Leonardo da Vinci

The Life

Leonardo da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 in or near the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of Piero da Vinci, a successful Florentine notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi, a woman of lower social standing. Both parents married other people within a year of his birth, and Leonardo ultimately had sixteen half-siblings. He spent his childhood largely in the household of his paternal grandfather, receiving only informal instruction in reading, writing, and mathematics — he never mastered Latin or advanced mathematics, a gap that would later cause some contemporary scholars to dismiss his scientific notebooks. Around age fourteen, he was apprenticed in Florence to the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the city's leading workshops, where he trained for roughly a decade alongside future masters including Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Pietro Perugino. He qualified as a master in Florence's Guild of Saint Luke in 1472, and by 1473 produced his earliest dated independent work, a pen-and-ink landscape drawing of the Arno valley. Leonardo remained in Florence through the 1470s, receiving commissions including an altarpiece for the Palazzo della Signoria in 1478 and, in 1481, 'The Adoration of the Magi' for the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto — a painting he left unfinished when, around 1482, he entered the service of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. There, over nearly two decades, Leonardo worked simultaneously as painter, military engineer, architect, and stage designer for court pageants, while pursuing an equestrian monument for the Sforza family (the 'Gran Cavallo,' never cast) and designs for the Milan Cathedral cupola. In Milan he painted 'The Virgin of the Rocks' (two versions, c. 1483–1508) and, between roughly 1495 and 1498, 'The Last Supper' — a monumental mural for the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, executed in an experimental technique that began deteriorating within decades of its completion. When the French invasion toppled the Sforza regime in 1499, Leonardo fled Milan, eventually returning to Florence in 1500 with his young assistant Salaì. In October 1503 he rejoined Florence's painters' guild and began work on the portrait now known as the 'Mona Lisa,' a commission believed to depict Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, though Leonardo kept the painting with him, reworking it for years and never delivering it to any patron. During this Florentine period he also briefly served as a military engineer and cartographer for Cesare Borgia and undertook the ambitious, ultimately abandoned mural 'The Battle of Anghiari' for the Palazzo Vecchio. In 1506 he returned to Milan at the invitation of its French governor, taking on Francesco Melzi as his new favorite pupil, and pursued his scientific studies — particularly human anatomy, which he investigated through dissections conducted in hospitals in Florence, Milan, and later Rome, producing over 240 detailed anatomical drawings and roughly 13,000 words toward a planned treatise. In 1513 Leonardo moved to Rome under the patronage of the Medici pope Leo X, lodging in the Belvedere Courtyard of the Vatican and continuing botanical and anatomical research. In 1516, at the invitation of the young French king Francis I, he relocated to the manor house of Clos Lucé near the Château d'Amboise in France, accompanied by Melzi, with a generous pension and the honorary title of 'first painter, engineer, and architect to the King.' There he continued sketching and advising on royal building and pageant projects, including a mechanical lion automaton, even as, by his own account and Vasari's, paralysis in his right hand from around age sixty-five limited his ability to paint. Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519, at the age of sixty-seven, likely following a stroke, and was buried in the Collegiate Church of Saint-Florentin at Amboise. He left the bulk of his manuscripts, paintings, and possessions to Francesco Melzi, who preserved and catalogued them after his death.

The Hand

Leonardo's signature technical innovation was sfumato — literally 'smoky' — a method of blending tone and color in almost imperceptible gradations, without hard outlines, to model form and produce atmospheric depth. Visible above all in the soft transitions around the eyes and mouth of the 'Mona Lisa' and in the studies for 'The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne,' sfumato was made possible by his mastery of oil paint, applied in many thin, translucent layers (glazes) built up slowly over a tempera or oil ground, a technique still being refined in Florentine and Netherlandish painting during his lifetime. He was also a pioneer of aerial (atmospheric) perspective, using shifts in color saturation, contrast, and clarity to suggest distance in landscape backgrounds, most famously in the hazy blue mountains behind the 'Mona Lisa.' Leonardo's technique was inseparable from his empirical method: he treated the studio as a laboratory, filling notebooks with studies of drapery, hands, facial expressions, water eddies, plant growth, and skeletal and muscular structure before ever committing a final composition to panel or wall. His anatomical dissections — conducted on human cadavers with a rigor unusual for a painter of his era — gave his figures an internal structural logic that set them apart from contemporaries working from surface observation alone; his notebooks record early, accurate descriptions of conditions such as atherosclerosis and cirrhosis of the liver, byproducts of an investigative practice aimed ultimately at better representing the living body in paint. This obsessive preparatory drawing, combined with a self-critical perfectionism, meant Leonardo left an unusually high proportion of major commissions unfinished — including 'The Adoration of the Magi,' 'Saint Jerome in the Wilderness,' and 'The Battle of Anghiari' — and fewer than twenty-five paintings are today confidently attributed to his hand, an extraordinarily small body of work for an artist of his stature. His experimentation extended to materials with mixed results: 'The Last Supper' was painted using an untested combination of tempera and oil directly onto dry plaster rather than true fresco technique, which allowed for the fine detail and reworking Leonardo wanted but caused the painting to begin flaking within his own lifetime, a condition still managed through ongoing conservation today. Leonardo also wrote predominantly in mirror-image cursive, moving right to left across the page — a product of his left-handedness — filling some 13,000 surviving pages with a fusion of art and natural philosophy that anticipated the modern scientific notebook, even though it went almost entirely unpublished in his own lifetime.

The Legacy

Leonardo is universally regarded as the founding figure of the High Renaissance and, alongside his younger rival Michelangelo, one of the two artists whose combined achievement defined the era's ideal of the universal genius, or 'Renaissance man.' His compositional innovations in 'The Last Supper' — dramatic psychological reaction distributed across a unified group, rather than static individual figures — became a template studied and echoed by generations of painters, while 'Mona Lisa' evolved, particularly after its celebrated 1911 theft and recovery from the Louvre, into arguably the most famous single painting in the world, drawing crowds that the Louvre now manages with dedicated viewing infrastructure. His anatomical and engineering drawings, largely unpublished until centuries after his death, are now recognized as major, independent contributions to the history of science; his notebooks are studied by art historians and scientists alike as an unprecedented record of observational method predating the formal Scientific Revolution. Leonardo's manuscripts, dispersed after his death among collectors and institutions, form the basis of major holdings at the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (home to the twelve-volume 'Codex Atlanticus'), the Institut de France, and the British Library, while the privately owned 'Codex Leicester,' purchased by Bill Gates in 1994, continues to travel for public exhibition. In 2019, the quincentenary of his death, the Louvre staged the largest Leonardo retrospective ever mounted, drawing more than 1.1 million visitors and setting a new attendance record for the museum, while institutions across Italy and France mounted parallel commemorative exhibitions and scholarship. Beyond the museum world, Leonardo occupies a singular place in global popular culture as shorthand for genius itself, inspiring centuries of biography, fiction, and film, and lending his name to institutions, awards, and countless commercial and educational ventures worldwide. His 2017 auction record for 'Salvator Mundi' — a work of disputed but partly attributed authorship — pushed his market value into territory no other artist has approached, reinforcing, whatever the scholarly debate over that specific painting, the singular commercial and cultural gravity that continues to surround his name more than five centuries after his death.

The Market

Leonardo's market is defined by the near-total absence of available paintings — fewer than twenty-five works are confidently attributed to him, virtually all in permanent museum collections — which makes any Leonardo sale an extraordinary market event rather than a routine data point. The defining transaction is the 15 November 2017 sale of 'Salvator Mundi' at Christie's New York, which achieved $450.3 million including buyer's premium, shattering the previous world record for any artwork sold at auction (roughly triple the prior record) after a bidding war reported to have lasted nearly twenty minutes. The painting, depicting Christ as 'Savior of the World,' had a documented but broken ownership history, was heavily restored, and had sold for just $1,175 at a 1958 Sotheby's auction under a different attribution before being rediscovered, restored, and controversially reattributed to Leonardo (with some scholars arguing for substantial studio participation) ahead of the 2017 sale. Because no further autograph Leonardo panel paintings are expected to reach the market in the foreseeable future, market activity concerning Leonardo instead centers on drawings, manuscript leaves, and works from his circle or school, which appear only rarely and can themselves command tens of millions of dollars — a rediscovered Leonardo drawing or attributed study is treated as major auction-house news whenever one surfaces, given the near total institutional lock on his confirmed output. In practical terms, Leonardo's 'market' today is best understood through his institutional standing rather than trading volume: virtually every surviving painting is permanently housed at the Louvre, the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi, the Hermitage, or comparable state institutions, meaning valuation is almost entirely theoretical except in the exceptional circumstances that produced the 'Salvator Mundi' sale — a painting whose current owner and location remain undisclosed since the 2017 auction, adding a further layer of mystique to an already singular market case.