Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a notary and a young woman from the village of Vinci near Florence. In Florence he trained in the workshop of the painter Andrea del Verrocchio. (His dates are given in the Julian calendar.)

He became the universal genius of the Renaissance: painter of the “Last Supper” and the “Mona Lisa”, engineer, inventor, anatomist and scientist, whose notebooks are filled with drawings of flying machines, human bodies, water and plants. He worked in Florence, Milan, Rome and finally in France at the invitation of King Francis I.

In 1476, aged 24, Leonardo was one of several young men anonymously accused of sodomy with a 17-year-old. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence. Leonardo never married. For decades he lived with his pupil Gian Giacomo Caprotti, called Salaì (“little devil”), who came to him as a boy, and later with the young nobleman Francesco Melzi, who inherited his notebooks. Many historians, beginning with Sigmund Freud, have concluded that Leonardo loved men, although the sources do not allow certainty.

He died in Amboise in 1519, aged 67.