Léonard de Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci, the son of a Florentine notary and a peasant woman who never married. Because he was illegitimate, his father's trade of law was closed to him, so as a boy he was sent instead to train in the Florence workshop of the painter Andrea del Verrocchio. That accident of birth may be the reason we have a painter at all.

What he did with painting was strange for his time. He finished almost nothing. Fewer than 20 paintings are firmly his, because he treated every commission as an experiment and kept moving on before the last one was done. For The Last Supper, made in Milan in the 1490s for Duke Ludovico Sforza, he abandoned proper fresco and invented his own wall technique so he could work slowly and rework it. The paint began flaking within his lifetime, and restorers have been fighting to hold it together ever since.

Most of his day went into notebooks rather than pictures. He left around 13,000 surviving pages, written right to left in mirror script, filled with dissected bodies, water in motion, gears, and machines for flying that no one would build for centuries. He opened up some 30 corpses to understand how a human arm actually moves, then used almost none of it to finish a painting.

He carried the portrait we call the Mona Lisa with him for more than a decade and never handed it to whoever had commissioned it. In 1516 the young French king Francois the First offered him a house at Amboise in the Loire valley and, mostly, the freedom to think. Leonardo brought his paintings north with him and died there in 1519. The Mona Lisa stayed in France, which is how it came to hang in the Louvre in Paris.