Who Was Leonardo da Vinci, and How Can His Curiosity Inspire a Child?

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 in Anchiano, a small hamlet near the town of Vinci, the son of a notary and a young peasant woman who never married. Being born outside marriage at that time meant being excluded from many traditional paths, including university and the notarial profession his father might otherwise have passed on to him; perhaps that exclusion gave him a freedom few other children of his time could enjoy.

While still young, he moved with his father to Florence, where he entered the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the city's most highly regarded artists. There he learnt to paint, sculpt, work with metal and build machines, remaining in the workshop for years before beginning to work independently.

He was left-handed and wrote from right to left, so his pages are easiest to read in a mirror. For centuries people believed he did this to conceal his secrets, but the simplest explanation is that writing in this direction allowed him to avoid smudging the ink with his hand as it moved across the page. That mirror writing is still one of the details that most intrigues children when they discover Leonardo's story.

And it was in his notebooks, thousands of pages now known as the Codices, that Leonardo recorded the workings of his mind. He was not simply an artist who painted: he observed the flight of birds and designed machines capable of gliding, studied the human body to understand how muscles and the heart worked, and imagined river defences, revolving bridges, mechanisms and even a mechanical knight that could move by itself. During those years he also drew the Vitruvian Man, the human figure enclosed within a circle and a square, which is still recognised everywhere, from schoolbooks to coins. Many of his ideas remained on paper because the materials or techniques needed to build them did not yet exist, but they reveal how he saw the world: as an immense mechanism to be understood piece by piece.

Of all his works, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa remain the best known around the world. He painted The Last Supper between 1495 and 1499 on a wall in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, while working for Duke Ludovico Sforza; a few years later, after returning to Florence, he began the portrait we now call the Mona Lisa, carrying it with him for the rest of his life and continuing to refine it. Today that small painting hangs in the Louvre in Paris, behind glass that protects it from the millions of visitors who come to see it each year.

He died on 2 May 1519 in Amboise, France, where he had moved at the invitation of King Francis I. Francesco Melzi remained beside him until the end, and Leonardo left all his drawings and notes to this devoted pupil; without that decision, we would probably know far less about his mind today.

Introducing Leonardo to a child does not mean listing his inventions, but showing them someone who never stopped asking questions, who could watch a falling leaf or a whirlpool in a river and want to understand why it moved that way. What happens when we let a child ask the same question without giving them the answer immediately?

The book "Leonardo Da Vinci", subtitled "The Boy Who Imagined the Future", tells this story to the youngest readers in the Little Great Heroes series.