History’s Greatest Artist
Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) was the epitome of a “Renaissance Man”. While best known as the painter of sublime works such as the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and Vitruvian Man, he excelled in numerous other fields. Indeed, he combined in a single person not only one of history’s greatest painters, but also an outstanding sculptor, architect, inventor, anatomist, paleontologist, draftsman, musician, mathematician, and military engineer.
He was born out of wedlock to a wealthy Florentine legal notary, and a peasant girl whom contemporaries described as possessing “easy virtue”. Other than getting together one day and conceiving Leonardo, the future artist’s parents do not seem to have had much of a relationship. Leonardo spent the first five years of his life in his mother’s hamlet, after which he went to live in his father’s household in the town of Vinci.
Leonardo’s parents did provide him with seventeen half brothers and sisters, who were not too fond of their illegitimate half brother. Indeed, they seem to have been embarrassed by him as a stain on the family honor. Particularly so with his paternal half-siblings, who conspired to deprive Leonardo of a share of their father’s estate after the latter’s death in 1503.
By then, however, Leonardo was the age’s greatest artist and a considerably wealthy man in his own right. Thus, getting screwed out of his father’s inheritance mattered little financially, although it must have stung emotionally. He did get back some measure of satisfaction after a wealthy uncle died a few years later, and left his entire estate to Leonardo, while disinheriting all his other nephews and nieces.
