Leonardo da Vinci

This obsessive search for underlying natural laws meant that Leonardo’s creative process was slow, deliberate, and frequently agonizing for his patrons. He became a master of the unfinished. In 1478, he received an independent commission to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of Saint Bernard in the Palazzo della Signoria; it was never completed. In 1481, the monks of San Donato in Scopeto commissioned him to paint The Adoration of the Magi. This too was abandoned, left as a haunting monochrome underdrawing that nevertheless redefined how complex group compositions could be structured. For Leonardo, the conception of a work of art was often more satisfying than its physical execution. His mind moved too quickly, distracted by the mathematical perspective of a background staircase or the botany of a weed growing in the foreground. Stories of his youth paint a picture of a young man possessed by this consuming observational drive. When a local peasant asked Ser Piero to have a simple wooden shield painted, Leonardo reportedly shut himself in a room with a collection of dissected reptiles and noxious insects, using their anatomy to compose a dragon so lifelike and terrifying that his father secretly sold it to a Florentine art dealer for a hundred ducats, buying a common decorated shield to give to the peasant instead.

By 1482, Leonardo’s reputation as a man of diverse, if unpredictable, talents caught the attention of Lorenzo de' Medici, who sent him as an ambassador to Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan. Seeking to secure his place in the Sforza court, Leonardo wrote the Duke a remarkable letter of self-recommendation. Rather than leading with his achievements as a painter, Leonardo presented himself primarily as a military engineer. He promised Sforza that he could design portable bridges, secure trenches, armored fighting vehicles, and specialized artillery, adding almost as an afterthought at the end of the letter that he could also paint and sculpt as well as any other master. To seal the introduction, he presented the Duke with a silver stringed instrument—a lute or lyre—he had crafted himself in the shape of a horse’s head.

The move to Milan marked the beginning of a highly productive nearly two-decade residency, during which Leonardo functioned as court artist, pageant designer, and engineering consultant. It was here that Sforza commissioned him to paint The Virgin of the Rocks and, later, the mural that would secure his global fame: The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Yet even as he produced these masterworks of the High Renaissance, Leonardo’s notebooks began to swell with drawings and treatises that went largely unseen by his contemporaries. In thousands of pages written in his characteristic mirror-image cursive, he mapped out designs for flying machines inspired by the wing structures of bats and birds, double-hulled ships, automated wire-testing devices, and concentrated solar power. He made profound, independent discoveries in hydrodynamics, geology, and tribology. Because he did not publish these findings, his scientific work had virtually no direct influence on the subsequent development of European science; his designs remained locked in his personal codices, centuries ahead of the metallurgy and engineering capabilities of his era.

Leonardo’s life was defined by this tension between the ephemeral beauty of his art and the permanent laws of the natural world he sought to decode. He left behind fewer than twenty-five major paintings, many of them damaged, altered, or incomplete, yet works like the Mona Lisa and the Vitruvian Man became the defining icons of Western culture. When he died in France in 1519, under the patronage of King Francis I, he left behind a legacy that transcended the traditional boundaries of the artist. He had spent his life attempting to see the invisible forces—the wind, the flow of water, the spark of human emotion—that animate the material world. In doing so, he did not merely paint the Renaissance; he constructed a monument to the limitless reach of human observation.