In the quiet at Clos Lucé in 1517, an old man with a paralysed right hand still bent over drawings, while Francis I of France came often to see him. Leonardo had already spent his last three years in France, and the king had given him the manor house near the Château d'Amboise, a pension of 10,000 scudi, and the honour of close company. By then the great painter of Milan and Florence had become something larger than a court artist: a man whose notebooks held anatomy, flight, botany, maps, and machines.

He had been born on 15 April 1452, in or near Vinci, 20 miles from Florence, the illegitimate son of Piero da Vinci, a notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi, a woman of the lower class. His childhood is thinly recorded, but by 1457 he was living in his grandfather Antonio da Vinci's household, and he grew up with only a basic education in reading, writing, and mathematics. The first memory he later wrote down, in the Codex Atlanticus, was of a kite opening his mouth with its tail, a small image that suited a life spent watching birds and asking how things moved.

In the mid-1460s he went to Florence and entered Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop at about 14. There he learned drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, mechanics, woodwork, drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling, alongside other apprentices such as Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Lorenzo di Credi. By 1472 he was a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, and his early hand can be seen in the 1473 Landscape of the Arno Valley and in the angel of The Baptism of Christ, which Vasari said was so fine that Verrocchio laid down his brush.

The rise came in commissions and in ambition. In 1482 he left Florence for Milan, carrying a letter to Ludovico Sforza that offered engineering, weapon design, and painting. In Milan he made The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper, while also designing the Gran Cavallo, a vast equestrian monument that was never cast because Ludovico sent the metal for cannon in November 1494. In Florence he began the Mona Lisa in 1503 and painted The Battle of Anghiari in 1505, working beside Michelangelo.