Leonardo da Vinci completed fewer than twenty paintings in his lifetime — a surprisingly small number for someone who lived to sixty-seven and worked for more than four decades. But once his notebooks are taken into account, perception changes. Packed with anatomical studies, hydraulic experiments, architectural plans, and mechanical designs, they reveal the truth: Leonardo wasn’t unproductive. He was relentless. And it is this breadth — the fusion of scientific rigour and artistic craft — that makes him, even five centuries later, one of the most culturally significant artists in Western tradition.
Selection of Leonardo da Vinci Drawings
A Craft Built in Layers
He was born in 1452 in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a notary named Ser Piero da Vinci and a peasant woman named Caterina. Illegitimacy barred him from following his father into law or medicine — the professions reserved for men of standing. It also, perhaps, freed him. Without a prescribed path, he followed curiosity wherever it led. He received no formal Latin education and was largely self-taught, a fact he was acutely aware of and which he wore as a point of distinction rather than deficiency. He described himself in his notebooks as an “uomo sanza lettere” — a man without letters — but the thousands of pages he left behind suggest a mind that had absorbed more than most formally educated men of his era.
Leonardo’s training began around 1466 in Florence, where he entered the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. Florence at the time was the intellectual and artistic centre of Europe, bankrolled by the Medici family whose patronage had turned the city into a hub for Renaissance ideas. It was an environment that rewarded cross-disciplinary ambition, and Leonardo thrived in it completely. Verrocchio’s studio was among the most demanding of its day — painters, sculptors, and metalworkers operated under the same roof, and standards were absolute. It was here that Leonardo mastered the fundamentals: oil and tempera technique, anatomical proportion and the mechanics of light. He learned, above all, to observe before he drew. His contribution to the Baptism of Christ — a collaborative work with Verrocchio — offers an early measure of his ability.
Legend holds that Leonardo painted the angel on the far left of the composition, and the contrast is stark: his figure, rendered with lightness and atmospheric softness, sits in an entirely different register from everything around it. Vasari, writing decades later, claimed Verrocchio put down his brush when he saw it and never painted again.
His earliest independent works — including The Annunciation and several religious compositions from the 1470s — show a painter finding his register. The figures are precise; the backgrounds already suggest depth through atmospheric haze rather than hard outline. The softening of edges, achieved through layered glazes and minute tonal gradation, would become his defining technical signature, later described by critics as sfumato.
The Science Behind the Brushwork
Leonardo’s visual precision was not intuitive — it was earned through systematic investigation. He went as far as performing dissections on human corpses, producing studies of the heart, musculature, skeletal structure, and foetal development that were more anatomically accurate than anything produced by his contemporaries. He is believed to have dissected over thirty human bodies, working in the mortuary of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later in Milan. The resulting drawings — over two hundred pages of anatomical studies — were so far ahead of contemporary medical understanding that they sat unexamined in private collections until long after his death.
His drawings were not ancillary to his painting practice; they were the foundation of it. His grasp of how light falls across a shoulder, how tension gathers in a forearm, how the face reorganises itself under strain — all of it was earned at the dissection table. The Vitruvian Man sits at the crossroads of these pursuits: at once a geometric proposition, an anatomical study, and a philosophical statement about the relationship between human proportion and the natural world.
The notebooks themselves are extraordinary objects. Leonardo wrote exclusively in mirror script — right to left, legible only when held to a glass — in a hand so distinctive it functioned as a kind of natural encryption. On a single page he might sketch a mechanical gear system, note the anatomy of a bird’s wing, draft a letter, and record an observation about the movement of water. The disciplines were not separated in his mind; they were facets of the same inquiry. He was also, by the standards of his time, an unusual figure in his personal habits: a vegetarian who reportedly bought caged birds simply to release them, and a man with little interest in the wealth or property that preoccupied most of his peers.
Milan and the Monumental Ambition
When Leonardo wrote to Ludovico Sforza in 1482 seeking employment at the Milanese court, he listed ten skills. Nine were military or engineering in nature — portable bridges, armoured vehicles, cannon, siege machines, naval weapons. Painting appeared almost as an afterthought, in the final line. The letter remains one of the most revealing documents in art history: it shows a man who understood that his value lay not in a single discipline but in the breadth of his capabilities. He departed Florence leaving the Adoration of the Magi unfinished — a commission he would never return to.
The move to Milan expanded the scale of his ambition. Working under Sforza, Leonardo took on commissions that demanded engineering as much as artistry. During these years he filled notebooks with designs for a flying machine based on the anatomy of birds; the aerial screw, a forerunner of the helicopter; an armoured vehicle recognisably related to the modern tank; hydraulic machines, a revolving bridge, and studies of water movement that would not be matched in scientific rigour for two centuries. None were built in his lifetime. All were eventually recognised as workable in principle.
The Last Supper, painted in the late 1490s on a refectory wall at Santa Maria delle Grazie, is perhaps the most studied compositional work in European art. Rather than conventional fresco, Leonardo applied tempera and oil directly to a dry prepared wall. The technique gave him more time and more control, but it also meant the work began to deteriorate within decades. Preservation has been a continuous effort ever since.
What survives is structurally extraordinary: twelve figures arranged in dynamic clusters of three, each responding to Christ’s announcement of betrayal with a distinct and psychologically specific gesture. The geometry is deliberate. Leonardo placed the vanishing point directly behind Christ’s head, drawing every architectural line in the room toward that single figure. The composition functions as theology, mathematics, and human drama simultaneously — a combination no painter before him had achieved at that scale.
Throughout the Milan years, Leonardo lived largely apart from conventional social life. There are no documented romantic relationships of any kind. He kept a small household, took on pupils, and worked. The isolation was not incidental; it was the condition under which the output became possible.
It was also during these years that Leonardo painted Lady with an Ermine — a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza. Compact in scale but extraordinary in execution, it remains the best-preserved of all his portraits. The sitter’s direct gaze, the precise rendering of the ermine’s fur, and the psychological tension between figure and animal place it among the most technically accomplished portraits of the fifteenth century.
The Florence Return
After political upheaval forced his return to Florence in the early 1500s, Leonardo began what would become his most scrutinised work. He also found himself, for the first time, in direct competition with another artist of comparable stature. Michelangelo was twenty-three years younger, already celebrated, and temperamentally his opposite — where Leonardo was detached and methodical, Michelangelo was volatile and prolific. The two were commissioned to paint opposing walls of the same room in the Palazzo della Signoria: Leonardo with the Battle of Anghiari, Michelangelo with the Battle of Cascina. Neither work survives in its final form. Leonardo, characteristically, experimented with a new technique for the Anghiari that failed under the heat used to dry it. What remains are copies and preparatory drawings — and those drawings alone influenced European painters for generations.
The portrait now known as the Mona Lisa was in progress by around 1503 and accompanied him for the rest of his life. It was not, by the standards of the time, a large or overtly ambitious painting. Its distinction lay in subtlety: a three-quarter pose then considered unconventional, a background landscape rendered in receding atmospheric perspective, and an expression that resists single interpretation. The sfumato around the eyes and mouth makes direct reading impossible — the mood shifts as the viewer moves. Leonardo never sold it. When he died in France in 1519, it was listed among his personal possessions.
This same Florentine period produced another work of comparable psychological complexity. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, now held at the Louvre, is unusual in its composition — three generations occupy a single intimate space, the figures arranged in a continuous diagonal of interlocking gestures. It is a painting about connection and succession rather than devotion in the conventional sense. Leonardo worked on it across many years and multiple preparatory cartoons, some of which survive and are themselves considered major works. The Burlington House Cartoon, held at the National Gallery in London, is among the finest drawings in existence.
Less familiar but equally revealing is La Scapigliata — “the dishevelled one” — a small unfinished study on wood from the same period. Because it was never completed, it offers something the finished paintings cannot: the sfumato technique visible at its most raw. The face reads with more psychological immediacy than almost anything else in the Leonardo canon. It is held at the Galleria Nazionale in Parma and is rarely discussed outside specialist circles.
A Final Statement
His final years, from 1516, were spent at Clos Lucé near the royal court of Francis I. The King provided him with a stipend, a house, and something rarer — genuine intellectual companionship. Francis reportedly visited Leonardo regularly through a tunnel connecting the two properties, and accounts suggest he valued the conversations as much as the art. It was an unusual arrangement: a monarch treating an ageing painter not as a craftsman to be commissioned but as a thinker to be listened to.
Leonardo produced no major new paintings in France, though he brought Saint John the Baptist with him — his last completed painting, and one of his most arresting. The figure emerges from a dark, undifferentiated background, one hand raised in a gesture that carries none of the solemnity expected of devotional art. The expression is ambiguous, even unsettling. As a closing statement from a painter of his stature, it is deliberately unresolved — as if Leonardo had decided that certainty was less interesting than suggestion. Francis I was reportedly present at his death in May 1519. Whether the account is literally true or later embellishment, it captures something accurate about the relationship: a king who understood that what he had in his court was not an artist, but an intellect of exceptional scope.
He refined manuscripts in his final years, continued anatomical studies, and returned to earlier drawings. His notebooks — around five thousand surviving pages — represent the intellectual output of a mind that fused observation with analysis.
Value, Rarity, and the Market for Leonardo
No Leonardo painting has appeared at public auction in modern times. His works are almost entirely held by state institutions — the Mona Lisa and Saint John the Baptist at the Louvre, the Last Supper in Milan, the Lady with an Ermine in Kraków, the Virgin of the Rocks and the Burlington House Cartoon at the National Gallery in London. That institutional lock on the primary market is effectively permanent. No government deaccessions a Leonardo. No estate sells one. The supply side of this market closed decades ago. The Lady with an Ermine, widely considered the best-preserved of all surviving Leonardo portraits, has not left institutional custody since entering the Czartoryski collection.
The one modern exception was Salvator Mundi, sold at Christie’s New York in 2017 for $450.3 million (approximately £352 million at the time) — the highest price ever achieved at auction for any work of art. Its attribution has since been contested by several leading scholars, which makes it the most instructive case study in the Leonardo market: at that price level, a question mark over authorship is not an academic footnote. It is a material risk.
For collectors, the realistic entry point is works on paper. Leonardo drawings do surface — rarely, and at significant prices. A red chalk study sold at Christie’s London in 2001 for over £8 million, a figure that would be considerably higher today given sustained demand and near-zero supply. Anatomical studies and preparatory sketches attract competition from museums, private foundations, and a small number of informed private buyers. Attribution remains the critical variable. Works confirmed by peer-reviewed catalogue raisonné command a substantial premium over those described with any ambiguity.
The related market segment — pieces from Leonardo’s workshop and works by his documented followers — offers a more accessible but still demanding category. Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Francesco Melzi, the two most significant figures in method and proximity, are central here. Boltraffio in particular absorbed the sfumato technique with more fidelity than any other pupil, and his portraits occasionally appear at major auction houses at prices that reflect that proximity. Compared to equivalent works by Raphael or Michelangelo followers, Leonardo-school material trades at a premium that has held consistently for two decades. The risks here — misattribution, condition issues, provenance gaps — are real and require specialist guidance before any acquisition.
The Case for Leonardo
Leonardo’s output did not follow the economics of the market — limited in volume, frequently unfinished, and spread across disciplines that had no common category. That has worked in his favour across five centuries. The scarcity is structural, not manufactured, and the cultural authority behind it has only deepened as his notebooks have been more fully understood. What began as admiration for the paintings has become recognition of something larger: a method of thinking that connected observation, science, and making in ways that still have no direct parallel.
The trajectory for Leonardo’s market is clear. Institutional holdings will not move. Works on paper will grow scarcer and more contested. And the premium attached to anything with a credible attribution will continue to widen. The foundation was laid five hundred years ago. Nothing in the current landscape suggests it is under any pressure.
Images credit (right hand side, top to bottom): Ginevra de’ Benci, c. 1474–1478, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC · Portrait of a Musician, c. 1486–1487, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan · La Belle Ferronnière, c. 1495–1497, Musée du Louvre, Paris · St Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1480–1490, Vatican Museums, Rome · Benois Madonna, c. 1478–1480, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg · Madonna of the Carnation, c. 1478–1480, Alte Pinakothek, Munich · Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, Bacchus, c. 1510–1515, Musée du Louvre, Paris
