Leonardo da Vinci
1452–1519 — Florentine Renaissance painter
The complete Renaissance mind.
The painter of the Mona Lisa and one of the defining figures of the High Renaissance.
Life
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born on the fifteenth of April, 1452, in the Tuscan town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary, ser Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman named Caterina. He was raised in his father's house, received a basic education in Italian and arithmetic, and at around fourteen entered the Florentine workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio — at that point one of the most accomplished bottegas in Italy, training the next generation of Renaissance painters alongside Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Pietro Perugino.
By the early 1480s Leonardo had moved to Milan to serve Ludovico Sforza, the city's de facto ruler, in a role that was equal parts court painter, engineer, military consultant, and impresario. The Milanese years produced The Last Supper, the Virgin of the Rocks, and an enormous body of scientific and engineering notebooks that survived him. After the fall of Sforza in 1499 he moved between Florence, Milan, Rome, and finally France, where he entered the service of King Francis I in 1516 and died at Amboise in May 1519.
Major paintings
Leonardo completed astonishingly few paintings. The accepted catalogue is fewer than twenty works, several unfinished, some attributions still contested. The small surviving body of work nevertheless contains some of the most consequential single paintings ever made.
Working method
Leonardo's working method is the most fully documented of any Renaissance painter, because he wrote thousands of pages of notebooks. He drew obsessively from life — anatomical dissections, water studies, plant studies, military machines, geometric exercises. He composed paintings slowly, often over years, building them up in dozens of translucent oil glazes. He invented and refined sfumato, the smoke-like softening of contours that gives his portraits their unresolved psychological presence. He treated painting as a scientific exercise — a structured response to questions about light, motion, perception, and the human body.
The cost of this method was his famous unfinishedness. Leonardo abandoned many commissions, delivered some late by years, and carried the Mona Lisa with him for sixteen years without releasing it. The benefit was that the works he did complete were, individually, almost unrivalled.
Technical contribution
Leonardo's principal technical contribution to Renaissance painting is sfumato — the soft, gradient, indeterminate modelling of edges and tonal transitions, applied through extraordinarily thin translucent oil glazes. He also extended the use of atmospheric perspective (the gradual loss of saturation and contrast with distance), the dynamic three-quarter portrait turn, and the pyramidal compositional stability that became foundational to High Renaissance painting and was inherited by Raphael.
He was also, almost incidentally, one of the great draftsmen of the period. His drawings — anatomical, mechanical, botanical, geological — are widely held to be the finest body of preparatory drawing in Western art.
Place in art history
Leonardo is the central figure of the High Renaissance and, with Michelangelo and Raphael, one of its three defining painters. His direct influence on Raphael — who absorbed Leonardo's pyramidal composition, three-quarter turn, and atmospheric softening — is documentary fact. Through Raphael, Leonardo's lessons passed into the standard High Renaissance vocabulary, and from there into the entire European tradition.
His indirect influence is incalculable. The modern image of the artist as polymath — painter, scientist, engineer, intellectual — is in large part a Leonardo invention. The Mona Lisa, in particular, is the painting through which the largest number of non-specialists encounter the idea of Renaissance art at all.