47 Fun Facts About Leonardo Da Vinci

Which museum marked 500 years since Leonardo's death with a 2019 blockbuster in the country where he died?

The Louvre. It owns five of his paintings, more than any other museum, yet its star stayed out of the show: the Mona Lisa was left in her usual room because so many everyday visitors come for her.

Leonardo's Last Supper shows the apostles reacting just after Jesus has said what?

"One of you will betray me" is the line. Vasari tells that when the prior nagged him to hurry, Leonardo told the duke he still lacked a face wicked enough for Judas, and that the prior's own would do.

Which Leonardo work appears on Italy's one-euro coin?

Vitruvian Man. Leonardo drew it around 1490 to test a claim by the Roman architect Vitruvius: that a well-built man with his limbs spread fits inside both a circle and a square.

What was the profession of Leonardo's father, Ser Piero?

Legal notary. Ser Piero drew up contracts for leading Florentine families, the Medici among them, and it was he who carried the boy's drawings to an artist friend and had him taken on as an apprentice.

Which artist did Paris police question as a suspect after the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911?

Pablo Picasso. He was questioned and cleared; the real thief was an Italian handyman who had helped fit the painting's glass case, and the uproar turned an admired portrait into the most famous one on earth.

Freud's essay on Leonardo's cradle memory called the bird a vulture, a mistranslation of which bird?

A kite. Leonardo wrote that one came to his cradle and struck his lips with its tail; Freud read a German version that said vulture and built his case on Egyptian vulture myths, so the slip undid it.

In whose Florentine workshop did Leonardo train from around the age of 14?

Andrea del Verrocchio. His workshop taught sculpture and metalwork as well as painting, and Leonardo liked it enough to stay about five more years after he had qualified as a master himself.

Per Vasari, what did Leonardo's master do after seeing the angel his pupil added to The Baptism of Christ?

Gave up painting. Vasari says the master would never touch colour again, in disdain that a child should know more than he did, though historians treat that part of the tale as legend.

Per Vasari, Leonardo wanted the monster he painted on a peasant's shield to terrify like which figure of Greek myth?

Medusa. To build the beast, Vasari says, Leonardo shut himself in with lizards, bats and snakes and never noticed the stench as they rotted; his startled father quietly sold the shield for a hundred ducats.

The painters' company Leonardo joined in Florence in 1472 was named, like many across Europe, for which saint?

Saint Luke. Tradition held that the evangelist painted the Virgin Mary's portrait, so painters took him as their patron; in Florence they also shared a trade guild with the doctors and apothecaries.

Leonardo's earliest dated work, a pen drawing from 1473, shows the valley of which Italian river?

The Arno. He dated the sheet 5 August 1473, and the river stayed with him: some thirty years later he was drawing up schemes to canalise it and even to shift its course.

An anonymous letter in 1476 accused the 24-year-old Leonardo and three other men of what?

Sodomy. The note was dropped in a public letter box in Florence, and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence, perhaps helped by the fact that one of the four was a Tornabuoni, kin to the Medici.

In his letter seeking work at Milan's court, what did Leonardo offer at length before adding that he could paint?

Weapons and siege engines. He promised portable bridges, siege mines and armoured wagons, then added that he could paint as well as anyone; the duke kept him busy with pageants, portraits and a giant bronze horse.

What became of the bronze set aside for Leonardo's giant horse statue in Milan in 1494?

Cast into cannon. With a French army invading Italy, the duke gave the metal up for guns; five years later French archers used Leonardo's full-size clay model for target practice.

Leonardo's Last Supper covers the end wall of which room in a Milan convent?

The dining hall. It belongs to Santa Maria delle Grazie, and in 1943 an Allied bomb wrecked most of the room; the wall with the painting, shielded by sandbags, was left standing.

Leonardo's Last Supper began flaking within decades because he painted it on what?

A dry, sealed wall. True fresco goes onto wet plaster and sets with it; Leonardo instead used tempera over a coating of gesso, pitch and mastic, and it never held: flaking and mildew soon set in.

In Leonardo's portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, a duke's young mistress, which animal does she cradle?

An ermine. Scholars read the animal as a nod to her lover: the Duke of Milan had been admitted to the Order of the Ermine and was nicknamed the White Ermine.

Leonardo drew the geometric solids for friar Luca Pacioli's 1509 book on which mathematical idea?

The golden ratio. Pacioli called it the divine proportion; he taught Leonardo mathematics at the Milan court, shared lodgings with him, and the two fled the city together when the French seized it.

Which commander took Leonardo into his service in 1502 to travel his newly conquered lands in central Italy?

Cesare Borgia. Leonardo spent under a year touring his conquered towns, planning canals and harbour works, then went home to Florence as the campaign turned to treachery and revenge.

What does the 'Mona' in Mona Lisa mean?

Madam. 'Mona' is said to be a contraction of 'madonna', my lady, so the title is just Madam Lisa; Italians call the painting La Gioconda, a pun on her married name, Giocondo, and the word for cheerful.

In which Florentine building did Leonardo begin his lost battle mural, The Battle of Anghiari?

Palazzo Vecchio. Leonardo tried an oil technique on the council-hall wall, the colours ran, and he gave up; the ruin stayed for some fifty years until Vasari covered it with frescoes of his own.

What did Leonardo sit on a committee to decide in January 1504?

Where to place Michelangelo's David. Leonardo backed the group that wanted it under the roof of a loggia, citing flaws in the marble; it was set up in the open instead and stood out in the weather for over three centuries.

What does Salaì, Leonardo's nickname for his light-fingered young assistant, mean?

Little devil. Leonardo logged the boy's thefts and called him a thief, a liar, stubborn and a glutton, yet kept him in the household for decades and left him half a vineyard in his will.

Which king invited Leonardo to his court in 1516 and installed him at Clos Lucé near Amboise?

Francis I. The young king gave him a manor a short walk from the royal château and a handsome pension, then kept coming round simply to talk, saying no man alive knew as much about art and philosophy.

At a pageant for a French king, Leonardo's mechanical lion walked forward and opened its chest to show what?

Lilies. The lily, the fleur-de-lis, was the badge of the French crown, so the beast walked a few steps on its own and then opened its breast to offer the king his own emblem.

A visitor in 1517 recorded that the ageing Leonardo was suffering from which ailment?

A paralysed right hand. The cardinal's secretary wrote that no more good work could be expected of him, yet Leonardo still showed his guests three paintings, one of them a Florentine lady thought to be the Mona Lisa.

In 1502 Leonardo offered a sultan his design for a vast single-span bridge in which city?

Istanbul. Bayezid II wanted a bridge over the Golden Horn and passed Leonardo over; in 2019 MIT engineers built a scale model from his sketch and found the span, the longest of its day, would have stood.

Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks exists in two versions: one in Paris and one in which other city?

London. The National Gallery's panel replaced the first on a Milan altar; one theory is that Leonardo, unhappy with his fee, sold the original privately and had to paint the whole picture again.

What is the usual explanation for Leonardo writing his notebooks in mirror-image script?

He was left-handed. Nobody knows his reason for certain, but a left-hander writing the normal way drags his hand through wet ink, and running right to left avoids the smudge; he wrote normally when others had to read it.

Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus takes its name from what?

Its atlas-sized pages. The sculptor Pompeo Leoni pasted more than a thousand loose Leonardo sheets onto paper of the size used for atlases, and that 'atlantic' format gave the album its name.

Which tech tycoon bought Leonardo's Codex Leicester at auction in 1994 for $30.8 million?

Bill Gates. His bid made the notebook the most expensive manuscript ever sold at the time, and rather than lock it away he began sending it to be shown in a different city each year.

How did Leonardo learn what he needed for his detailed drawings of muscles and organs?

Dissecting corpses. A Florence hospital let him work on the bodies of its dead, and he later teamed up with Marcantonio della Torre, who lectured on anatomy at Pavia, each man helping the other's research.

Leonardo worked out the basic laws of which everyday force some 200 years before science rediscovered them?

Friction. He recorded the laws in a small notebook in 1493 and never published them, so Amontons got the credit in 1699; the page itself was later waved away by an art historian as irrelevant scribbles.

Leonardo's 'aerial screw', a spiral sail spun by men on a platform, is often called a forerunner of what?

The helicopter. Leonardo pictured a crew running round a pole to spin a spiral of starched linen; it could never have flown, since nothing stopped the platform itself from turning the other way.

What did Leonardo do with the caged birds he bought, according to Vasari?

Released them. Vasari has him pay the asking price and set the birds free, and a traveller of his day compared Leonardo to the Gujaratis of India, who would let no living thing be harmed.

Which painting attributed to Leonardo sold for a record $450 million in 2017?

Salvator Mundi. In 1958 the same panel, then taken for a follower's work, had gone at auction for £45; cleaned and reattributed, it became the most expensive painting ever sold at public sale.

Leonardo's portrait Ginevra de' Benci left Liechtenstein's princely collection in 1967 for a museum in which American city?

Washington. The National Gallery of Art paid a record price of over $5 million, and with fewer than 25 major Leonardos in existence it was still, as of 2025, the only one on public view in the Americas.

Which pope's brother, Giuliano de' Medici, received Leonardo in Rome in 1513?

Leo X. Given a papal commission, Leonardo began by distilling oils for the final varnish, and the pope sighed that a man who starts with the end of a job before the beginning will never get anything done.

Why are the bones in Leonardo's tomb at Amboise only presumed to be his?

The burial church was demolished. It was pulled down after the Revolution; an 1863 dig in the ruins turned up bones beside stones carved with letters of his name, and those bones were reburied in the castle chapel.

Which artist pencilled a moustache and goatee onto a postcard of the Mona Lisa in 1919?

Marcel Duchamp. He bought a cheap postcard of the portrait, drew on the whiskers, lettered a rude French pun underneath as its title, L.H.O.O.Q., and signed the result as a work of his own.

Which Russian museum owns the Benois Madonna and the Madonna Litta, two paintings it credits to Leonardo?

The Hermitage. The Benois Madonna was presumed lost for centuries until a Saint Petersburg architect's family put it on show in 1909; the Madonna Litta is still argued over and may be a pupil's work.

What did both Leonardo's parents do soon after his birth?

Married other people. His father wed Albiera Amadori, and his mother Caterina married a local man nicknamed Accattabriga, the quarrelsome one; the boy grew up in his grandfather's house.

Vasari says the Duke of Milan first sent for Leonardo to do what, rather than to paint?

Play the lyre. Vasari has him arrive with an instrument he had made himself, largely of silver and shaped like a horse's skull to give a fuller tone, and outplay every musician at the court.

When a skydiver finally tested Leonardo's wood-and-canvas parachute design in 2000, what happened?

It floated down smoothly. Adrian Nicholas dropped from a balloon 3,000 metres up under 85 kg of canvas and wood built to the sketch; experts had told him it would not fly, and he called the ride gentler than a modern chute.

Leaving Milan in 1499, Leonardo stopped briefly at Mantua on his way to which maritime republic?

Venice. At Mantua the marchioness Isabella d'Este coaxed a chalk portrait out of him on the promise of a painting to follow, then spent years writing to beg for it, and never got one.

Which altarpiece for the monks of San Donato a Scopeto did Leonardo leave unfinished when he moved to Milan?

Adoration of the Magi. He left for Milan with only the brown underdrawing done, and after waiting some fifteen years the monks had Filippino Lippi paint them the same subject instead.

After taking Milan in 1499, what did King Louis XII want done with Leonardo's Last Supper?

Shipped home across the Alps. The French king asked whether builders could brace the picture with wood and iron and carry it off whatever the cost, but it was painted on the wall itself, so it stayed in Milan.