Leonardo da Vinci
The Italian painter, anatomist, and inventor whose breadth gave English the term 'Renaissance man.'
Origin
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was born the illegitimate son of a Tuscan notary and trained as a painter in Verrocchio's Florence workshop. He spent his career drifting between Florence, Milan, Rome, and finally the French court of François I, leaving most projects unfinished. The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man are the famous paintings; the notebooks — flying machines, anatomical dissections, water studies, war engines — are arguably the more famous record. Roughly fifteen completed paintings survive.
Modern usage
His name is the universal shorthand for the multi-talented polymath: 'a real Da Vinci,' 'the Da Vinci of [field].' The Vitruvian Man — the figure inscribed in a circle and square — is on T-shirts, logos, and medical-school flyers. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003) added a separate pop-culture layer that has very little to do with the historical Leonardo.
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