Leonardo
da Vinci
1452 — 1519Historical Archive · Portrait Study
Leonardo da Vinci
Anchiano, near Vinci, 1452 · Clos Lucé, Amboise, 1519
The notary's illegitimate son who finished almost nothing, and left behind seven thousand pages that explain why.
Raised without Latin and shut out of the learned books, he was apprenticed to Verrocchio and taught himself the rest by looking. He spent seventeen years offering Ludovico Sforza war engines, a bronze horse that was never cast, and a Last Supper that began to flake in his lifetime; he rode a year with Cesare Borgia as military engineer; he dissected thirty corpses and drew the vortex in the heart. He carried a silk merchant's wife's portrait with him for sixteen years and died in a French manor where the king asked only for his conversation.
In 1476 he was accused of sodomy and released. He never wrote a word about it.