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Leonardo Da Vinci was a Florentine artist and one of the great masters of the High Renaissance, who was also celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. His innovations in the field of painting influenced the course of Italian art for more than a century after his death, and his scientific studies particularly in the fields of anatomy, optics, and hydraulics anticipated many of the developments of modern science. He was born on April 15, 1452, in the small Tuscany town of Vinci, near Florence. He was the son of a wealthy Florentine notary and a peasant woman. In the mid-1460s the family settled in Florence, where Leonardo was given the best education and artistic education in the center of Italy. In 1466, he 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 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 the picture completed by Verrocchio and Da Vinci, the techniques are eminent. In 1472, he was entered in the painter's association of Florence, and in 1476 he is still mentioned as Ver