Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo was born in the village in Anchiano, a few miles from a small town of Vinci, in Tuscany, near Florence. He was the son of a rich Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid-1460s the family stayed in Florence, where Leonardo was given the best education that Florence (a major intellectual and artistic centre of Italy) could offer. He fastly advanced socially and intellectually. He was persuasive in conversation, and a good musician and improviser.

In about 1466 he was apprenticed as a garzone (a studio boy) to Andrea Del Verrocchio (the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day!) In Verrocchio's workshop Leonardo was introduced to a lot of activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble and bronze.

In 1472 he was entered in the painter's guild of Florence, and in 1476 he was still considered Verrocchio's assistant. In Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ, 1470, the kneeling angel at the left of the painting is by Leonardo.

In 1478 Leonardo became an independent master at the age of 26. His first gob was to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine town hall. His first large painting, the Adoration of the Magi, which he started to paint