73 Facts About Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect.

Leonardo Da Vinci began his career in the city, but then spent much time in the service of Ludovico Sforza in Milan.

Leonardo Da Vinci is identified as one of the greatest painters in the history of art and is often credited as the founder of the High Renaissance.

In 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed in whole or part to Leonardo Da Vinci, was sold at auction for, setting a new record for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction.

Leonardo Da Vinci made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, but he did not publish his findings and they had little to no direct influence on subsequent science.

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From all the marriages, Leonardo Da Vinci eventually had 16 half-siblings who were much younger than him and with whom he had very little contact.

Leonardo Da Vinci is thought to have been close to his uncle, Francesco da Vinci, but his father was probably in Florence most of the time.

Later in life, Leonardo Da Vinci recorded his earliest memory, now in the Codex Atlanticus.

Leonardo Da Vinci became an apprentice by the age of 17 and remained in training for seven years.

Leonardo Da Vinci was exposed to both theoretical training and a wide range of technical skills, including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and woodwork, as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling.

Leonardo Da Vinci was a contemporary of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was.

Leonardo Da Vinci would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio or at the Platonic Academy of the Medici.

Leonardo Da Vinci, inspired by the story of Medusa, responded with a painting of a monster spitting fire that was so terrifying that his father bought a different shield to give to the peasant and sold Leonardo Da Vinci's to a Florentine art dealer for 100 ducats, who in turn sold it to the Duke of Milan.

Leonardo Da Vinci's earliest known dated work is a 1473 pen-and-ink drawing of the Arno valley.

An anonymous early biographer, known as Anonimo Gaddiano, claims that in 1480 Leonardo Da Vinci was living with the Medici and often worked in the garden of the Piazza San Marco, Florence, where a Neoplatonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers organized by the Medici met.

Leonardo Da Vinci wrote Sforza a letter which described the diverse things that he could achieve in the fields of engineering and weapon design, and mentioned that he could paint.

Leonardo Da Vinci brought with him a silver string instrument—either a lute or lyre—in the form of a horse's head.

In 1482, Leonardo Da Vinci was sent as an ambassador by Lorenzo de' Medici to Ludovico il Moro, who ruled Milan between 1479 and 1499.

Leonardo Da Vinci was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

Leonardo Da Vinci was employed on many other projects for Sforza, such as preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions; a drawing of, and wooden model for, a competition to design the cupola for Milan Cathedral; and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Ludovico's predecessor Francesco Sforza.

When Ludovico Sforza was overthrown by France in 1500, Leonardo Da Vinci fled Milan for Venice, accompanied by his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli.

In Venice, Leonardo Da Vinci was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.

In Cesena in 1502, Leonardo Da Vinci entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron.

Leonardo Da Vinci created a map of Cesare Borgia's stronghold, a town plan of Imola in order to win his patronage.

Later in the year, Leonardo Da Vinci produced another map for his patron, one of Chiana Valley, Tuscany, so as to give his patron a better overlay of the land and greater strategic position.

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Leonardo Da Vinci created this map in conjunction with his other project of constructing a dam from the sea to Florence, in order to allow a supply of water to sustain the canal during all seasons.

Leonardo Da Vinci then spent two years in Florence designing and painting a mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina.

In 1506, Leonardo Da Vinci was summoned to Milan by Charles II d'Amboise, the acting French governor of the city.

In 1507, Leonardo Da Vinci was in Florence sorting out a dispute with his brothers over the estate of his father, who had died in 1504.

In 1512, Leonardo Da Vinci was working on plans for an equestrian monument for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, but this was prevented by an invasion of a confederation of Swiss, Spanish and Venetian forces, which drove the French from Milan.

Leonardo Da Vinci stayed in the city, spending several months in 1513 at the Medici's Vaprio d'Adda villa.

Leonardo Da Vinci was given an allowance of 33 ducats a month, and according to Vasari, decorated a lizard with scales dipped in quicksilver.

Leonardo Da Vinci practiced botany in the Gardens of Vatican City, and was commissioned to make plans for the pope's proposed draining of the Pontine Marshes.

Leonardo Da Vinci dissected cadavers, making notes for a treatise on vocal cords; these he gave to an official in hopes of regaining the pope's favor, but was unsuccessful.

In 1516, Leonardo Da Vinci entered Francis' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Luce, near the king's residence at the royal Chateau d'Amboise.

Leonardo Da Vinci continued to work at some capacity until eventually becoming ill and bedridden for several months.

Leonardo Da Vinci's brothers received land, and his serving woman received a fur-lined cloak.

Nevertheless, Leonardo Da Vinci treated him with great indulgence, and he remained in Leonardo Da Vinci's household for the next thirty years.

Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo Da Vinci "taught him many things about painting, " his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo Da Vinci's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggiono and Boltraffio.

Leonardo Da Vinci had many friends who are now notable either in their fields or for their historical significance, including mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on the book Divina proportione in the 1490s.

Leonardo Da Vinci appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Cecilia Gallerani and the two Este sisters, Beatrice and Isabella.

Leonardo Da Vinci first gained attention for his work on the Baptism of Christ, painted in conjunction with Verrocchio.

In both Annunciations, Leonardo Da Vinci used a formal arrangement, like two well-known pictures by Fra Angelico of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with a rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily.

In 1482 Leonardo Da Vinci went to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo de' Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro, and the painting was abandoned.

Leonardo Da Vinci chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt.

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In 1505, Leonardo Da Vinci was commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

Leonardo Da Vinci devised a dynamic composition depicting four men riding raging war horses engaged in a battle for possession of a standard, at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440.

Leonardo Da Vinci's painting deteriorated rapidly and is known from a copy by Rubens.

Leonardo Da Vinci leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice.

Leonardo Da Vinci was a prolific draughtsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention.

Leonardo Da Vinci's earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.

Vasari relates that Leonardo Da Vinci would look for interesting faces in public to use as models for some of his work.

The Codex Leicester is the only privately owned major scientific work of Leonardo Da Vinci; it is owned by Bill Gates and displayed once a year in different cities around the world.

Since Leonardo Da Vinci wrote with his left hand, it was probably easier for him to write from right to left.

Leonardo Da Vinci used a variety of shorthand and symbols, and states in his notes that he intended to prepare them for publication.

Leonardo Da Vinci started his study in the anatomy of the human body under the apprenticeship of Verrocchio, who demanded that his students develop a deep knowledge of the subject.

Leonardo Da Vinci made over 240 detailed drawings and wrote about 13,000 words toward a treatise on anatomy.

Leonardo Da Vinci studied the mechanical functions of the skeleton and the muscular forces that are applied to it in a manner that prefigured the modern science of biomechanics.

Leonardo Da Vinci closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage.

Leonardo Da Vinci drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.

Leonardo Da Vinci studied and drew the anatomy of many animals, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans.

Leonardo Da Vinci attempted to identify the source of 'emotions' and their expression.

Leonardo Da Vinci found it difficult to incorporate the prevailing system and theories of bodily humours, but eventually he abandoned these physiological explanations of bodily functions.

Leonardo Da Vinci made the observations that humours were not located in cerebral spaces or ventricles.

Leonardo Da Vinci documented that the humours were not contained in the heart or the liver, and that it was the heart that defined the circulatory system.

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Leonardo Da Vinci was the first to define atherosclerosis and liver cirrhosis.

Leonardo Da Vinci created models of the cerebral ventricles with the use of melted wax and constructed a glass aorta to observe the circulation of blood through the aortic valve by using water and grass seed to watch flow patterns.

Leonardo Da Vinci drew their “anatomy” with unparalleled mastery, producing the first form of the modern technical drawing, including a perfected "exploded view" technique, to represent internal components.

Leonardo Da Vinci continued to contemplate the canalization of Lombardy's plains while in Louis XII's company and of the Loire and its tributaries in the company of Francis I Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical.

Leonardo Da Vinci's innovation was to combine different functions from existing drafts and set them into scenes that illustrated their utility.

Leonardo Da Vinci's results were never published and the friction laws were not rediscovered until 1699 by Guillaume Amontons, with whose name they are now usually associated.

Interest in Leonardo Da Vinci's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found.

Leonardo Da Vinci can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term.