Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was a Florentine painter, engineer and natural philosopher, born the illegitimate son of a notary in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci. Trained in the workshop of Verrocchio, he worked for the Sforza court in Milan, where he painted The Last Supper, for Cesare Borgia as a military engineer, for the republic of Florence, where he painted the Mona Lisa, and finally for Francis I of France, at whose château of Amboise he died. His notebooks, some seven thousand surviving pages written in mirror script, record investigations of anatomy, water, flight, optics, geology and painting that remained almost unknown for centuries.