Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo finished very little. That is the first thing to understand about him. A few dozen paintings survive, several unfinished, against thousands of pages of notebooks filled with anatomy, water, flight, gearing and the occasional shopping list.

What he did finish changed how paint could describe a face. Sfumato, the smoky transition between tones with no visible edge, is why the Mona Lisa’s expression refuses to settle. He built it up in translucent layers so thin that analysis still struggles to count them.

The Last Supper was an experiment that failed technically, painted in tempera on dry plaster rather than true fresco, and it began deteriorating within his lifetime. He worked for the Sforza in Milan, for Cesare Borgia as a military engineer, and ended his life in France under François I. The anatomical drawings, made from dissections he performed himself, were centuries ahead of anything published.