Leonardo da Vinci is a well-known Italian painter, inventor, sculptor, and musician, among others. He lived from 1452 to 1519 and is regarded as the prototypical “Renaissance man,” meaning he was knowledgeable in a wide range of fields. He was born as the illegitimate son of a peasant, but rose to such fame and respect throughout the world during his lifetime that the King of France carried him to his deathbed.
Painting is where Leonardo da Vinci achieved some of his greatest achievements. Many of the world’s most famous and renowned works of art were created him, including the Mona Lisa, a portrait of a woman with a mysterious smile. Da Vinci also painted The Last Supper, a famous religious painting depicting Jesus eating dinner with his disciples at a long table.
In addition, Leonardo da Vinci kept a series of notebooks that totaled more than 13,000 pages over the course of his life. The notebooks were mostly filled with art, science, and philosophy-related writings and drawings. They included sketches of an imaginary aircraft and notes for building an armored military tank, both of which were far ahead of their time. These notebooks are now on display in museums all over the world, including the Louvre in Paris and the British Museum in London. Others, such as Giorgio Vasari and H. Taine, have referred to da Vinci as the greatest artist who ever lived.
Leonardo da Vinci has been portrayed in a variety of ways in popular culture over the years. Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003, was the most recent. The book was about a supposed Jesus conspiracy, and it implied that the artist was a member of a secret society called the Priory of Sion, though there is no evidence that this society ever existed. In 2006, Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou starred in a film based on the book.