High Renaissance
Leonardo da Vinci is the figure through whom art ceases to be only craft and becomes an intellectual system. His painting is built on observation, scientific precision, and extraordinary plasticity of light.
Leonardo matters as the maker of masterpieces and as a model of the future artist: an author who thinks through drawing, experiment, hypothesis, and form.
The Last Supper began to die almost at once. Instead of true fresco Leonardo used tempera and oil on dry plaster, which let him rework the faces endlessly but never bonded to the wall: within a few decades the paint was flaking, and by the mid-16th century writers described the mural as ruined.
Source: Wikipedia / Wikimedia
Key works
Works with a dedicated ArtAtlas page are highlighted in gold.
1503-1506
A psychological portrait that changed the history of the gaze.
1495-1498
A dramatic moment built through composition and gesture.
c. 1490
A symbol of the link between art, anatomy, and geometry.
FAQ
Quick answers to what people most often search about this artist.
Leonardo da Vinci lived from 1452 to 1519. He was born near the Tuscan town of Vinci and died at Amboise in France, where King Francis I had invited him in 1516.
He turned painting into research: his sfumato dissolved outlines into soft gradations of light and shade, and he tied art to anatomy, optics and engineering. In his hands portraiture became a record of inner life.
The best known is the Mona Lisa (1503-1506), now in the Louvre. It became a global icon after it was stolen from the museum in 1911 and recovered two years later in Florence.
Leonardo kept his notes in mirror writing: the lines run right to left with the letters reversed, easy to read only in a mirror. About 6,000 such pages survive, covering anatomy, water, machines and recipes for paint.
