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→The life of Leonardo Da Vinci
Leonardo is recognized as making a unique contribution to the Renaissance, that period of time which saw the re-birth of learning and a move to a secular worldview. The Florentine artist and polymath made a decisive contribution to this epoch. He decisively influenced artistic trends in his own time and in the later Renaissance. His interest in science and experiment inspired many humanists to study the world and nature. While he was also a great inventor, but his inventions had little impact, on his own era.
====The life of Why was Leonardo Da Vinciimportant?====
[[File: Leonardo 3.png|200px|thumb|left|Drawing of Leonardo in old age]]
Leonardo was born in 1452, in the village of Vinci, outside the city of Florence. His father was a wealthy lawyer, and his mother was a peasant woman. His parents were not married, and Leonardo was illegitimate, which carried with it a great deal of social stigma at the time. He could not legally bear his father’s surname, and so he was named after his native village, Vinci.<ref> McCurdy, Edward. The mind of Leonardo da Vinci (London, Courier Corporation, 2013), p 4 </ref>
While he received little or no formal education as a child, at 15 he was apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio (1435–1488). He was one of the leading artists of his day and was a great influence on the young Leonardo, especially in his dynamic representations of the human figure. After the completion of his apprenticeship, he became an assistant to Verrocchio, and his extraordinary skills became well-known. His artistic style was considered to be extraordinarily original because of his unique use of light and shade. <ref>(McCurdy, p. 34)</ref> In either 1477/1488, Leonardo set up his studio and soon was receiving significant commissions.
In 1499, when the French invaded Italy, Leonardo fled the city and stayed in Venice. Here he was active as a military engineer and drew up plans to create a series of naval defenses. In 1500, Da Vinci, who was by now one of the most famous men in all of Italy, returned to his native Florence. Here he continued to work on several artistic projects, but he appears to have left many uncompleted. Many of the projects from this period are only known from Leonardo’s drawings, which are considered to be masterpieces. In 1506, Leonardo worked for a time as a military engineer for the notorious Cesare Borgia, who was ruthlessly carving a state for himself out of Papal lands in central Italy.
