Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in Tuscany, to a notary father and a peasant mother who left her son with his natural father, who raised him along with his nine brothers and two sisters. The mother was forbidden to see her son. His grandfather was also a notary. Leonardo da Vinci did receive an education, but it was very limited: he learned to read in the vernacular and would only study Latin later, as an autodidact. It seems that Tuscan nature served as his mot

Nothing is given, everything is to be conquered, and the aspiration to the sublime is what we are allowed to experience in Florence: time has stopped there on good taste, on beauty "universal and without concept", as Emmanuel Kant would later say.