Who Was Leonardo da Vinci

1.Who Was Leonardo da Vinci?

2.An Unwanted Boy

3.The Art Studio

4.The Wider World

5.Moving On

6.Wandering

7.The Battle of the Artists

8.Leonardo's Ladies

9.Losses .

10.Bibliography

Who Was Leonardo da Vinci?

Some people are enormously talented … and then there is Leonardo da Vinci. He lived at a time when there were many extremely talented people all around him. Even so, he stood out.

He could draw and paint better than anyone. One of his paintings, the Mona Lisa

, is the most famous painting in the world. He was a scientist hoping to unlock the secrets of the natural world. He was an engineer and inventor. He designed a bicycle that would have worked—three hundred years before the first bike was actually built.

He was an excellent athlete. A fine musician. And he was handsome. (Although there are no known paintings of him, whenever people of the day described him, they always mentioned his good looks.)

“I want to work miracles,” he stated. Yet he often met with failure. And while he could be charming, he mistrusted almost everyone. He was a loner. He had no family of his own. For sixteen years, he didn’t even have a home of his own.

By his own standards, Leonardo was a disappointment. He never reached the goals he set for himself. His greatest works were left unfinished. Nevertheless, what he did achieve in sixty-seven years still sets the standard for human excellence. It is hard to imagine someone doing better.

Chapter 1

An Unwanted Boy

On April 15, 1452, in a tiny hill town in Italy, a baby boy was born. His father was a well-to-do businessman, Ser Piero. His mother, Caterina, was a poor young peasant girl. We don’t even know her last name. Their baby was named Leonardo. Because the town he came from was called Vinci, he was known as Leonardo da Vinci. That means Leonardo from Vinci.

Leonardo’s parents weren’t married. His father was ashamed of the baby and left him with his mother. Ser Piero married another woman, someone more respectable, and started a new family. He moved nearby to the busy city of Florence. Caterina did not want to keep her baby, either. She cared for him for only a year or two. Then she, too, married someone else and began a new family.

So what was to become of little Leonardo?