Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian artist and thinker whose curiosity seemed to have no limits. Born in 1452 near the town of Vinci, he became a defining figure of the Renaissance, working as a painter, engineer, anatomist, and inventor. Though he completed only a small number of paintings, they include the two most famous pictures in the world, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.

He filled thousands of notebook pages with sketches of machines, water, plants, and the human body, studying nature with the eye of both an artist and a scientist. His soft, smoky way of blending tones, known as sfumato, gave his faces a lifelike mystery no one had achieved before. Restless and easily distracted, he left many projects unfinished, yet his blend of art and science still stands as a symbol of human genius.