Leonardo da Vinci Timeline

By 1472, at the age of 20, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine. Even after his father set him up in his own workshop, he continued to collaborate and live with his master Verrocchio.

Image source: Guild of Saint Luke

According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on The Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus's robe with skill so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio purportedly put down his brush and never painted again, though this claim is probably apocryphal.

Image source: The Baptism of Christ (Verrocchio and Leonardo)

Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a 1473 pen-and-ink drawing of the Arno valley, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.

Image source: Santa Maria del Popolo

In January 1478, Leonardo received an independent commission to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of Saint Bernard in the Florentine town hall, the Palazzo della Signoria, indicating his independence from Verrocchio's studio.

Image source: Palazzo Vecchio

A macabre sketch done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 shows the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano de' Medici in the Pazzi conspiracy.

Image source: Bernardo Bandini Baroncelli

In March 1481, Leonardo received a commission from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto for The Adoration of the Magi. In 1482 he went to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo de' Medici, and the painting was abandoned.

Image source: Adoration of the Magi (Leonardo)

Leonardo's most remarkable portrait of this Milanese period is the Lady with an Ermine, presumed to depict Cecilia Gallerani, lover of Ludovico Sforza.

Image source: Lady with an Ermine

Leonardo completed a model for the colossal equestrian horse and made detailed plans for its casting, but in November 1494 Ludovico gave the metal to his brother-in-law to be used for a cannon to defend the city from Charles VIII of France.

Image source: Leonardo's horse

Toward the end of his Milanese period, in 1498, Leonardo painted his trompe-l'œil decoration of the Sala delle Asse for the Duke of Milan in the Castello Sforzesco.

Image source: Sala delle Asse

Leonardo had left Borgia's service and returned to Florence by early 1503, where he rejoined the Guild of Saint Luke on 18 October of that year.

In January 1504, Leonardo was part of a committee formed to recommend where Michelangelo's statue of David should be placed in Florence.

Image source: David (Michelangelo)

In 1505, Leonardo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. He devised a dynamic composition depicting four men riding raging war horses engaged in a battle for possession of a standard at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440.

Image source: The Battle of Anghiari (Leonardo)

In 1512, Leonardo was working on plans for an equestrian monument for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, but this was prevented by an invasion of a confederation of Swiss, Spanish and Venetian forces which drove the French from Milan. Leonardo stayed in the city, spending several months of 1513 at the Medici's Vaprio d'Adda villa.

Image source: Gian Giacomo Trivulzio

In 1490 Leonardo was called as a consultant, together with Francesco di Giorgio Martini, for the building site of the cathedral of Pavia, and was struck by the equestrian statue of Regisole, of which he left a sketch.

Image source: Regisole

In his notebooks, Leonardo first stated the 'laws' of sliding friction in 1493. His results were never published, and the friction laws were not rediscovered until 1699 by Guillaume Amontons, with whose name they are now usually associated.

Image source: Tribology

Leonardo was fascinated by flight for much of his life, producing many studies including Codex on the Flight of Birds (c. 1505), as well as plans for flying machines such as a flapping ornithopter and a machine with a helical rotor.

Image source: Codex on the Flight of Birds

In the 1490s Leonardo studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book Divina proportione, published in 1509.

Image source: Divina proportione

From 1510 to 1511 Leonardo collaborated in his anatomy studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre, professor of Anatomy at the University of Pavia.

Image source: Marcantonio della Torre

Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67, possibly of a stroke.

On 12 August 1519, Leonardo's remains were interred in the Collegiate Church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise. Much of the château was damaged during the French Revolution, leading to the church's demolition in 1802, and the current location of his remains is unclear.

At the time of his death in 1524, Salaì owned a painting referred to as Joconda in a posthumous inventory of his belongings; it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait, likely referring to the Mona Lisa.

Image source: Mona Lisa

Giorgio Vasari's frequently apocryphal biography of Leonardo appeared in Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550). Very little is known about Leonardo's childhood, and much is shrouded in myth partly because of this work.

Image source: Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

After Melzi's death in 1570, Leonardo's collection passed to his son, the lawyer Orazio, who initially took little interest in the journals. Some drawings were copied by an anonymous Milanese artist for a planned treatise (Codex Huygens, c. 1570), and in 1587 a household tutor named Lelio Gavardi took 13 manuscripts to Pisa before they were returned.

Image source: Francesco Melzi

Aspects of Leonardo's work on studies of anatomy, light and landscape were assembled by Melzi for publication and eventually published as A Treatise on Painting in France and Italy in 1651 and Germany in 1724, with engravings based on drawings by Nicolas Poussin.

Image source: A Treatise on Painting

In 1863, fine-arts inspector general Arsène Houssaye received an imperial commission to excavate the site and discovered a partially complete skeleton with a bronze ring on one finger, white hair, and stone fragments bearing inscriptions interpreted as forming 'Leonardus Vinci'. The remains were re-interred in the chapel of Saint Hubert in 1874.

The admiration for Leonardo's genius revived in the 19th century, notably by writers like Henry Fuseli in 1801, and was renewed in the 20th century most famously by Sigmund Freud in his Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood.

Image source: Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood

In 1925, Houssaye's great-grandson sold the ring and a lock of hair kept by Houssaye to an American collector. Sixty years later another American acquired them, leading to their display at the Leonardo Museum in Vinci beginning on 2 May 2019, the 500th anniversary of the artist's death.

In 2016, it was announced that DNA tests would be conducted to determine whether the attribution of the excavated remains is correct. More than a decade of analysis of Leonardo's genetic genealogy by Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato came to a conclusion in mid-2021, and in 2019 documents revealed that Houssaye had kept the ring and a lock of hair.

In 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed in whole or part to Leonardo, was sold at auction for US$450.3 million, setting a new record for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction.

Image source: Salvator Mundi (Leonardo)

On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death, the Louvre in Paris arranged for the largest ever single exhibit of his work, called Leonardo, running between November 2019 and February 2020.