Leonardo da Vinci

Italian painter, sculptor, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, anatomist, writer and botanist whose known as the archetype of Renaissance man with multifaceted talent. His scope of interest were precedent that makes him mysteriously remote.

Da Vinci was born in April 15, 1452 at the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, Florence, Italy. He was the illegitimate son of wealthy legal notary Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci and a peasant woman named Caterina. He educated in the studio of renowed Florentine painter Virrocchio. He spent his early five years in hamlet of Anchiano his mother's hometown.

In 1466, at the age of fourteen he became an apprentices in many famous Italian painters like Andrea di Cione known as Virrocchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi. By the age of twenty, he qualified as a master in the Guild of St. Luke, the guild of artists and medicine.

One of his first major works is his earliest drawing called the Arno Valley in 1473. It has been written that Leonardo "may be the most universally recognized left-handed artist of all time", a fact documented by numerous Renaissance authors, and manifested conspicuously in his drawing and handwriting.

Leonardo was a most talented musician, when he created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse head.

His later paintings and art works includes the The Baptism of Christ (1472–1475), Anunciation (c. 1472–1475), Ginevra de Benci (c. 1476), Benois Madonna (1478), Madonna of the Carnation (1478–1480), St. Jerome in the Wilderness (c. 1480), Adoration of the Magi (1481), Virgin of the Rocks (1483–1486), Lady with an Ermine (1485), Madonna Litta (c. 1490), Portrait of a Musician (1490), La Belle Ferronniere (1490–1496), The Last Supper (1495–1498), Virgin of the Rocks (1495–1508), Sala delle Asse ceiling frescoes (circa 1498–1499), The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c.1499-1500), Madonna of the Yarnwinder (c. 1501), Mona Lisa or La Gioconda (c. 1503–1506), The Virgin and the Child with St. Anne (c. 1510), Bacchus (1510–1515) and St. John the Baptist (1513–1516).

See more List of paintings/works by Leonardo da Vinci...

Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination.