Leonardo da Vinci: Life, Paintings, and the Universal Mind

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519): Italian Renaissance painter, scientist, and engineer whose Mona Lisa and Last Supper defined Western art's idea of genius.

Who Was Leonardo da Vinci?

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance whose interests reached from painting and sculpture to anatomy, engineering, hydraulics, optics, botany, geology, and the design of machines that would not be built for another four centuries. Fewer than twenty paintings can be securely attributed to him, and several of those are unfinished, yet he is generally regarded as the central figure of the period in which Italian art reached its highest technical and intellectual development.

His significance lies as much in what he refused to finish as in what he completed. He treated painting as a science of seeing, slowed his work to the speed of his observation, and left behind some 7,200 surviving notebook pages in which the same restless mind dissected corpses, traced the eddies of rivers, designed flying machines, sketched the proportions of the human body, and described the rules of light and shade more thoroughly than any contemporary. The few paintings he brought to completion — the Last Supper at Milan, the Mona Lisa now at the Louvre, the Virgin of the Rocks, the Lady with an Ermine — set a standard of pictorial intelligence that European art would orbit for the next three hundred years.

Vinci, Florence, and Verrocchio's Workshop (1452–1482)

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 in the hamlet of Anchiano, just outside the small Tuscan town of Vinci. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a successful Florentine notary, and a peasant woman named Caterina, about whom very little is known beyond her first name. The circumstances of his birth had consequences he would carry his whole life: as an illegitimate child he was barred from the notarial profession that his father practiced and from the major guilds and universities that drew their members from legitimate families. He was raised on the family estate at Vinci by his paternal grandparents and an uncle, Francesco, who taught him to read the landscape with the attention of a farmer.

Around 1466, when Leonardo was fourteen, his father moved the family to Florence and placed him as a garzone — a workshop apprentice — with Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading sculptor and painter of the city. Verrocchio's bottega was a hybrid institution that produced bronze monuments, marble tombs, panel paintings, gold-work, festival décor, and theatrical sets for the Medici court; it counted among its apprentices and associates Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Lorenzo di Credi. There Leonardo learned drawing from life, the chemistry of pigments, the working of bronze and marble, the engineering of large public sculpture, and the rhetoric of composition that the new Florentine painting demanded.

His first documented contribution to a finished painting is the angel on the left of Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ, painted in the workshop between roughly 1472 and 1475 and now in the Uffizi. Giorgio Vasari, writing seventy years later, reported the famous anecdote that Verrocchio, on seeing how completely the young Leonardo had surpassed him in the rendering of that angel, gave up panel painting forever. The story is almost certainly a literary embellishment, but the painting itself bears it out: the angel's profile, the softness of its hair, and the modeling of the cheek are visibly the work of a different and more advanced hand.

Leonardo was admitted to the Florentine painters' guild, the Compagnia di San Luca, in 1472 — at twenty, but still living and working at Verrocchio's. His earliest independent canvases follow shortly: the small Annunciation now in the Uffizi (c. 1472), the Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci (c. 1474–78, now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington), and the unfinished Adoration of the Magi (1481), which was commissioned for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto and abandoned when Leonardo left for Milan. Even in these early works the habits that would mark his entire career are visible: a refusal to outline forms with hard contour, a fondness for slow tonal modeling rather than line, and a willingness to leave a commission incomplete the moment a better problem appeared.

Milan and the Sforza Court (1482–1499)

In 1482, when Leonardo was thirty, Lorenzo de' Medici sent him north to Milan as a kind of cultural ambassador to Ludovico Sforza, the regent (and from 1494 the duke) of the city. Before leaving Florence, Leonardo drafted a now-famous letter of self-recommendation to Ludovico. The letter listed his qualifications across ten numbered points — most of them military and engineering: portable bridges, siege machinery, methods of draining moats, devices for breaking up enemy galleys, cannon design, sculpture, architecture. Only at point ten, almost in passing, did he add that he could also paint as well as any man in Italy. The order was strategic: Sforza Milan was at war, and a court needed engineers more than panel painters.

He stayed for seventeen years and became the central figure of the Sforza cultural project. The court commissioned three of his most important works. The first was the Virgin of the Rocks, painted in two versions — the earlier (c. 1483–86) is now at the Louvre; a later replica with the assistance of his workshop (c. 1495–1508) is at the National Gallery in London. Both are radical in their handling of light: the Virgin and the children sit in a grotto whose darkness is described not by black underpainting but by a saturated atmosphere of cool blues and greens, the figures emerging from it with the gradual visibility of objects appearing through fog.

The second was The Last Supper, painted between 1495 and 1498 on the north wall of the refectory of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Leonardo wanted to paint slowly enough to layer color, glaze tones, and rework — none of which is possible in true fresco, where pigment is laid into wet plaster that dries in a single morning. He invented an experimental mixture of tempera and oil on dry plaster, prepared with gesso and a sealant. The technique allowed him to work for three years on the same wall, and gave him the spectacular psychological intensity of the apostles' faces in the second after Christ has announced that one of them will betray him. It also began to flake within Leonardo's lifetime. The wall has been restored seven times and is now only a fragment of the original surface, but the composition remains the most analyzed religious painting in Western art.

The third major Milanese commission, never completed, was an equestrian bronze monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's father and the founder of the dynasty. Leonardo spent twelve years on the project — designing the casting of what would have been the largest equestrian bronze ever attempted, modeling a full-scale clay horse that he exhibited in 1493 for the wedding of Ludovico's niece, and producing the surviving drawings now at Windsor. The bronze was never poured: in 1494, with French troops massing on the alpine border, the seventy tons of bronze Ludovico had set aside were melted for cannon. When French troops under Louis XII took Milan in 1499 the clay model was used by Gascon archers for target practice and destroyed. Leonardo escaped south.

Beyond these three major projects, the Milanese years saw the beginning of his sustained scientific notebook practice. He began writing in mirror script — right to left in his left hand — possibly to avoid smearing the wet ink, possibly to preserve the privacy of work that was unusual enough to attract suspicion. He started a treatise on painting, a treatise on the movement of water, a treatise on the anatomy of the horse, and a treatise on flight, none of them finished. The Last Supper had taken three years; the unfinished projects multiplied around it.

The Second Florentine Period (1500–1508)

After the fall of Milan, Leonardo travelled briefly through Mantua and Venice, then returned to Florence in April 1500 — eighteen years after he had left. He was now forty-eight, famous, and without a regular patron. The Republic of Florence, restored after the brief Savonarolan theocracy, commissioned him to paint a giant mural in the Hall of the Five Hundred, the council chamber of the Palazzo Vecchio: the Battle of Anghiari, a Florentine victory of 1440. The young Michelangelo was given the opposite wall to paint the Battle of Cascina. Neither mural was finished. Michelangelo abandoned his to answer Pope Julius II's summons to Rome. Leonardo, working again in an experimental medium intended to allow oil-paint glazing on a wall, found that the paint refused to dry properly; he tried heating the wall with charcoal braziers, the upper portions melted, and the surviving central group degraded within decades. What remains of his Battle of Anghiari is known only through preparatory drawings and through Peter Paul Rubens's copy of a copy.

Between 1502 and 1503 Leonardo spent ten months as military engineer to Cesare Borgia, the cardinal-turned-condottiere who was carving out a personal state across central Italy with the support of his father, Pope Alexander VI. Leonardo travelled with Borgia through Imola, Urbino, Cesena, and the Romagna; produced the celebrated aerial map of Imola — one of the first cartographic representations of a city seen from directly above — and surveyed fortifications, ports, and river crossings. The engagement ended abruptly when Alexander VI died in August 1503 and Cesare's regime collapsed. Leonardo returned to Florence.

It is in this second Florentine period that he began the Mona Lisa, probably in 1503, commissioned (according to Vasari) by the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo for his wife Lisa Gherardini. He worked on it intermittently for sixteen years. He never delivered it. The painting travelled with him north to Milan in 1508 when the French recalled him, and on to France in 1516. It was in his possession at his death.

The years 1503–1508 also saw an intense renewal of his anatomical work. Leonardo had been dissecting corpses since at least the 1480s, but in this period he obtained access to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and, later, to the medical school in Pavia, where he collaborated with the anatomist Marcantonio della Torre. By his own account he dissected more than thirty bodies of both sexes and all ages, producing the drawings now divided between the Royal Collection at Windsor and a small group in Turin. They are among the finest anatomical drawings ever made — finer, in their description of the layered relationship between bone, muscle, vessel, and organ, than anything in the medical literature for the next two hundred and fifty years.

Notable Works

The catalogue of Leonardo's universally accepted paintings is one of the shortest of any major Western artist. The list below collects the works for which the attribution is essentially uncontested by modern scholarship, in roughly chronological order. Several pieces — the Salvator Mundi most controversially — remain debated. Many of his most important conceptions survive only in workshop versions, copies by followers, or his own preparatory drawings.

Annunciation

c. 1472

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

One of Leonardo's earliest independent paintings, made while he was still working in Verrocchio's bottega. The angel's anatomically observed wings and the receding harbor in the background already announce his commitment to painting as a science of observation.

Ginevra de' Benci

c. 1474–1478

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The only painting by Leonardo in the Americas — a private commission portrait whose juniper bush (ginepro) is a punning emblem of the sitter's name. Already shows his refusal to outline form with hard contour.

Adoration of the Magi

1481 (unfinished)

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Commissioned by the monks of San Donato a Scopeto, abandoned when Leonardo left Florence for Milan in 1482. The underpainting survives and shows the radical compositional thinking — a swirling crowd of figures organized around a central pyramid — that would shape European altarpiece painting for two centuries.

Virgin of the Rocks

1483–1486 (Louvre); c. 1495–1508 (National Gallery, London)

Musée du Louvre, Paris; National Gallery, London

Two surviving versions of the same composition, painted for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception at the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan. The first major work in which Leonardo's sfumato and aerial perspective operate together to dissolve the boundary between figure and atmosphere.

Lady with an Ermine

c. 1489–1491

Czartoryski Museum, Kraków

Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza. The ermine is a heraldic pun on Ludovico's Order of the Ermine and on Cecilia's surname (the Greek for ermine is galée). The three-quarter pose with sharply turned head was a portraiture innovation that Raphael would soon absorb.

The Last Supper

1495–1498

Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan

The most analyzed religious painting in Western art. The composition captures the moment immediately after Christ has said 'one of you shall betray me' — the apostles arranged in four groups of three, each reacting differently. The experimental medium began to flake within Leonardo's lifetime; the wall has been restored seven times and is now a fragment of the original surface.

Vitruvian Man

c. 1490

Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Drawing — not a painting — illustrating the proportions described by the Roman architect Vitruvius. The figure inscribed in both a square and a circle has become the single most reproduced image in the history of Western art outside the Mona Lisa.

Mona Lisa

c. 1503–1519

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo carried the unfinished panel with him for sixteen years and to three countries, and never delivered it. Now the most visited painting in the world.

Salvator Mundi

c. 1500 (attribution debated)

Private collection (whereabouts undisclosed since 2017)

A devotional image of Christ holding a crystal orb. Sold at Christie's in November 2017 for $450 million, then the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. The attribution to Leonardo's own hand — rather than to his workshop — remains the most contested in current Renaissance scholarship.

Saint John the Baptist

c. 1513–1516

Musée du Louvre, Paris

Leonardo's last completed painting. The figure of the Baptist emerges from total darkness in extreme sfumato, with the right hand pointing upward — a gesture Leonardo had used in the Last Supper a generation earlier. Carried by Leonardo to France and bequeathed to Salaì.

Scientist, Anatomist, Engineer

Leonardo left behind around 7,200 surviving notebook pages — once part of a far larger collection. After his death the papers passed to his student Francesco Melzi, who kept them intact for fifty years; on Melzi's death the heirs allowed the bound notebooks to be broken up, sold piecemeal, and scattered across Europe. They are now divided into named codices held by libraries and private collectors. The notebooks contain mirror-written observations and sketches on a startling range of subjects, very few of them ever published in his lifetime. Their rediscovery in the 19th century forced a revision of how Renaissance science had been understood.

1. Codex Atlanticus (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan) — 1,119 leaves, the largest single collection, covering mechanics, hydraulics, flight, mathematics, and warfare; assembled by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni in the 1580s.
2. Codex Leicester (private, owned by Bill Gates since 1994) — 72 pages of geological and hydrological observation, including a remarkable proto-scientific explanation of why marine fossils appear on mountain tops.
3. Codex Arundel (British Library, London) — 283 leaves of mixed mechanical, geometric, and architectural notes assembled after Leonardo's death.
4. Codex Trivulzianus (Trivulzio Library, Milan) — 51 leaves, including studies of grotesque heads and Latin vocabulary exercises.
5. Codex on the Flight of Birds (Biblioteca Reale, Turin) — 18 folios studying the mechanics of bird flight as a model for designing a human ornithopter.
6. Anatomical drawings (Royal Collection Trust, Windsor) — approximately 600 sheets, including the celebrated studies of the foetus in the womb, the muscles of the back, the valves of the heart, and the bones of the foot.
7. Madrid Codices I and II (Biblioteca Nacional de España) — 192 + 158 folios of mechanical engineering and mapmaking, rediscovered in the library's collection only in 1965.

The scope of subjects is unique in the period. Leonardo described — among other things — the action of the heart valves five hundred years before they were rediscovered by modern cardiology; sketched a parachute, an underwater diving suit, a self-supporting bridge, an armored vehicle, and a flying machine that approximates the mechanics of helicopter rotation; calculated the resistance of beams under load; drew the layered geology of riverbeds and theorized that fossils of marine animals on Italian mountains proved those mountains had once been at the bottom of the sea — a conclusion the Catholic intellectual world would not accept for another two hundred years.

Almost none of this work was published in Leonardo's lifetime. His Treatise on Painting (Trattato della pittura) was the only sustained body of his prose to enter circulation — and even that only in 1651, more than a century after his death, edited and abridged by Cassiano dal Pozzo from a compilation Melzi had made of Leonardo's writings on art. The scientific notebooks remained essentially private until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when systematic transcription by Jean Paul Richter (1883) and Edmondo Solmi (1907) made them accessible. By then most of the discoveries had been made independently by others, and what the notebooks revealed was less a record of breakthroughs than a portrait of a particular kind of mind: one that treated drawing as an instrument of thought.

Sfumato and the Leonardo Method

Leonardo's mature painting is defined by three interlocking inventions. The first is sfumato — the word comes from the Italian sfumare, to dissipate like smoke — in which the transitions between light and shadow are softened to the point of being almost imperceptible. There are no hard contours in his late painting. The eyes of the Mona Lisa do not have edges; the shadow that defines the corner of the mouth is built up of perhaps thirty or forty translucent glazes, each thinner than a human hair, applied with brushes so fine they leave no visible trace. The technique is the antithesis of the linear Florentine drawing tradition he grew up in, and it is the foundation of every subsequent attempt to render flesh in oil paint.

The second invention is aerial perspective — also called atmospheric perspective — in which distant objects are made paler, bluer, and softer in contour than near ones, as the eye actually perceives them through the haze of intervening air. Leonardo was not the first European painter to use the effect, but he was the first to theorize it explicitly and to use it as a structural rather than decorative element. The receding mountains of the Mona Lisa and the Virgin of the Rocks operate as a separate optical event from the figures in the foreground; the painting becomes a layered atmospheric stage rather than a single uniformly lit plane.

The third is chiaroscuro: dramatic modeling of forms by light and shadow rather than by outline. The young apostles in The Last Supper, leaning across the table in the second after Christ's announcement, are described as masses of light and shadow whose three-dimensional weight is communicated entirely by tonal modeling. Caravaggio a century later, and Rembrandt a century after that, would build their work on the foundation Leonardo laid here.

These technical inventions came at a cost. Leonardo's method was slow — at the Last Supper his contemporaries reported that he would spend half a day on a single brushstroke and then walk away for a week without painting at all. He left a striking number of major commissions unfinished: the Adoration of the Magi, the Saint Jerome, the Battle of Anghiari, the Sforza equestrian monument. He took on more than he could complete, and he revised endlessly. The Mona Lisa accompanied him for sixteen years because, in his own view, it was never finished.

Final Years in France (1516–1519)

In 1513 Leonardo moved from Florence to Rome, where his patron was Giuliano de' Medici, brother of Pope Leo X. The Roman years were a relative disappointment: he produced little, and was overshadowed at the Vatican by the much younger Michelangelo (finishing the Sistine ceiling) and Raphael (decorating the papal apartments). When Giuliano de' Medici died in 1516 Leonardo accepted an invitation that had been pressed on him for several years: King Francis I of France offered him a generous pension, a house, and the title of premier peintre, architecte et mécanicien du Roi.

Leonardo travelled north over the Alps in the autumn of 1516, accompanied by his student and heir Francesco Melzi and his servant Battista de Vilanis. With him he brought three paintings he had refused to part with: the Mona Lisa, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and the Saint John the Baptist. He settled at the small manor of Cloux — today the Château du Clos Lucé — within walking distance of the royal residence at Amboise on the Loire river. He was sixty-four.

He painted little in France. Right-side paralysis after a stroke, probably suffered in late 1517, made it difficult for him to hold a brush, though as a left-hander he could still draw and write. He designed the festivities for the baptism of the Dauphin and for the wedding of the king's niece. He planned a vast canal project to link the Loire and Saône valleys. He drew the studies for what may have been a royal residence at Romorantin. He spent long afternoons in conversation with Francis I, who reportedly visited the house at Cloux through an underground passage from the royal château.

Leonardo died at Cloux on 2 May 1519, aged sixty-seven. By his will, drawn up some weeks earlier, he left the contents of his studio — manuscripts, drawings, instruments — to Francesco Melzi; the vineyards he owned outside Milan to his servant Salaì; his clothes and money to his half-brothers and his housekeeper; and the three paintings to Salaì. Vasari, writing thirty years later, said that Leonardo died in the arms of Francis I; the king was probably not at Amboise that day, but the story has the right shape, and the painter and the king had been close. He was buried at the church of Saint-Florentin in Amboise. The tomb was disturbed during the French Revolution and the relics scattered; what is now identified as his grave at Saint-Hubert chapel inside the château of Amboise is a 19th-century reconstruction.

Legacy and Influence

Leonardo's posthumous reputation was made first by Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects appeared in 1550 and in an expanded edition in 1568. Vasari placed Leonardo at the start of his third and final period — the maniera moderna, the modern manner — and used the biography to establish a model of the artist as a learned individual genius rather than a craftsman. Most of the anecdotes that now define the popular Leonardo come from Vasari: Verrocchio breaking his brushes in despair, the Mona Lisa smiling for the musicians and jesters Leonardo hired to entertain her, the death in the arms of Francis I.

Among painters of the next generation, the direct influence was greatest on the so-called Leonardeschi — the loose group of Milanese followers including Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Bernardino Luini, Marco d'Oggiono, and Salaì himself. Their work spreads Leonardo's compositions, his sfumato, and his characteristic facial types across northern Italy and beyond. Raphael, who saw the Mona Lisa in Florence and made a drawing of it, absorbed Leonardo's pyramidal composition and three-quarter portrait pose into the canon of High Renaissance portraiture. Andrea del Sarto and Correggio both built directly on Leonardo's sfumato; Correggio extended it into the soft luminism of his Parma cupolas.

Beyond his direct followers, the chiaroscuro tradition that Caravaggio formalized at the end of the 16th century and Rembrandt deepened in the 17th descends from Leonardo's invention of dramatic tonal modeling. The 19th-century rediscovery of his notebooks — particularly the systematic transcription begun by Jean Paul Richter in 1883 — produced the modern image of Leonardo as universal genius and the popular emblem of the Renaissance itself. From the late 19th century onward he has been the figure through whom every popular history of European art is told.

Mass culture in the 20th and 21st centuries has only intensified this. The Mona Lisa became the most-visited painting in the world after its theft in 1911 (see the Mona Lisa guide). The Vitruvian Man is now an icon of nearly any institution that wishes to claim a fusion of art and science. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003) sold more than 80 million copies. Walter Isaacson's biography Leonardo da Vinci (2017) was a publishing phenomenon. The Salvator Mundi attribution sold at Christie's in 2017 for $450 million, the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction, on the strength of a contested attribution to him. He has become, perhaps more than any other historical figure, the popular symbol of human curiosity itself.

In His Own Words

Leonardo's notebooks are full of aphorism, observation, and rule-of-thumb advice to the apprentice. The lines below are among the most often cited; each is drawn from the surviving codices and the Treatise on Painting. They give a sense of the temperament behind the paintings — patient, exacting, and unsparing about the difficulty of the work.

Influences

• Andrea del Verrocchio (master and the painter of the workshop Leonardo trained in)
• Antonio Pollaiuolo (anatomical drawing and the dynamic study of the figure in motion)
• Masaccio (the chiaroscuro tradition of Florentine quattrocento painting)
• Early Netherlandish oil technique transmitted south through Antonello da Messina (van Eyck-derived layered glazing)
• Vitruvius and the classical tradition of bodily proportion
• Aristotle and natural philosophy via Florentine humanism

Influence on Later Art

• The Leonardeschi (Boltraffio, Bernardino Luini, Marco d'Oggiono, Salaì)
• Raphael (composition, sfumato, and portraiture)
• Andrea del Sarto and Florentine High Renaissance painting
• Correggio and the luminism of the Parma school
• Caravaggio and the chiaroscuro tradition of the 17th century
• Rembrandt and the Dutch Baroque
• Modern image of the polymath — the foundational symbol of the artist-scientist

Where to See These Works

• Musée du Louvre

  Five paintings — the Mona Lisa, the Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre version), the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, Saint John the Baptist, and La Belle Ferronnière — plus important drawings. The largest single concentration of Leonardo's paintings in the world.

• National Gallery

  The London version of the Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1495–1508) and the Burlington House Cartoon — the full-scale charcoal study for the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist.

• Royal Collection Trust

  Approximately 600 sheets of drawings, including the most important surviving anatomical studies (the foetus in the womb, the muscles of the back, the valves of the heart), the natural-history studies, and the late deluge drawings. Catalogued by Carlo Pedretti and Martin Clayton.

• Galleria degli Uffizi

  The early Annunciation, the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, the Verrocchio Baptism of Christ to which Leonardo contributed the famous angel, and a number of preparatory drawings from the Florentine years.

• Gallerie dell'Accademia

  The Vitruvian Man drawing — exhibited only briefly and rarely for conservation reasons — together with a small group of other Leonardo drawings.

Read next

• ArtworksMona Lisa: History, Sfumato, and the World's Most Famous PaintingLeonardo's Mona Lisa (c. 1503–1519) — the world's most-visited painting. Guide to the sitter, sfumato technique, 1911 theft, and seeing it at the Louvre.
• MovementsWhat Is Impressionism? Origins, Artists, and Influence on Modern ArtImpressionism is a 19th-century French art movement defined by visible brushwork, open-air painting, and the depiction of fleeting light and everyday life.
• ArtistsVincent van Gogh: Life, Paintings, and the Birth of Modern ArtVincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose vivid color and expressive brushwork shaped 20th-century art.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Leonardo da Vinci | Smarthistory(Editorial reference)
• Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art(Editorial reference)
• Leonardo da Vinci — Encyclopædia Britannica(Editorial reference)
• Leonardo da Vinci — Wikipedia(CC BY-SA 3.0)
• Leonardo da Vinci | Musée du Louvre(Editorial reference)
• Leonardo da Vinci — Royal Collection Trust(Editorial reference)