He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine lawyer and property owner. His artistic bent obviously appeared at an early age for when he was 15 he was apprenticed to the painter Verocchio. In 1472 he was accepted in the painters guild in Florence, where he remained until 1481. ________2_________. "And among his early drawings were many sketches of mechanical apparatus and weapons, evidence of his interest in, and knowledge of things mechanical."________3_________.His artistic achievements in Milan reached their peak with the mural The Last Supper completed in 1497.________4_______.In the 1490s he began monumental treatises on painting, architecture, human anatomy and mechanics. He set down his observations on these themes in voluminous notes and sketches, which he would later assemble in his notebooks. There remain of his notebooks a prodigious 7000 pages, all in characteristic mirror-writing.________5_______. He then went back to Milan and entered the service of the French King Louis XII. Later he was to work in Rome with Raphael and Michelangelo on designs for the new church of St Peter. In 1516 he settled in France, at Cloux, near Amboise, where he died three years later.______6___. He was no mere theorist advancing fanciful ideas. He was a practical man, who designed things that would work, because he could see how they would work. _____7_______.There is no evidence that Leonardo actually built the machines and mechanical devices he sketched and described. And in many cases their practical importance remained unrealized and unrealizable for centuries. There was neither the demand for them nor the technology.