Most people know that Leonardo da Vinci was a great painter. However, he was also a talented sculptor, musician, poet, scientist, architect, and engineer. His work had a strong influence on artists throughout Europe, and his scientific ideas were centuries ahead of their time.

Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 in the town of Vinci, near Florence, Italy. His parents never married, so Leonardo lived with his father in Florence. Over the years, he had four stepmothers and eleven stepsisters and stepbrothers. One of them was 45 years younger than Leonardo! At the age of 15, Leonardo went to work with a famous artist. He studied painting, sculpture, music, mathematics, and science. By 20, he was a master painter. Leonardo was so talented that one day one of his teachers threw down his brushes and never painted again.

Although da Vinci was a great painter, he never gave up his interest in other subjects. He liked to do research in many different areas. He wanted to understand everything he saw. Many people think of him as the first modern scientist because he liked to make observations and look for explanations for things. For example, he was one of the first people to dissect human bodies. He cut the bodies open in order to figure out how they worked. Da Vinci wrote down all his ideas and observations in notebooks. He also filled the notebooks with more than 5,000 drawings of plants, animals, and the human body.

Da Vinci was a great inventor, too. His scientific research and knowledge of architecture and mathematics helped him to design many new things. For example, he drew a flying machine 400 years before the airplane was invented. He also designed an air conditioner, an alarm clock, a reading lamp, a submarine, a bridge, and many other things. In all, da Vinci designed more than 1,000 inventions. Unfortunately, he did not have time to develop many of his ideas.

As a matter of fact, da Vinci started many projects that he never finished. He was always more interested in thinking about and planning projects than doing them. He was so brilliant that he quickly lost interest in one project and couldn't wait to start another. Because of this, he completed very few paintings. Sometimes people paid him to do a painting or a sculpture but he never did it. Other times he started the work, but he never finished it. Some people got tired of waiting, so they hired someone else to finish his work.

The pieces that da Vinci completed were magnificent and unique. He created a new, more realistic style of painting. At that time, when artists painted people, they looked flat. When da Vinci painted people, they looked real. No other artist of his time painted people or animals as well as da Vinci. His famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is a good example of this style. Da Vinci took four years to paint the Mona Lisa. Unfortunately, the man who ordered the painting didn't like it and refused to pay him. However, ten years later, da Vinci sold it to the King of France for 492 ounces of gold(about $300,000). The King hung it in the Louvre palace in Paris. Today the Mona Lisa still hangs in the Louvre, which is now a museum.

Often, da Vinci painted in religious buildings, like churches and monasteries. In 1495, he painted another of his greatest paintings, The Last Supper, on the dining room wall of a monastery. It took him three years to complete it. People came to see it even before it was done. They admired the painting because it showed the emotions of the people in the scene. People also liked the bright colors that da Vinci used. Unfortunately, the painting had problems. In just a few years, the paint started to peel off the wall. Later, the people in the monastery made a doorway that went right through the painting. The rest of The Last Supper was almost destroyed when foreign soldiers threw stones at it. Fortunately, it had been repaired.

Da Vinci was greatly admired for his artistic talent and his skill in many areas. However, some people probably thought he was quite strange. He was a very mysterious, private man. He wrote backwards in his notebooks so nobody could read what he wrote. Many people thought that his scientific experiments were some kind of evil magic. He was also left-handed. At that time, some people believed that being left-handed was the sign of the devil.

Most people like and admired da Vinci. He was a strong and handsome man. He was also generous to his friends, both rich and poor. Although he never married, he adopted a son and he was a very good father. People invited him to parties because he was very entertaining. He talked about interesting things and people laughed at his clever jokes. He was also a great musician. He sang well and played an instrument that he had invented. Da Vinci was always well dressed, although he liked to wear unusual clothes. He wore short robes when everyone else wore long ones and loved to wear pink.

Da Vinci had some other unusual habits for his time. He was extremely clean when many people were not. He even hated to have paint on his fingers. He was also a vegetarian because he did not believe in killing animals. He used to buy birds just to let them free and to study their flight.

During his lifetime, da Vinci traveled to all the great cities of Italy and did many different kinds of work. Once, when he was trying to get a job, he made a list of 36 different jobs he could do. In addition to working as an artist, he had also worked as an architect and engineer. He designed buildings and canals and he figured out how to change the direction of rivers. At one point, he was a military adviser to the Duke of Milan.

Later in life, Leonardo da Vinci went to Rome to work for the pope. However, he was unhappy there because the younger artists were given more work than he was. As da Vinci grew older, he stayed alone more and more. Although people admired him, many didn't understand him because his ideas were far ahead of his time. Da Vinci spent the last years of his life working for King Francis I of France. He made architectural designs, worked on engineering projects, and entertained the king with all his ideas. He also worked on his notebooks so they could be published after his death. Da Vinci died peacefully on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67.
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