🎨 Leonardo da Vinci

What you’ll learn

1. The Illegitimate Boy from VinciPlace Leonardo's birth in the documents — illegitimacy, the 1457 catasto, and the 1473 landscape — not in Vasari's later colour.Leonardo was born 15 April 1452 near Vinci, the out-of-wedlock son of Ser Piero and Caterina. Illegitimacy closed the notarial guild; he never received a university Latin education and later called himself omo sanza lettere. The 1457 tax return lists the five-year-old in his grandfather's house. His earliest dated work is the 1473 Arno valley drawing.
2. Verrocchio's WorkshopSee how a Renaissance bottega trained him, and pick out his hand in the Baptism, the Annunciation, and Ginevra.Around 1466 he entered Andrea del Verrocchio's commercial workshop and joined the Compagnia di San Luca by 1472. His kneeling angel in the Baptism uses oil where Verrocchio used tempera. The early Annunciation still has a telling fault. Ginevra de' Benci, the only Leonardo painting in the Americas, already turns portraiture into psychology.
3. The Notebooks and Mirror WritingGrasp the scope and method of the notebooks — mirror script, water, fossils, bird flight, Vitruvian proportion.Surviving sheets are often put near 7,000, a lifelong laboratory in left-handed mirror script. The Codex Leicester watches water and reads mountain fossils as former sea floor. The Turin flight codex separates centre of gravity from centre of pressure. Vitruvian Man tests Vitruvius against measurement. Because he never published, the science stayed private.
4. Milan: Sforza's Court and the Last SupperUnderstand the Sforza years: the lost horse, Cecilia Gallerani, court spectacle, and why the Last Supper failed as a wall.For Ludovico he painted Lady with an Ermine, staged the 1490 Feast of Paradise, and built a full-scale clay horse wrecked by war. The Last Supper (c. 1495–98) was painted dry, in tempera and oil. De Beatis saw decay in 1517. Brambilla's 1977–1999 restoration recovered what little of Leonardo still clung to the wall.
5. The Mona Lisa, Sfumato, and Lost WorksLearn how sfumato works, how the Mona Lisa became an icon, and what happened to Anghiari and Leda.The Mona Lisa, begun around 1503, portrays Lisa Gherardini and was reworked until Leonardo's death; its living expression comes from micron-thin glazes. The Battle of Anghiari failed technically and survives in copies. Leda disappeared from the French royal collection. The 1911 theft sealed the portrait's modern fame.
6. Anatomy of the Human BodySee the anatomical achievement, including the centenarian's arteries, and why it had no impact in his lifetime.He dissected perhaps thirty human corpses. The Windsor sheets include the fetus in the womb, the heart's valves, and, from an old man at Santa Maria Nuova, the first clear description of atherosclerosis. He read the body as levers and hydraulics. Vesalius, not Leonardo, published the founding modern atlas in 1543.
7. The Machines: Vision Versus RealitySeparate buildable engineering — automata, maps, canals, a parachute — from magnificent paper dreams.He sold himself to Milan as a military engineer. Many war machines and flying devices were unbuildable; a parachute to his proportions works. Reconstructed automata and the spring cart function. The 1502 Imola map is centuries early; the Arno diversion with Machiavelli failed in execution.
8. The Myth and the Documented ManDistinguish Vasari's Leonardo from the archives, including the Salvator Mundi fight, and know where the work still lives.He died at Amboise on 2 May 1519. The deathbed legend is Vasari's. France owns the Mona Lisa because he brought it there. Fewer than twenty paintings are securely his. Salvator Mundi's 2017 sale and disputed attribution show the authentication battle is not over.

Questions this course answers

Grounded in trusted sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Leonardo da Vinci' — born 15 April 1452 near Vinci to Ser Piero and Caterina; died 2 May 1519 at Clos Lucé
• Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, official 'Backstage' — dry technique (greasy tempera on prepared wall); Antonio de Beatis 1517; Vasari 1568 'glowing stain'; Brambilla restoration 1977–1999
• Royal Collection Trust, 'Leonardo's study of anatomy' — perhaps thirty human corpses; centenarian at Santa Maria Nuova, probably winter 1508; coronary disease and cirrhosis
• Roger Jones, 'Leonardo da Vinci: anatomist,' British Journal of General Practice 62 (2012) — ~30 corpses; first to describe atherosclerosis and hepatic cirrhosis; wax ventricles; glass aorta; Vesalius 1543
• Victoria and Albert Museum, 'Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks' — mirror writing as left-handed practice, not a cipher; Forster Codices
• Christie's, 15 November 2017 — Salvator Mundi sold for $450,312,500; National Gallery, London exhibition 2011–12
• National Gallery of Art, Washington — Ginevra de' Benci, c. 1474–78, only Leonardo painting in the Americas; juniper pun; motto Virtutem forma decorat
• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum / Peter L. Jakab — Codex on the Flight of Birds, 1505–06, Turin

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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