Early life (1452–1472)
Birth and background
Leonardo da Vinci, properly named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Leonardo, son of ser Piero from Vinci), was born on 15 April 1452 in, or close

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Despite the thousands of pages Leonardo left in notebooks and manuscripts, he scarcely made reference to his personal life.
Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "great physical beauty"

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Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his fame rested on

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Renaissance humanismrecognised no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are sometimes considered as

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Leonardo's approach to science was observational: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail and did

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Although he had no formal academic training, many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man", an individual of

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Leonardo was a prolific draughtsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to

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