Leonardo da Vinci was a true genius who graced this world with his presence from April 15, 1452 to May 2, 1519. He is among the most influential artists in history, having left a significant legacy not only in the realm of art but in science as well, each discipline informing his mastery of …

Leonardo da Vinci was a prominent name not only during the Italian Renaissance, but is still recognized as one of the most well-known names in the art world today. He was a prominent figure, intellectual, and one of the leading artists that made a name for themselves during the Renaissance. Not only is he known for some of the most famous ...

Saint Jerome in the Wilderness - by Leonardo da Vinci. It was during a difficult period in his life, just prior to departing for Milan in 1482, that Leonardo worked on his most tragic painting and yet another destined to remain unfinished. He was a man often subject to bouts of melancholy; notes in his diary show how low he was feeling at this ...

Star of Bethlehem - by Leonardo da Vinci. An exquisite drawing of plant form, this Star of Bethlehem is dated around 1506-8 and is in pen and ink over red chalk underdrawing. The details of the blooms are clearly rendered and the intricate swirls of leaves are similar to some of Leonardo's studies of water movement, making a nice connection ...

A certain ambivalence is apparent in Leonardo da Vinci's military engineering. Leonardo was irresistibly attracted by the possibility of perfecting weapons, not only as a technical challenge but also more profoundly in terms of the physical principles involved. The design of cannons embodying his beloved laws of percussive motion (with ...

If Leonardo da Vinci's self-propelled cart was the first working design for a robotic vehicle, then the robotic knight would have been the first humanoid robot, a real 15th century C-3PO. Da Vinci was fascinated by human anatomy and spent long hours dissecting corpses in order to figure out how the human body worked. This gave him an ...

Litta Madonna - by Leonardo da Vinci. Though a drawing exists to connect Leonardo with this painting its attribution to Leonardo has been a great source of controversy. There is little doubt he had a hand in the unsigned Litta Madonna, but it is awkwardly composed and more than likely was completed by his pupil Boltraffio, around 1480-1490. ...

Study of Five Grotesque Heads - by Leonardo da Vinci. This picture, dated about 1493, of four grinning, taunting grotesques surrounding a dignified elderly man with a wreath of oak leaves around his head, is not known to be for any particular painting. Leonardo did several more examples of grotesque heads, included in this section, so the piece ...

Lady with an Ermine is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, from around 1489-1490. That stunning picture is 40.3 cm wide and 54.8 cm high, oil on walnut board. Unfortunately, the original background has been overlaid probably in the 17th c. The subject of the portrait is identified as Cecilia Gallerani, and was probably painted at a time when she ...

Dragon Striking Down Lion - by Leonardo da Vinci. Dragon Striking down Lion gives us once more the scope of Leonardo's imagination. Without it he would never have been able to invent so many machines centuries ahead of his time. Thanks to his "sacrilegious" dissections, his studies of heartbeats and the working of muscles are still valid today.