Leonardo da Vinci was a Tuscan artist and a man of a universal spirit.

Leonardo da Vinci (Anchiano, April 15, 1452 - Clos Lucé, May 2, 1519) was a Tuscan artist and a man of a universal spirit, at the same time a scientist, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, urban planner, naturalist, musician, poet, philosopher and writer.

Leonardo da Vinci has often been described as the archetype and human symbol of the Renaissance, a universal genius, a humanist philosopher with boundless curiosity, and a great creative force. He has been considered one of the most outstanding painters of all time and perhaps the most versatile and talented person in a greater number of different fields.

Leonardo is best known as a painter; two of his works, the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, are very famous paintings, often copied and parodied; his drawing of the Vitruvian Man has also been reproduced in numerous works. Only about fifteen of his works have survived to the present day; this small number is a consequence of the time he devoted to his constant technical experimentation and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, and everything that appears in his notebooks full of drawings, scientific diagrams and reflections on the nature of painting, have been an important legacy for the following generations of artists, comparable, if we compare the distances, to the legacy of Michelangelo.

As an engineer and inventor, Leonardo developed ideas that were very advanced for the time he lived in, from the helicopter to the battle tank, the submarine or even the automobile. Very few of his projects were ever built; they were not even feasible in light of the knowledge of his time, but some of his small inventions, such as a machine to measure the elastic limit of a cable, entered the world of manufacturing. As a scientist, Leonardo's contributions contributed to the development of knowledge in fields as diverse as, for example, anatomy, civil engineering and optics.

Leonardo da Vinci was born on Saturday, April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night", three hours after the Ave Maria, that is, 10:30 p.m., in the castle of Vinci, near Florence, from an illegitimate love affair between his father, Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, notary, chancellor and ambassador of the Florentine Republic, who descended from a wealthy family of Italian notables, and his mother, Caterina, a humble daughter of farmers from the small Tuscan village of Anchiano, located two kilometers from Vinci, in the territory of Florence. A 2006 study highlights that it seems likely that Caterina was a slave who came from the Middle East.