Leonardo da Vinci Trivia
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47 free Leonardo Da Vinci trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Leonardo da Vinci left fewer than 25 major paintings, two of them the most famous pictures on Earth, plus 13,000 pages of notebooks written backwards in mirror script and stuffed with anatomy, flying machines, fossils and friction laws that nobody read for centuries. He was born illegitimate in a Tuscan hill town, trained under Verrocchio, served the Sforzas and Cesare Borgia, and died in the arms, legend says, of the King of France. This quiz covers the painter, the engineer and the man. Easy questions ask about the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and Vitruvian Man. Harder ones want the master who supposedly put down his brush after seeing his pupil's angel, the horse that became a cannon, the reason The Last Supper began flaking within a century, the meaning of Salaì's nickname, the mechanical lion built for Francis I, the codex owned by Bill Gates, the price Salvator Mundi fetched in 2017 and what a 19th-century excavation found in the chapel at Amboise. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Leonardo da Vinci, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for art and history teachers, students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Renaissance Art and History, Famous Painters and Inventions.
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Q 01Which museum marked 500 years since Leonardo's death with a 2019 blockbuster in the country where he died?
The Louvre
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.
Q 02Leonardo's Last Supper shows the apostles reacting just after Jesus has said what?
"One of you will betray me"
"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.
Q 03Which Leonardo work appears on Italy's one-euro coin?
Vitruvian Man
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.
Q 04What was the profession of Leonardo's father, Ser Piero?
Legal notary
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.
Q 05Which artist did Paris police question as a suspect after the Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911?
Pablo Picasso
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.
Q 06Freud's essay on Leonardo's cradle memory called the bird a vulture, a mistranslation of which bird?
A kite
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.
Q 07In whose Florentine workshop did Leonardo train from around the age of 14?
Andrea del Verrocchio
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.
Q 08Per Vasari, what did Leonardo's master do after seeing the angel his pupil added to The Baptism of Christ?
Gave up painting
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.
Q 09Per Vasari, Leonardo wanted the monster he painted on a peasant's shield to terrify like which figure of Greek myth?
Medusa
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.
Q 10The painters' company Leonardo joined in Florence in 1472 was named, like many across Europe, for which saint?
Saint Luke
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.
Q 11Leonardo's earliest dated work, a pen drawing from 1473, shows the valley of which Italian river?
The Arno
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.
Q 12An anonymous letter in 1476 accused the 24-year-old Leonardo and three other men of what?
Sodomy
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.
Q 13In his letter seeking work at Milan's court, what did Leonardo offer at length before adding that he could paint?
Weapons and siege engines
Q 21In which Florentine building did Leonardo begin his lost battle mural, The Battle of Anghiari?
Palazzo Vecchio
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.
Q 22What did Leonardo sit on a committee to decide in January 1504?
Where to place Michelangelo's David
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.
Q 23What does Salaì, Leonardo's nickname for his light-fingered young assistant, mean?
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.
Q 14What became of the bronze set aside for Leonardo's giant horse statue in Milan in 1494?
Cast into cannon
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.
Q 15Leonardo's Last Supper covers the end wall of which room in a Milan convent?
The dining hall
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.
Q 16Leonardo's Last Supper began flaking within decades because he painted it on what?
A dry, sealed wall
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.
Q 17In Leonardo's portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, a duke's young mistress, which animal does she cradle?
An ermine
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.
Q 18Leonardo drew the geometric solids for friar Luca Pacioli's 1509 book on which mathematical idea?
The golden ratio
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.
Q 19Which commander took Leonardo into his service in 1502 to travel his newly conquered lands in central Italy?
Cesare Borgia
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.
Q 20What does the 'Mona' in Mona Lisa mean?
Madam
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.
Little devil
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.
Q 24Which king invited Leonardo to his court in 1516 and installed him at Clos Lucé near Amboise?
Francis I
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.
Q 25At a pageant for a French king, Leonardo's mechanical lion walked forward and opened its chest to show what?
Lilies
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.
Q 26A visitor in 1517 recorded that the ageing Leonardo was suffering from which ailment?
A paralysed right hand
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.
Q 27In 1502 Leonardo offered a sultan his design for a vast single-span bridge in which city?
Istanbul
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.
Q 28Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks exists in two versions: one in Paris and one in which other city?
London
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.
Q 29What is the usual explanation for Leonardo writing his notebooks in mirror-image script?
He was left-handed
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.
Q 30Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus takes its name from what?
Its atlas-sized pages
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.