Leonardo da Vinci was born near Vinci, Italy
On this day · 15 April 1452
On April 15, 1452, the painter and polymath who would define the Renaissance was born in a Tuscan hill town.
On April 15, 1452, Leonardo da Vinci was born in or near the hill town of Vinci, in the hills west of Florence. He was the out-of-wedlock son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a young woman named Caterina — a status that, ironically, freed him from the family trade and pushed him toward art.
His surname is really a place, not a name: “da Vinci” simply means “from Vinci.” As a teenager he was apprenticed in Florence to the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio, where he learned the design skills he would carry into painting, anatomy, hydraulics, and flight.
He left roughly 2,500 drawings, most still gathered into his famously mirror-written notebooks.
Though he completed only a handful of paintings, two of them — the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper — became the most analyzed pictures in Western art. Leonardo died in France in 1519, having spent a life turning curiosity into a method.
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