Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was an Italian High Renaissance painter whose works include the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. He was also an engineer, anatomist, inventor and observer of nature, and he is often cited as the model of the "universal genius." His significance lies both in a small body of celebrated paintings and in a vast body of drawings and notes that record his investigations into the human body, perspective, light, hydraulics, flight and geology. Many of his projects were left unfinished, and most of his notebooks stayed unpublished for centuries, so his direct influence on the science of his time was limited even as his reputation grew.

The entry follows his life from his early training in Florence through his years at the courts of Milan, Florence, Rome and France. It then treats his painting technique and major works, his anatomical and engineering studies, and his natural-philosophical inquiries. It also covers the notebooks, his sculpture and architectural projects, the history of his reception, and the open questions of attribution and conservation that surround his surviving works.

Early life and training in Florence

The painter was born in 1452 in a hamlet near Vinci, a Tuscan town about 25 miles west of Florence. His parents were not married to each other: his father was a Florentine notary and his mother came from a much humbler background who were not married to each other. Because the notary's wife had no children, the boy was eventually adopted into his father's household. Much of his boyhood unfolded among relatives around Vinci, where he received an informal education before moving to Florence. Schooling in the formal sense went no further than elementary literacy and numeracy beyond basic reading, writing and mathematics.

Sources differ on when he began his training. Their dates range from 1466 to 1469, and they give his age as fourteen or fifteen In 1466, Leonardo da Vinci, aged 14, became a studio boy in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio; another account says in 1467, at age fifteen, Leonardo was apprenticed; and a third has him in the studio By 1469. The workshop of Verrocchio, a leading Florentine sculptor who also painted and worked in precious metals, offered a wide curriculum. Apprentices encountered drafting, metalworking, plaster casting, metallurgy, mechanics, chemistry, woodwork, and leatherworking, alongside drawing, painting and modelling. Historians often credit the master's example with shaping Leonardo's later view of the artist as a figure who combined craft with science Leonardo's conception of the artist as a man of science, versed in all aspects of engineering and anatomy as well as design, owes much to Verrocchio's example.

Verrocchio's studio took on large joint commissions, and the young Leonardo supplied figures for them. The best-known case is an angel in The Baptism of Christ, which the two finished around 1475. A later anecdote claims that the master, impressed by the angel, gave up painting, but the story is probably embellished. Dating his first independent hand is also contested. One date places his earliest documented contribution to a finished painting around 1473, while the Uffizi Annunciation has been dated about 1472-75 and is possibly his earliest surviving painting. Because the workshop produced objects collectively, distinguishing the hands of Verrocchio, Leonardo, and other assistants can be difficult.

In the summer of 1472 he was enrolled as a painter in the Compagnia di San Luca, the Florentine painters' confraternity at the age of twenty. This body was separate from the painters' guild, the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, although it shared some of the guild's functions. Even after his father set him up with a workshop of his own, he was so attached to Verrocchio that he continued to live and collaborate with him for a few more years. Accounts of when he finally left vary, from until 1476 to late 1477.

The city that shaped him was a centre of princely patronage and humanist learning. Verrocchio was one of the best sculptors of the later part of the fifteenth century and a great favorite of the Medici family. Florence was also the center of Christian Humanist thought and culture at the time, a setting in which classical scholarship had real prestige. Even before he reached Florence, Leonardo had some access to learned texts, since growing up in his father's Vinci home, Leonardo had access to scholarly texts owned by family and friends. His early drawings already reveal the wide range of interests that would stay with him, including geometry, anatomy and engineering.

Painting technique: sfumato, chiaroscuro and perspective

Sfumato

Leonardo's best-known contribution to painting is sfumato, a method of letting one tone pass into the next without a visible seam. Contours are not drawn as lines; they dissolve into the shadow around them. He described the effect as blending colours with no lines or borders, "in the manner of smoke". Modern accounts usually treat sfumato as a Renaissance painting mode that Leonardo developed most fully, although Giorgio Vasari credited its origins to two early Northern European painters, Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden.

The gradations were built physically from many layers. Sfumato involved applying numerous thin glazes to produce gentle tonal shifts between light and shadow. Technical analyses of his surfaces have reportedly found glazes that were often barely a micron thick, made from lead white with a small addition of vermilion. The technique suited faces in particular, since it allowed an elusive and illusionistic rendering of the human face.

Chiaroscuro and atmospheric perspective

Chiaroscuro, the modelling of form through contrasts of light and dark, is the second pillar of his style. The name combines Italian words for "clear" and "dark", and the method uses graded light and shadow to make figures read as solid bodies. Leonardo's full mastery of the approach is generally dated to works such as the Adoration of the Magi (1481) and the Virgin of the Rocks (1483–86), where tonal modelling gives figures weight and places them in a believable space.

Leonardo also treated distance as a problem of air. In his Treatise on Painting, he is credited with first using the term aerial perspective, and he wrote that colours become weaker in proportion to their distance from the observer. His advice was concrete: to make a distant object appear five times as far away, he suggested making it five times bluer. Modern optics explains this shift by the scattering of light by air molecules and suspended particles, which is why distant hills look blue. Leonardo also observed that distant forms lose definition, a phenomenon he called Perspective of Disappearance. Together, the loss of contrast and the cooling of hue give landscapes their recession, and this is closely tied to his broader use of linear perspective and his interest in optics.

Oil glazes, mixed media and The Last Supper

Leonardo's willingness to experiment carried real risks. In the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, he did not follow the standard fresco method, which applies pigment to wet plaster. The Last Supper was executed in tempera and oil paint on a dry wall. The dry surface allowed him to revise and refine. This gave him the ability to work slowly, revise, and achieve the fine details and tonal gradations he wanted.

The cost was adhesion. Sources disagree on the exact preparation: one describes a combination of egg tempera and oil paint onto a ground of chalk bound with glue, while another describes a wall sealed with a layer of pitch, gesso, and mastic. In either case, the paint began to flake soon after the mural was completed. Visible decay was recorded early, as visitors were already noting its deterioration by 1517. Later interventions, including a restoration that ran from 1978 to 1999, have stabilised the surface and removed overpainting, but the work's condition remains a central concern of cultural heritage conservation.

Facial expression and the "motions of the mind"

Leonardo treated expression as a central problem of painting. Writing after about 1505, he studied emotion under the heading of "motions of the mind", and he linked the faces of his figures to the posture and attitude of their whole bodies. His comparison of laughing and weeping is a clear example of this method: he singled out the brows as the feature that most distinguishes the two expressions, observing how they lift or draw together. The Treatise also gave practical instruction on human proportion and facial expressions, so that a painter could make an inner state legible to the viewer through the body. In this respect, sfumato was not only a question of surface softness but also of psychology and how a viewer reads emotion from a face.

Major works and commissions

Leonardo's output of finished panels was small, and many of his commissions ended unfinished or were abandoned. The early religious and portrait paintings show a gradual move toward more complex compositions. The Benois Madonna was one of two Madonnas he began in October 1478, and it is generally dated to about 1478–1480. Scholars think it may be the first work he painted independently of his master, Verrocchio. The portrait of Ginevra de' Benci belongs to the same early Florentine period, alongside the Annunciation and the unfinished St Jerome.

The Adoration of the Magi was his largest early project. The Augustinian monks of San Donato a Scopeto in Florence commissioned it, but Leonardo left for Milan the following year, leaving the painting unfinished. The panel has been in the Uffizi since 1670. Its underpainting survives, which allows the composition to be studied even in its incomplete state.

The Virgin of the Rocks exists in two versions with nearly identical compositions. The Louvre version is usually dated to the 1480s, though sources give ranges from 1483–86 to 1483–94. The London version, dated c. 1491–1508, was produced after a dispute over payment with the Milan confraternity that had commissioned the first. The Louvre itself notes that the exact sequence of events cannot be fully reconstructed from the surviving documents. The London painting adds haloes and a reed cross for Saint John, and it drops the angel's pointing gesture.

The Last Supper, painted in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan in the late 1490s, is discussed in the technique section. Its experimental wall-painting method caused damage soon after completion. The Mona Lisa, begun around 1503 in Florence, was never delivered to its commissioner. Leonardo kept it with him until his death in France in 1519.

The Battle of Anghiari was the most ambitious of his civic commissions. It was intended for the council hall of the Palazzo Vecchio and was meant to commemorate the Florentine victory over Milan at Anghiari in 1440. He worked on the battle scene from October 1503, with interruptions, until May 1506, when he returned to Milan and left the work unfinished for good. He had devised an oil-based technique for the wall, and it deteriorated rapidly. An early biographer reports that the colors were too unstable, leading the master to abandon the project. In 1563 Vasari redecorated the hall, and the remaining traces of the mural were destroyed. Today the work is known only through preparatory sketches and copies. The central scene is best known from a 16th-century drawing that Peter Paul Rubens later extended, now in the Louvre. Some researchers have proposed that the original may survive behind a later wall, but this remains unproven and disputed.

Scholars generally explain the recurring pattern of unfinished work through several overlapping factors. The first is technical experimentation: the Anghiari failure and the problems with the Last Supper both followed his attempts to use unconventional media that did not hold up on large walls. The second is a restless working habit. He moved between patrons and cities, most notably from Florence to Milan in 1482 and back again, and he often left projects half-finished when a new opportunity arose. The third is contractual disagreement, as the Virgin of the Rocks episode illustrates. Because the surviving records are fragmentary, the precise reasons for any single abandonment are often debated rather than settled.

Patronage and career at the courts

Leonardo's working life moved between a small number of courts, and each move was tied to a particular patron's needs. In about 1482 he went to Milan and sought service with Ludovico Sforza. The surviving draft of his application, now in the Codex Atlanticus, reads as a list of military and engineering skills, and it mentions painting only near the end. Leonardo initially presents himself as a military engineer, emphasizing his ability to design war machines, siege engines, and innovative defensive systems. Because of this emphasis on engineering, the letter is often treated as one of the earliest examples of a professional résumé, and it secured him a long post at the Milanese court. Milan was his main base for roughly seventeen years, during which he worked as a painter, engineer and designer of court festivals. That period ended when Sforza lost power at the close of the decade, and Leonardo then left the city. He spent a short time in Venice, where he approached the Senate of the Republic and offered his services as an engineer.

Leonardo returned to Florence around 1500, but he did not settle there on a regular basis until 1503. In the city's Palazzo Vecchio he received a major public commission to paint a battle scene from the Florentine victory at Anghiari, a work intended to occupy the Great Council Hall. The work was set against a companion commission for Michelangelo, who had just finished his David, was assigned the opposite wall. Michelangelo's subject was the Battle of Cascina, and the rivalry between the two artists became one of the best-known episodes of the period. Leonardo's technical experiments with the wall painting caused problems, and Leonardo left Florence for Milan in May 1505 and the work was abandoned. Sources differ on the exact date of the contract, but most place it in 1503. The unfinished mural is discussed in the section on major works.

In August 1502, while he was still in Florence, Leonardo took a post with Cesare Borgia. He was appointed military architect and engineer to Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI and Marshal of the Papal Troops. His work was practical and cartographic. Over the next few months Leonardo surveyed Borgia's strongholds to the north and east of Florence, and created his most impressive surviving map, of the town of Imola. He returned to Florence in 1503 and kept producing maps there, which shows that the Borgia commission fed directly into his later technical interests. The work took him away from painting for much of this period, and one source notes that he left Florence for 10 months and traveled, surveying the territories.

After Borgia's commission ended, Leonardo's position became less secure. He spent the years from about 1513 in Rome, where he lived under the protection of the Medici family, who had returned to power. His hopes for large commissions there were not realized, and the period is marked more by study than by completed paintings. In 1516 he accepted an invitation from Francis I of France. The king gave him a residence at Clos Lucé near the royal château at Amboise, and Leonardo spent his last years in France. He died at Amboise on 2 May 1519. Later accounts that describe him dying in the king's arms are legendary and are not supported by contemporary evidence.

Anatomy and the study of the human body

Leonardo's anatomical work rested on his own dissections, and he treated the body as a subject to be observed and drawn. In the winter of 1510–11 he worked at the medical school in Pavia beside the anatomy professor Marcantonio della Torre, and he may have dissected around twenty corpses in that period. During the winter of 1510-11, Leonardo was apparently working in the medical school of the university of Pavia, south of Milan, alongside the professor of anatomy, Marcantonio della Torre. He now had ready access to human material and may have dissected as many as 20 corpses that winter. Earlier, in 1506, he examined the body of an elderly man who had died unexpectedly, at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, in Florence, and recorded what he found in his notes. His notebooks hold careful drawings of the organs, tissues and skeletal formations uncovered during his dissections.

His most detailed investigation concerned the heart and aortic root. Because human hearts were scarce, he used animal hearts as well. He injected melted wax into the heart of an ox, then made a glass model of the cast and pumped it with water with a suspension of grass seeds in order to observe the vortexes at work. From this he identified a bulb-shaped swelling at the base of the aorta and concluded that the swelling made the aortic valve close after each heartbeat, a proposition which cardiologists didn't arrive at until the early 20th century. His overall picture of the heart remained close to Galen's, so he never fully grasped the circulation of blood. That circulatory system would not be fully demonstrated until 1628 by William Harvey. Even so, Leonardo understood that the heart was a one-way pump, and he came close to discovering the circulation of the blood.

The Vitruvian Man, a pen-and-ink sheet of about 1490, links his anatomy to architectural theory. It shows a nude man in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and inscribed in both a circle and square. The figure draws on the Roman architect Vitruvius, who proposed that the proportions of a temple should reflect those of the human body. Leonardo did not simply copy the ancient ratios. Leonardo commenced anatomy studies in 1489 and he modified proportions, and the drawing also reflects his own measurements, the drawings of his contemporaries, and the De pictura treatise by Leon Battista Alberti. The result is a unique synthesis of artistic and scientific ideals.

His embryological drawings, made around 1510–1512, are among his best-known anatomical images. Leonardo is considered to be the very first in history to correctly depict the human fetus in its proper position within the womb. He also depicted the uterus with one chamber, in contrast to theories that the uterus had multiple chambers which many believed divided fetuses into separate compartments in the case of twins. His drawings were not free of error, however. Because he had recently studied a pregnant cow, his most famous anatomical drawing, showing a fetus curled up within an opened-out uterus, therefore includes bovine features such as a multiple placenta. Though he seems to have dissected a pregnant woman at some point, he never discovered that the human placenta is single and discoidal.

The practical influence of this work was limited. He began to practice dissections and planned to publish a treatise on anatomy, including his drawings of anatomical dissections. That treatise never appeared, and his findings did not enter the medical literature of his time. After his death his incomplete and unpublished sketchbooks remained largely unknown for almost 300 years. His papers passed to his assistant Francesco Melzi, and although early biographers noted the anatomical drawings, their dense and disorganised content was barely comprehended, and they were effectively lost to the world.

Engineering, machines and military designs

Leonardo's notebooks treat flight as a long research problem rather than a single invention. Much of his material comes from close observation of birds and bats, and he drew on the wing structure of those animals when he designed his own flying devices. He primarily used the bone structure of the wings of bats for his studies and plans for building his wing designs. The best-known result is the ornithopter, a human-powered machine in which the operator lay on a board and drove large membranous wings through hand levers, foot pedals and a system of pulleys. He sketched a device in which the aviator lies down on a plank and works two large, membranous wings using hand levers, foot pedals, and a system of pulleys. Leonardo doubted that human muscle could sustain such a craft. Eventually, he realised that human musculature was not powerful and versatile enough to lift his machine. There is no documented evidence that he built or flew any of these designs. Leonardo did not build a documented flying machine, fly an ornithopter, invent the modern helicopter, prove a parachute

His parachute sketch is better known for its later testing than for any construction by Leonardo himself. It consisted of a linen canopy stretched over a rigid pyramidal wooden frame, and his notes gave its size as twelve braccia across and twelve in depth, roughly 7 metres. The pyramidal design was tested in 2000 by Adrian Nicholas, and again in 2008 by a Swiss skydiver. The feasibility of Leonardo's pyramidal design was successfully tested in 2000 by Briton Adrian Nicholas and again in 2008 by the Swiss skydiver Olivier Vietti-Teppa. A related rotor concept, the so-called aerial screw, used a spiral form modelled on a water screw but meant to push against air. The pen-and-ink sketch outlines an idea for a flying machine similar to a modern helicopter, with a spiral rotor or "aerial screw" based on a water screw, but intended to push against the fluid of the air instead of water.

War machines

Leonardo's military drawings include some of the most often cited designs in the notebooks. The armoured vehicle is the most famous. It was designed while Leonardo da Vinci was under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza in 1487. Its conical cover, inspired by a turtle's shell, was to be made of wood and reinforced with metal plates. Sources disagree on how many men were to drive it. One gives two large cranks operated internally by four strong men, while another describes eight men, who moved cranks to turn the wheels. The design also had a serious fault. The gears of the design were located in a reversed order, making the vehicle unworkable. Some commentators have suggested this was deliberate, to protect the design from misuse, but this remains speculation. A 2009 television project rebuilt the vehicle and corrected the gearing so that it moved. A team of engineers and craftsmen undertook the challenge of reconstructing Leonardo's design for an armoured vehicle, commonly referred to as his tank.

The scythed chariot followed the same logic of shock and disruption. It had blades attached to the sides and front of a horse-drawn vehicle, and the scythes are mounted on axles connected to the wheels, these should turn and cut everything that is at their height as the cart moves. Historians generally think it was never built. It was quite a deadly war machine, but was probably never made. Other drawings include a large crossbow and a multi-barrel weapon. One of the crossbow designs was intended as a massive projectile launcher, and a repeating weapon was drawn to be operated by a man-powered treadmill. Few of these machines were ever tested in his lifetime, and many survive only as drawings.

Civil and hydraulic projects

Leonardo's civil projects were closely tied to water. Working for Ludovico Sforza, he devised plans for canals, flood-control measures and urban water systems. In Milan he also revisited an older canal scheme linking the city with Lake Como. His hydraulic engineering work included developing plans for draining vast sections of the Italian countryside and for building extensive canals, among them the Adda Canal, which would connect Milan to Lake Como.

His most ambitious project was the Arno scheme of 1503. Florence was at war with Pisa, and Florence needed to cut the city off from the sea. Leonardo visited the Florentine camp in July 1503 and, with the support of Niccolò Machiavelli, proposed a scheme to divert the Arno and cut Pisa's access to the sea. Leonardo's proposal, as preserved in his drawings, called for a deep new channel fed by a dam. The channel was intended to be eighty feet wide at its mouth, sixty-four feet wide at its end, thirty feet deep, and a mile long. Leonardo estimated that the construction of this channel would require the removal of over one million tons of earth and more than fifty thousand worker-days. Work began in 1504 but failed. Diversion channels seem to be drawn here as dark lines from the Arno south-west towards Livorno, and digging of a channel actually began in August 1504, but the scheme was soon abandoned. Historians debate how far Leonardo and Machiavelli worked together on the plan. While historians broadly regard Machiavelli as a central figure in both projects, the extent to which he and da Vinci worked together on the Arno diversion remains contested.

Mechanical devices and automata

Leonardo's notebooks contain many mechanical studies, including gears, cranes, pulleys and lifting gear, often drawn as parts of larger machines. He also sketched automata, the most discussed of which is a mechanical knight, usually dated to the 1490s. Some scholars doubt that this drawing is by Leonardo, and the attribution remains debated. The surviving drawings give only partial evidence of how such devices were built or operated, so reconstructions depend heavily on interpretation.

Natural philosophy: water, optics, geology and botany

Water and turbulence

Water was the subject to which Leonardo returned most often, and his studies of it are among the most extensive parts of his notebooks. Between roughly 1508 and 1513 he sketched and annotated the eddying behavior of moving water. The word "turbulence" first appears in his Codex Atlanticus. One sheet at Windsor, dated about 1510–12, shows a jet falling from a sluice into a pool, and fluid dynamicists have often treated this drawing as the first important document on turbulent flow. He also tracked crossing currents and countercurrents, noting that a lower wave passes under a higher one, and observed that water descending over an uneven bed moves faster near the surface. Modern work has tested these images against theory: a smoothed particle hydrodynamics model has reproduced the flow in the pool drawing, and its authors concluded that he captured essential features of complex air-water flows. Late in his life he also made the Deluge drawings, in which a landscape far below is about to be overwhelmed by a great mass of turbulent, boiling water. Historians generally regard these as imaginative visions rather than literal illustrations of the biblical flood, since they do not show the destruction of people and animals or Noah's ark.

Optics and the eye

Leonardo's optical work combined careful observation with inherited theory. He was the first to compare the eye with a pinhole camera (camera obscura), and his drawings of inverted images on the back wall of such a device helped establish it as a tool for artists. The device appears in a sketch dated about 1508–1509, and his description of one survives in the Codex Atlanticus. His analysis of the eye also reveals the limits of his knowledge. He recognized that light is refracted and reflected inside the eye, but his imperfect anatomy prevented the development of a physiological optics, and his sketches of circular lenses in the eye show how much he still depended on medieval optical models.

Geology and fossils

His geological work is one of the clearest cases of observation running ahead of theory. He concluded that as mountains formed, they lifted marine sediments, carrying fossil-bearing rock skyward. He used this reasoning to reject a universal flood as the explanation for marine fossils in hills and mountains, relying on hydraulic principles and comparisons with present-day processes. He used trace fossils as evidence for the marine origin of the sedimentary successions of the Apennines, and his notes describe worm tracks found between beds that were still soft when the animals crawled through them. In the Romagna valleys he separated hard stone strata, bluish marine earth full of shells, and common earth of the foothills, and the modern clay formation there bears a name he coined. Some historians read this reasoning as implying the possibility of deep geologic time. His sedimentary observations were kept in his notebooks, and he never published his theories, and his notes ended up scattered or lost, so their influence was delayed for centuries. His canal and irrigation work also led him to study rivers, their valleys, and the sediment they carried to the sea.

Botany and geometry

Leonardo's botanical notes examine how plants grow, how shoots and branches divide, and how leaves are arranged to catch light. He recorded a rule relating the combined cross-sectional area of branches at a fork to that of the trunk below, often called "Leonardo's rule," which holds only approximately for real trees. His interest in form also led him to the collaboration with the mathematician Luca Pacioli on De divina proportione, published in Venice in 1509. Pacioli's treatise on proportion in geometry was illustrated with Leonardo's drawings of regular polyhedra, many of them drawn as skeletal wireframe solids, which made the abstract geometry visible.

Notebooks and writing practice

Leonardo's surviving notebook material is usually counted in the thousands of pages, but the totals depend on how loose sheets are counted. One estimate holds that he produced between 20,000 and 28,000 pages of notes and sketches across some 50 notebooks, while the surviving material is most often put at around 7,000 pages. Other sources give different figures again, so the numbers should be treated as rough estimates.

The pages mix drawings with writing on a very wide range of subjects, including painting, engineering, philosophy, warfare, physiology, landscape, proportion, perspective, geography, geology, light and shade. Most of the text is in Italian. The notebooks were not organized by topic: a single page can jump from hydraulics to hats. Their contents are often fragmentary, and the Codex Trivulzianus (1487–1490) shows the range well. It contains studies of physiognomy, architectural drafts and diagrams of machines, and at its end Leonardo added long lists of words that document his attempt to enlarge his own vocabulary.

Mirror writing and shorthand

Most of the notes run from right to left, with the letters formed in reverse, so that the text can be read only when reflected in a mirror. The most common explanation is practical. A left-handed writer who moved from right to left avoided dragging the hand across wet ink. The simplest and most accepted reason is that he was left handed, and this is generally preferred to the older idea that the script was meant to conceal his thinking. That idea, which holds that the reversed writing protected his ideas from thieves or from church censure, has been repeatedly proposed (trying to make his notes harder to read, preventing people from stealing his ideas). The evidence against a deliberate cipher is that he employed mirror writing consistently across many of his private notes, while in formal or public contexts he was able to write in standard script. The notes also use shorthand and symbols, abbreviations that made the writing quicker for his own use and meaningful mainly to him.

The major manuscript collections

Several codices are now named after their later owners or compilers rather than after Leonardo. The Codex Leicester has 72 pages and a mixture of Leonardo's observations and theories on astronomy, the properties of water, rocks, and fossils, air and celestial light. It was bought in 1719 by Thomas Coke, the Earl of Leicester, and in 1994 it was sold at auction for $30.8 million.

The Codex Atlanticus is the largest of the group. It comprises 1,119 leaves dating from 1478 to 1519, but its form is a product of later reorganization. It was gathered in the late 16th century by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who dismembered some of Leonardo's notebooks in its formation. A UNESCO account gives a smaller count, 1,068 pages, divided into twelve leather-bound volumes, so the figures differ between sources.

The Codex on the Flight of Birds is a shorter and more coherent work. It dates from c. 1505, comprises 18 folios, and is now held at the Royal Library of Turin. It is written in Leonardo's famous "mirror" script, written backward and reading from right to left. Its history was unusually long. It passed through at least ten individuals and nine locations before reaching Turin.

Dispersal after his death

Leonardo left his papers to his pupil Francesco Melzi, who was present at his death-bed and was named executor and heir. Melzi kept the manuscripts at his villa at Vaprio d'Adda, near Milan. After his death in 1570, his son Orazio showed little interest in them, and the papers passed out of family control. Pompeo Leoni, court sculptor to Philip II of Spain, managed to acquire many of them. Some of the notebooks were reassembled into the Codex Atlanticus, while others were scattered. These manuscripts were dispersed throughout Europe, ending up in Spanish museums or in aristocratic and royal collections in England. A further loss came when a swath of the manuscripts were donated by Milanese nobleman Galeazzo Arconati to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, later to be purloined and taken to France by Napoleon Bonaparte. All the surviving Leonardo notebooks today are preserved in the collections of libraries and museums across Europe.

Why the unpublished notebooks had little immediate influence

Leonardo wrote for himself rather than for publication. He made no effort to get his notes published. The notes also remained largely out of view. For hundreds of years, the huge, secretive collection of manuscripts remained mostly unseen by all but the most rarified of collectors. Melzi was expected to make the material available, but Leonardo wanted his works to be shared with the world and read by others after his death, however Francesco never fully accomplished this. The exception was Melzi's compilation on painting. Gathered together by his heir Francesco Melzi, the material was abridged version of the treatise was first published in France in 1651, and the complete text appeared in its modern form in 1817. The wider body of notebooks was studied only later, since it was only after 1800 that the record of his intellectual and technical accomplishments began to be published.

Sculpture, architecture and stage design

The Sforza horse

Leonardo's most ambitious sculptural project was an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, commissioned by his son Ludovico in 1482 and intended to be the largest equestrian statue of its time. He prepared it by studying horses in the Sforza stables and by writing a treatise on horse anatomy. The plan called for casting the figure in one operation, using a multi-part mold and a pit with furnaces, so that the bronze would avoid seams. By November 1493 a full-size clay model, roughly 7 to 8 metres tall (sources differ on the exact height), was shown at a Sforza wedding and brought Leonardo considerable fame. The bronze, around 70 tons, was diverted in 1494 to make cannon for the Sforza defence against France. In 1499 French soldiers used the clay model as a target, and weather destroyed what remained. The bronze was never cast, and only the drawings survived. Modern reconstructions based on those drawings were produced centuries later.

Trivulzio monument and other tomb designs

Around 1508 to 1511, Leonardo designed another equestrian monument, this time a tomb for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, a condottiere who had led French forces into Milan in 1499. The sketches reuse his earlier Sforza ideas, but the horse is shown at a walking pace rather than in a dynamic rearing pose. The base comprised a sarcophagus within a structure reminiscent of a triumphal arch. Surviving documents include a detailed cost estimate for a life-size bronze horse and rider on a marble base, but there is no evidence that physical work began. Scholars disagree on whether a formal commission existed. Trivulzio died in 1518, a few months before Leonardo.

Architecture: Milan cathedral and central-plan churches

In 1487 Leonardo took part in the competition to design the tiburio, the crossing tower over the Milan cathedral, which was contested by several architects. His drawings show an octagonal tower with double vaults and buttresses, and he produced a wooden model with an accompanying letter around 1487 to 1488. One account says he favoured a square plan on the grounds that it would be stronger, so the record of his proposal is not entirely consistent. His own design was not built as proposed.

Beyond the cathedral, he filled many notebook pages with studies of churches on circular, square, octagonal and Greek-cross plans, often topped by domes. He used a combined plan and bird's-eye view to convey these spaces, which was a novel way of showing three-dimensional centrally planned buildings. Most of these schemes remained studies rather than built projects. He also developed designs for royal residences in France, including a project for Romorantin, and sketched ideal urban layouts. Those layouts are discussed further in the section on urban planning.

Festivals and stage machinery

At the Sforza court, Leonardo designed festival spectacles that depended on concealed mechanisms. The best-known example is the 1490 Paradiso entertainment, staged for the marriage of Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabella of Aragon, in which a mechanical representation of the heavens and planets was set in motion. His work for the court used the same skills he applied to his machines, including gears, pulleys and carefully timed movement. Because these productions were temporary and their records are fragmentary, the exact details of his stage designs can be reconstructed only partly from his drawings and from the accounts of contemporaries.

Legacy, reception and historiography

Vasari and the making of the artist-genius

Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects was first published in Florence in 1550 and expanded in a second edition in 1568, and the Leonardo biography appears in both. Vasari arranged his artists in a historical sequence, moving from the early pioneers toward a "maturity" in which Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo stand as the peak of achievement. By presenting Leonardo as a figure whose inventiveness and refinement set the standard for later artists, Vasari helped establish the image of the artist-genius that persisted for centuries. He also recorded anecdotes about Leonardo's habits, unfinished projects and personal character, and some of these stories have been questioned by later historians because Vasari was writing decades after the events and was not always concerned with strict accuracy. His book is nonetheless often treated as the starting point of modern art history, and the 1550 publication is widely described as the moment the discipline began to take shape.

Freud's psychoanalytic study

Sigmund Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood appeared in 1910. It was Freud's first extended attempt at biography from a psychoanalytic standpoint, and it used a single childhood recollection recorded in Leonardo's notes as its main evidence. In the passage, Leonardo describes a bird, which Freud rendered as a vulture, opening his mouth with its tail while he lay in his cradle. Freud read this as a fantasy tied to infancy and to Leonardo's relationship with his mother, and he extended the reading to Leonardo's sexuality, his scientific curiosity and the imagery of smiling women in works such as the Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. Freud himself was reportedly uneasy about the essay, which he regarded as speculative.

The critical response has been sharp. Later scholars showed that the bird in the Italian text is a kite (nibbio), not a vulture, so much of Freud's mythological argument rests on a translation error. Historians have also argued that the evidence for Leonardo's inner life is far too thin to support the psychological conclusions drawn from it. The essay is now read less as a reliable biography than as a landmark in the history of psychoanalysis and in the tradition of psychobiography.

The notebooks and scholarly editions

Leonardo's manuscripts were largely dispersed after his death, and many were not seen in print for centuries. Their modern study began in earnest in the 19th century, when scholars started to gather and edit fragments from the surviving codices and loose sheets. Editions of his writings, notably the anthology compiled by Jean Paul Richter in 1883, made his ideas accessible to a wider public and turned attention from his reputation as a painter to his work in science and engineering. This scholarly work continues today, with new transcriptions and digitized facsimiles allowing researchers to compare pages that were once separated across different collections.

The Mona Lisa's fame

The Mona Lisa was admired in Paris and Florence before 1911, but it was not yet the best-known image in the world. On 21 August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had worked as a glazier for a firm contracted by the Louvre, walked out of the museum with the panel hidden under his workman's smock. The theft was discovered the following day and became a major press sensation, and the search for the painting kept the image in newspapers for more than two years. Peruggia kept the picture hidden in his Paris lodgings and in 1913 tried to sell it to a Florentine dealer, who alerted the authorities. The painting was returned to the Louvre in January 1914. Peruggia claimed he had acted out of patriotism, believing Napoleon had taken the painting from Italy, but historians have pointed to evidence that money was a significant motive. The episode turned the portrait into a household name, and its subsequent reproduction in print, advertising and popular culture helped make Leonardo's name a general shorthand for artistic genius.

Authorship, attribution and open questions

The most valuable Leonardo attribution question of the modern era concerns the Salvator Mundi. Christie's sold the panel in New York on 15 November 2017 for $450,312,500 including fees, a record for an auction. The painting had been heavily restored, and the sale turned a specialist dispute into a global news story. Christie's has said that a panel of scholars established the attribution nearly a decade before the sale and reconfirmed it in 2017, and that there is broad academic consensus behind it. Other specialists disagree. The Leonardo scholar Matthew Landrus has argued that the picture is largely the work of Bernardino Luini, a pupil and follower, while Martin Kemp has defended a Leonardo attribution at book length. The debate is therefore not about whether a workshop was involved at all, but about how much of the surviving surface, and which stages of its making, belong to Leonardo's own hand. Restoration, later overpainting and workshop replicas complicate the answer. Since 2017 the painting has not been shown publicly, which has kept the question in the press.

Several of his most important works no longer exist in their original form, which makes their reconstruction a matter of inference. The Battle of Anghiari was planned as a mural for the Great Council Hall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, and Leonardo's work on it dates to about 1503–1506. Accounts differ on why it failed. Some describe an experimental wall preparation and paint that ran or failed to dry, while others describe the work as abandoned at an early stage, and the wall was later remodelled. Giorgio Vasari painted over the area in the 1560s. What survives is a set of preparatory drawings, the cartoon fragments, and copies, the most important of which is Peter Paul Rubens's drawing of about 1603, now in the Louvre. In 2012 a team led by Maurizio Seracini announced evidence that the original might survive behind Vasari's fresco, but the search was halted later that year after disputes among the parties, and no confirmed trace of the mural has been found. The lost equestrian monument for Francesco Sforza presents a similar case: its full-size clay model was destroyed in 1499, and the bronze was never cast. Its appearance is known only from drawings, notes and later reconstructions.

Dating and attributing his drawings and notes is an equally persistent problem. His manuscripts are undated in many places, and the pages were often reordered or dispersed after his death, so scholars rely on paper types, handwriting, internal references to events and patrons, and the chronology of his known paintings. The same difficulty extends to the workshop. Leonardo's studio included assistants and pupils who copied his compositions and sometimes worked on the same panels, and their hands can be hard to separate from his in works that were partly executed by others. For this reason, many catalogues distinguish between works fully by Leonardo, works in which he had a substantial role, and works from his circle or followers, and the boundaries between these categories are still argued over.

The identity of the sitter in the Mona Lisa has a clearer documentary basis than most of these questions, though not every point is settled. For centuries a variety of names were proposed, including Isabella d'Este, Cecilia Gallerani, Caterina Sforza and even Leonardo himself. The identification with Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, was stated by Vasari in 1550 but was long treated with suspicion. A marginal note by Agostino Vespucci, dated October 1503 and written in a 1477 edition of Cicero held at Heidelberg University, names her and places the portrait in progress at that time. That document has become the principal support for the traditional identification. Debate continues on narrower matters. Some scholars argue that Vespucci's note refers to an earlier version of the portrait, and the meaning of details such as the landscape, the smile and the clothing has generated many competing readings. Attempts to test the identification through forensic work on Lisa Gherardini's remains, carried out in 2012, did not produce conclusive results.

Conservation and modern technical study

Much of what is known about Leonardo's painting methods now comes from non-invasive imaging. Infrared reflectography, which dates to the 1950s, uses a principle similar to ordinary infrared photography, but its detectors respond to wavelengths up to about 2000 nanometres. This allows it to pass through some opaque pigments and reveal the underdrawing beneath. X-ray examination, together with multispectral imaging, shows changes made during painting, and these methods have repeatedly exposed the preparatory layout and later corrections in Leonardo's panels.

The Mona Lisa has been studied with particular intensity. Pascal Cotte, who developed the Lumière Technology scanning system, used a layer amplification method to pick up faint charcoal lines in the lighter areas of the painting. He interprets marks on the forehead and hand as traces of a pounced (spolvero) underdrawing, which would suggest that the composition was transferred from a full-scale drawing. This reading comes from one researcher's high-resolution work and has not been settled by a wider consensus, so it should be treated as a proposal rather than established fact.

Materials analysis has also grown more detailed. A 2023 study of a microsample from the painting's white ground layer, using synchrotron X-ray diffraction and micro Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, found a mixture of strongly saponified oil and a high proportion of lead compounds. Macro X-ray fluorescence had already shown lead distributed across the panel. Such findings help conservators understand how the layers respond to humidity, light and solvents, and they inform decisions about whether to clean or leave varnish in place. In 1999 the Louvre announced that it would not remove the yellowed varnish from the Mona Lisa, a choice shaped by the caution that the recent controversy over The Last Supper had made more visible.

The Last Supper is the clearest case of conservation dominating the modern reception of Leonardo's work. Because he painted on dry plaster rather than wet plaster, the paint was never bonded into the wall, and the refectory in Milan suffered from damp, kitchen steam, mould, a cut doorway, and wartime bomb damage. A restoration led by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon was unveiled in May 1999. Sources differ on its length, describing it as roughly twenty to twenty-two years; one gives a start in 1977. Conservators removed overpainting, varnish and dust, used infrared reflectoscopy to assess the surface, and reintegrated losses, first with a neutral tone and later with watercolour that approximated the surrounding colour. The result was brighter and more legible, and some critics praised it. Others argued that the removal of earlier layers had left little of Leonardo's own handling, and the advocacy group ArtWatch UK warned that overzealous use of new techniques could cause irreversible damage and questioned the influence of corporate funding.

Since the 1999 work, the principal concern has been environmental stability. The refectory was adapted into a sealed, climate-controlled space with regulated temperature and humidity, and visitor numbers are strictly limited to slow the transfer of moisture and pollutants to the paint. Condition is monitored regularly with non-invasive methods, including laser scanning for three-dimensional records, so that changes such as flaking or fresh cracking can be detected early.

Digitization has widened access to the notebooks. The Codex Atlanticus, a twelve-volume set of 1,119 leaves held by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, was made fully viewable online in recent years, and the Museo Galileo's Leonardo//thek@ project published images and transcriptions of its folios on the web in 2023. Because the sixteenth-century compiler Pompeo Leoni cut and rearranged many pages, digital reconstruction also allows scholars to match fragments that have long been separated. Working replicas of Leonardo's machines, such as the reconstructed hoist in Milan, let engineers test whether his designs would have worked as drawn, a line of research that depends on the same digitized drawings.

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