" with his rival Michelangelo, who was supposed to paint the Battle of Cascina on the opposite wall: the artist was called to Rome, and the duel of the century ended in a draw for both artists — and with an entire room to be redone for the gonfaloniere.

4. He learned Latin only after the age of thirty

Leonardo, who in his youth did not follow a regular course of study, was compelled around the age of thirty to make a decision: learn Latin in order to continue his scientific education, or give it up? With extraordinary humility and determination, he chose to teach himself the fifteenth-century equivalent of English — that "dead" language in which, at the time, not only literary texts but also technical and scientific ones were written — and in doing so was able to continue his studies.

5. The codices were not reorganised by Leonardo

The master was a graphomaniac and, particularly from his first Milanese sojourn onwards, took notes on absolutely everything: his codices contain fables, shopping lists, household accounts (which he, true to his roots as the son of notaries, records scrupulously), and of course a great many studies — in anatomy, botany, hydraulics, architecture and engineering, the techniques of flight, and much else besides. His handwriting is distinctive and mirrored: it runs from right to left, with the letters drawn in reverse. The reason, however, was probably not a desire to conceal his discoveries, but simply to spare himself effort. Leonardo was left-handed and learned, from childhood, to write in both directions. A brilliant but poorly organised mind, da Vinci never systematised anything, even though it was his wish to do so: a plan to reorganise his notes into treatises was in the works, and to that end he enlisted the help of one of his most beloved pupils, Francesco Melzi. Leonardo unfortunately