![[Leonardo da Vinci - The Last Supper]](leo1t.jpg)
so, leonardo da vinci had an early life of obviously overwhelming consequence especially for aspiring avant-garde architects and other professionally alliterative types, in vinci, a small town in tuscany which wasn't even in Italy then for there was no Italy then - not for another 400 when along came this garibaldi guy in a red shirt with some secret biscuit-making recipes - which is all a bit going off on a tangent of course, which should help bring in the stray mathematician picture buyer of course - but then maybe he/she would prefer a della francesca, just a thought!)
anyway, upon hitting his teenage years the boy leonardo moves just up the road to florence (his mom, once a local peasant girl called caterina but now half the gene string to the greatest all-round cool-dude genius ever to have graced the planet earth, having left years earlier) with his pa (a local notary), some brothers, and maybe a sister or two, who knows.
so the boy leonardo gets a cool job working in the verrocchio (read chanel, gucci, versace, you get the picture) interior design studio helping out with the odd painting here and there (see kneeling angel to the left in verrocchio's baptism of christ) - stayed there until he was 32 and then moved on to milan to work for some duke dude.
(milan was facilities management, military planning and munitions, catapults and cannon, anatomy and astronomy and mathematics, helicopter inventing and hydraulics, physics and optics and contrapposto and chiaroscuro, and the madonna of the rocks, and the last supper - amongst other things).
leonardo da vinci was 47 and the year 1499 when the french (sans helicopter gunships) happened to invade milan and win and he had to up sticks and move - first to mantua and then to venice but after a few months, back to florence where he painted the mona lisa and got mixed up with the borgias for a while. In 1506 he does a deal with the conquering french and moves back to milan - attempts another big horse statue and doodles prodigiously in notebooks, which he writes in mirror-code (for the young machiavelli was on the scene).
and yeah, there was this renaissance thing happening.
to rome in 1513 for 3 years with a medici, meeting pope n stuff, then in 1516 (the reformation was just kicking in - heady days) it was off to be housing consultant to king frank the first, of france.
died, cloux, near amboise, france, 1519
mafia connections: not known
todger size: small
& yeah, buy your leonardo da vinci art prints and canvas pictures and hang in the study with equanimity, and in the hallway with a modicum of aplomb
(but not in the bedroom, for obvious reasons, please!)