Leonardo was born in Vinci, in Val d'Elsa, in 1452 from the notary Ser Piero and Caterina. At an unspecified time his father took him to Florence and around 1469 he joined the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the most famous artists of that time.

His first work is a drawing dated 5^th August 1473 showing a view of Val d'Arno (today at the drawings and prints room at the Uffizi), which already represented a novelty in the artistic idea of the time since the landscape, portrayed from life, becomes the protagonist and is no more a mere "ideal" and harmonious composition of different elements, realised as a background for the characters in the scene.
As a matter of fact, Leonardo studied all the natural phenomena with an absolutely innovative interest for his age, and investigated them with a deep and sharp spirit of observation: his main aim was to know reality in all its aspects, and for this reason he was active in several fields and denied the value of sciences that were not based on experience.
The collaboration with Verrocchio for the realisation of the painting portraying Christ's Baptism (Florence, Uffizi), dates back to the period of the initial training in Florence.
It was made when Leonardo was still working in the workshop of the painter: in the parts that can be attributable to him (the angel on the left and part of the background landscape) the artist's great personality already comes out, so young but already distant from his master in the search for environmental effects and for a clearer fusion of the characters in space.
Also the famous Annunciation of the Uffizi was made in the same years, one of the major masterpieces of painting on wood, where the harmonic fusion of characters and landscape reaches a perfect balance, and the unfinished Adoration of the Magi, commissioned in 1481 and characterised by a completely new and original approach in the expressive strength of faces and in the dramatic excitement in the characters' gestures. In 1482 Leonardo moved to Milan, at the court of Ludovico il Moro, where he worked both as an artist and as a building and military engineer and where he stayed until 1499.
Here he made some of his best-known masterpieces as the Virgin of the Rocks (now in Paris, Louvre, then reproduced in the second version of London's National Gallery); the Portrait of a lady with ermine (Cecilia Gallerani) (Krakow); the project for the equestrian monument for Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's father; the wall painting with the Last dinner in the refectory of S. Maria delle Grazie in Milan (1495-98), a very degraded work but still very charming and extremely suggestive.
His intense activity went on also in the following years, which saw the return to Florence and a second stay in Milan: emblematic works of this period are the cartoon with S. Anna, the Madonna, the Child and S. Giovannino (London, National Gallery) and the linked painting (unfinished) that portrays S. Anna, the Madonna and the Child with the lamb (Paris, Louvre), where the blurred and airy landscape in the background can be linked with the one shown behind the famous Gioconda, the portrait to which Leonardo was always bound and which he brought also to France (where it was moved to the Louvre).
Before going to Rome to Pope Leone X (1513-1516), Leonardo, together with the young Michelangelo, received an important public order in Florence, the decoration of the Major Council room in Palazzo Vecchio. For this undertaking Leonardo realised the cartoon (and part of the painting) with the Battle of Anghiari, which has unfortunately been lost and is known only thanks to some copies, from which the extraordinary power and the dramatic excitement of the represented characters can be deduced. In the last years of his life, Leonardo moved to the court of the King of France Francis I, where he died in 1519.