Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) was a Florentine painter, draftsman, and polymath whose surviving body of painted work, though small, includes two of the most recognized images in Western art, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Trained in Florence in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, he later worked for patrons including Ludovico Sforza in Milan and, in his final years, the French king Francis I. Leonardo's paintings are distinguished by sfumato, a technique of soft, smoky transitions between light and shadow that avoids hard outlines, and by an unusually close study of anatomy, geometry, and the natural world, recorded across thousands of pages of notebooks that range from engineering sketches to botanical and hydraulic studies. He completed relatively few paintings, partly from perfectionism and partly from the breadth of his other interests, and several major projects, including a planned equestrian monument in Milan, were never finished. Leonardo is widely regarded as the paradigmatic example of the Renaissance ideal of the universal man, equally engaged with art and with the investigation of the natural world.