The Last Page: Leonardo da Vinci Dies, 1519

On May 2, 1519, in a manor house in the Loire Valley, the most curious mind of the Renaissance closed his notebooks for the last time. Leonardo da Vinci died at Clos Lucé, near Amboise, France, at the age of 67 — a painter who left behind fewer than twenty paintings, and a scientist who never published a single page of his research.

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in the Tuscan town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant woman. As a boy he was apprenticed to the Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio, and his talent bloomed so fast that legend says Verrocchio, seeing the angel his teenage pupil had painted in The Baptism of Christ, laid down his own brushes for good.

But painting was only the beginning. Leonardo filled thousands of pages with studies written in mirror-image script — read right to left, as if for a mirror — covering anatomy, flying machines, water systems, botany, optics, and weapons. He dissected human bodies to map muscles and veins. He designed a helicopter centuries before flight, a tank, a parachute, and bridges that could be built in a day. He was, as his contemporaries called him, a man of "unquenchable curiosity and feverishly inventive imagination."

His painting output was famously small — only about 17 completed works survive — because he was a perfectionist who often abandoned commissions to chase a new idea. Yet among them are two of the most famous images in all of art: The Last Supper in Milan (1495–97) and the Mona Lisa, painted around 1503–06, whose half-smile still draws millions to the Louvre each year.

In 1516, at 64, Leonardo accepted an invitation from King Francis I of France and crossed the Alps, carrying his notebooks and the Mona Lisa with him. He never returned to Italy. The king gave him the manor of Clos Lucé, connected by an underground passage to the royal château at Amboise, where the young king could visit his aging genius. Leonardo spent his final three years there, studying and organizing his papers.

His will asked that sixty beggars follow his coffin in procession. The artist Giorgio Vasari later wrote that Francis I, who had become a close friend, held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died — a story historians debate, but one that captures how deeply the king valued him. Francis is said to have declared that "there had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo."

Why it matters: Leonardo died 500 years ago, yet his notebooks still feel like dispatches from the future. He treated art and science as one subject, and curiosity as a duty. In an age of specialization, the "Renaissance man" he became remains the model for thinking without borders.

Painting: Leonardo da Vinci, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).