1452-1519
Painter, Sculptor, And Scientist

Court Artist. Born in the Tuscan town of Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a notary who eventually established a successful career in Florence. As a child da Vinci was raised in his paternal grandfather's household. Sometime in his late teens he was admitted to the painters' guild in Florence, where he was apprenticed to the sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio (circa 1467-1477) While in Florence he received several civic commissions and began his lifelong studies of mechanics and the natural sciences, which he recorded in his famous notebooks In the 1480s, da Vinci sought the patronage of Ludovico Sforza, ruler of Milan, whose attention he attracted largely as a consequence of his interest in military engineering and inventions For the next twenty years Leonardo enjoyed a period of fertile creation in the Sforza...