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The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior

The Intersecting Lives of Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped
Chapter One


Leonardo Learning

leonardo da vinci was born in 1452 in the hilly Tuscan country?side near the village of Vinci, some twenty miles west of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a twenty-six-year-old notary, who during Leonardo's childhood remained for the most part in Florence, pursuing a successful career. All that is known for certain of Leonardo's mother, Caterina, is that she was a twenty-five-year-old peasant girl, who may have been the daughter of a local woodcutter.

Few facts are known about Leonardo's early years and we have to rely upon occasional, often enigmatic, remarks made years later in his notebooks. A prime example is the comment made by Leonardo whilst he was writing on the flight of birds, in this case observing the flight of the fork-tailed kite, a bird that often flew over Vinci from the slopes of nearby Mount Albano:

Writing in such detail about the kite seems to be my destiny, since in the first memory of my child ... read full excerpt from: The Artist, The Philosopher, and the Warrior ebook