LEONARDO DA VINCI's EARLY LIFE
Leonardo da Vinci was born in the small town of Vinci, in Tuscany, near Florence. Da Vinci was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid-1460s the family settled in Florence, where Leonardo da Vinci was given the best education that Florence, a major intellectual and artistic center of Italy, could offer. Leonardo da Vinci rapidly advanced socially and intellectually. Da Vinci was handsome, persuasive in conversation, and a fine musician and improviser. About 1466 Leonardo da Vinci was apprenticed as a garzone (studio boy) to Andrea Del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his day. In Verrocchio's workshop Leonardo da Vinci was introduced to many activities, from the painting of altarpieces and panel pictures to the creation of large sculptural projects in marble and bronze. In 1472 da Vinci was entered in the painter's guild of Florence, and in 1476 he was still considered Verrocchio's assistant. In Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ, in 1470, the kneeling angel at the left of the painting is by Leonardo da Vinci. In 1478 Leonardo da Vinci became an independent master. Da Vinci's first commission, to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florentine town hall, was never started. Leonardo da Vinci's first large painting, The Adoration of the Magi, which he started in 1481 and was never completed, was ordered for the Monastery of San Donato a Scopeto, Florence.

The first known biography of Leonardo da Vinci was published in 1550 by Giorgio Vasari who wrote Vite de' piu eccelenti architettori, pittori e scultori italiani ("The lives of the most excellent Italian architects, painters and sculptors"), and later became an independent painter in Florence. Most of the information collected by Vasari was from first-hand accounts of Leonardo's contemporaries (Vasari was only a child when Leonardo died), and it remains the first reference in studying Leonardo da Vinci's life.

Until recently, it was thought that Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a local peasant woman known as Caterina; now some evidence indicates that Caterina may have been a Middle Eastern Slave. Da Vinci's biological father appears to have been a Florentine notary or craftsman named Piero da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci's mother was married off to one Antonio di Piero del Vacca, a labourer employed by his biological father. According to papers recently found by the Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci in his home town of Vinci, the marriage occurred just a few months after she gave birth to a boy called Leonardo. Even though he was born after modern naming conventions came into use, he was simply known as "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", which simply means "Leonardo, son of Piero, from Vinci". Leonardo da Vinci signed his works "Leonardo" or "Io, Leonardo" ("I, Leonardo").

Leonardo da Vinci grew up with his father Piero in Florence where he started drawing and painting. Da Vinci started school when he was 5 years old. Da Vinci's early sketches were of such quality that his father soon showed them to the painter Andrea del Verrocchio, who subsequently took on the fourteen-year old Leonardo da Vinci as an apprentice. In this role, Leonardo also worked with Lorenzo di Credi and Pietro Perugino.

But the greatest of all Andrea's pupils was Leonardo da Vinci, in whom, besides a beauty of person never sufficiently admired and a wonderful grace in all his actions, there was such a power of intellect that whatever he turned his mind to he made himself master of with ease.