Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the most resplendent figure in the history of the human race — in person, distinguished and strong; in bearing, generous and gentle; in intellect, a giant; in art, the most perfect painter who ever held a brush.

During his lifetime his presence stirred people to wonder and admiration, and to conjectures on his marvelous power. When he walked through the streets of Milan, his long fair hair crowned with a black cap, and his blond beard flowing down over his favorite rose-colored tunic, passers-by drew aside, and whispered to one another, "There he goes to paint The Last Supper!" He would travel from his house across the whole length of the city to work on the picture, mount the scaffold, add two or three touches of colour, and then go away; at other times he would paint in the deepest concentration from morning till night, without food or drink.

Leonardo was also an artist in warfare, and pressed by all sorts of demands, entered the service of Cesare Borgia, who was chief military engineer.

Profoundly religious, he was the enemy of superstition and magic. Disillusioned and skeptical, ceaselessly inquiring into the operations of all phenomena, he was at the same time, a poet who loved all outward shapes and forms — children, stern old men, enchanting women, horses, flowers, mountains and moving waters — and who tracked every outward manifestation of life down to the secret source of its energy.

He saw no essential difference between art and science; his mind was serene, strikingly deliberate, realistic, and endlessly experimental, and yet filled with the artist's delight in the making of new things. He put no trust in inspiration or momentary impulses; he was a master of calculations, a thoroughly modern man, superbly conscious in his method and perfectly balanced in his procedures. He was never able to create spontaneously. He painted but few pictures, and those after infinite reflections and readjustments.

But in the completeness of his knowledge and in his conception of the world and the whole celestial system as one vast design, he came closer to universality than any other men.

Leonardo was born in the village of Vinci, a few miles west of Florence. He was an illegitimate, his mother being a peasant girl of sixteen who, for a consideration, surrendered her child and became the wife of a craftsman. His first years were spent among the mountains of his grandfather's country estate; at the age of thirteen he was received in his father's house at Florence. The young Leonardo was extraordinarily precocious. When a boy, he displayed his abilities in many directions, in mathematics, music, and every branch of design. He played the lute, improvising both words and music. He modeled figures in bas-relief, and made drawings of faces, animals, and flowers. His father, a fashionable lawyer, showed some of his drawings to his friend, Verrocchio, and so astonished was that master at the quality of work that he accepted the boy immediately as his pupil. He remained in Verrocchio's workshop from his thirteenth to his twenty-fifth year, a time of learning rather than accomplishment. His famewas rising and he was by common consent the most richly gifted and enviable young man in Italy.

From 1478 to 1483, his first years as an independent artist, he supported himself by painting, He lived not sumptuously but well, keeping servants and horses.

In his thirtieth year, he entered the service of the Duke of Milan. He was engaged as general constructionist and court utilitarian. He had an assured living; was free to come and go as he pleased; and his obligations to the Duke did not interrupt his scientific studies. He assisted in the completion of the Cathedral, acted as hydraulic engineer, built canals, and invented the machine gun and breech-loading cannon.

During this period in Milan, Leonardo began to revise and collate his copious notebooks which constituted a repository of incalculable scientific researches. But other duties continually interfered and he was never able to give his papers anything like systematic arrangement. As a consequence, we have today, dispersed in European libraries, 5,000 manuscript pages of unclassified reflections. They reveal one of the finest brains ever put in human head.

In geology he established the law of petrifaction. He was aware of the circulation of the blood. He invented the military tank, hydrophonic devices for communication among ships. He described the flight of birds and made drawings of a "bird-man" and of aeroplanes driven by a propeller attached to a spring motor. He worked out every possible type of domed architecture and designed cupola for St. Peter's, sixty years before Michelangelo. He planned hygienic cities with underground avenues flushed by canals, and houses limited in height to the width of the streets. He had a cure for seasickness — the list is endless.

In his notes devoted to painting, Leonardo deals with the fundamental values of art, presenting the subject both scientifically and in the universal terms of God and man. It took him three years to paint The Last Supper. This masterpiece was finished in 1497. The painting immediately lifted him above his contemporaries, and throughout the ages has remained the most famous picture in the world.

We next hear of him in Venice where he invented diving bell and swimming belt, and at the opening of the new century he was in Florence again, deep in geometry and anatomy, and painting little.

The Mona Lisa shines out among the portraits of the world like a star. Though time has appreciably impaired the colour of the picture, the glory of it increases with the passing of years. The canvas hangs in the Louvre, a veritable shrine attracting pilgrims from every land.

In his later years, he journeyed to France, invited thither by Francis I, one of his warmest admirers. Comfortably lodged in a chateau in Touraine, he was at peace with the world. His hands were paralyzed and he could not paint. He died on the first of May 1519, in his sixty-seventh year.