Leonardo da Vinci was born out of wedlock in 1452, a status that, under the social rules of his time, barred him from attending university or entering many respected professions such as law or medicine. He was apprenticed instead to a painter's workshop in Florence, one of the few paths open to him, where he learned drawing, sculpture, and the technical craft of preparing pigments and materials.
Rather than confining himself to painting alone, he filled thousands of pages of private notebooks with detailed studies of anatomy, engineering, water flow, botany, and mechanics — dissecting human and animal bodies himself to understand muscles and bone structure with an accuracy far ahead of the medical knowledge of his era.
Among his sketches were designs for devices that would not become practical technology for centuries: parachutes, armored vehicles, and flying machines modeled on the flight of birds, none of which he could actually build with the materials and engineering available to him at the time.
He completed relatively few paintings in his lifetime, often leaving works unfinished as his curiosity pulled him toward the next question, yet the small number he did complete, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, remain among the most studied and recognized artworks in history.