Leonardo da Vinci was a man of his own time and place, a genius to be sure, but also an individual whose talents very much developed in the context of late fifteenth-century Italian culture. In addition to a small number of paintings, Leonardo's legacy includes numerous notebooks, comprising about 6000 individual sheets. Writing in mirror fashion from right to left, Leonardo created complete treatises, and also recorded thousands of random observations and notations of various kinds, interspersed with hundreds of drawings. His notebooks contain studies of machines and mechanics, water and its motion, flight, human anatomy, painting and perspective, bronze casting, architecture, and many observations of the natural world. The master was also an engineer who was fascinated by machines and new inventions, and was himself an inventor - at least on paper.

One of the most essential features of Leonardo's social world involved the separate paths followed by those bound for the university and those who became craftsmen. University instruction was carried out entirely in Latin. Male children bound for higher studies attended Latin school or were taught Latin privately by a tutor. In contrast, those headed for craftwork often received an elementary education in reading, writing, and calculating, but then entered a workshop as an apprentice. Painting and sculpture were considered artisanal trades, similar to ironmaking and carpentry. These trades, called "mechanical arts," were governed by guilds, and were accorded lower status than the liberal arts of the universities.

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