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He would remain in Vinci, living mainly on the estate of his paternal grandparents, until the age of twelve, when he moved into the home of his father in Florence.

Having no formal education other than a bit of rudimentary mathematical training at an abacus school, he was in need of a trade to support himself.

Left-handed, he taught himself to write in mirror script, from right to left across the page.

He executed his first drawings in the same manner, with a distinctive right-to-left upward cross-hatching.

His father showed some of the drawings to Andrea del Verrocchio, a friend and client who operated one of Florence’s most highly regarded workshops, and Verrocchio agreed to take the boy on as an apprentice.

The Republic of Florence was then the epicenter of a great artistic and intellectual reawakening—a movement that would later be referred to as the Renaissance—and Verrocchio’s busy workshop churned out paintings and other works of art for the city-state’s increasingly wealthy elite.

His apprentices, including young Leonardo da Vinci, lived in rooms upstairs and received rigorous artistic training in return for their services.

The exercises included countless hours of drapery studies, which the pupils executed on linen, with only black and white paint.

Leonardo, through his use of chiaroscuro, mastered the ability to create the illusion of three-dimensionality.

His most revolutionary achievement, though, was sfumato , the hazy blurring of edges and transitions in color that would become the defining trait of his art.

“Your shadows and light should be blended,” he would later write, “in the manner of smoke losing itself on the air.”

He much preferred his feather quill and his notebooks, carrying a small one with him always as he walked the streets of Florence.

Muscular in build and fine in appearance, he was a witty and charming conversationalist and by all accounts generous to a fault.

His clothing was colorful, usually a combination of dusty rose and dark purple, and unlike most Florentine men of his day, the hem of his gowns reached only his knee.

It was no secret in Florence that, like his rival Botticelli, he was sexually attracted to men.

He was once accused of engaging in sodomy with a male prostitute—a charge that might have landed him in prison had the case not been dismissed—and several boys of unsettling beauty served as apprentices in his workshop.

Eight days before his death, with the help of a local notary, he drew up his last will and testament.

To Francesco Melzi, whom he regarded as his adopted son and rightful heir, he left most of his possessions, including his money, notebooks, and “all the instruments and portraits pertaining to his art and calling as a painter.” His lover and longtime assistant Salaì received only a share of a vineyard near Milan, which Ludovico Sforza had given to Leonardo as payment for the fresco that was by then falling into disrepair.

Salaì, who was no doubt jealous over the affection shown to his rival Melzi, helped himself to several of his master’s paintings.

Just five years later Salaì would be dead too, killed by a crossbow during still another French siege of Milan.

An inventory of his estate would record that he had twelve paintings in his possession, including the portrait of the Florentine noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo.

A seventeenth-century inventory of the French royal collection would reveal that King Francois I paid four thousand gold crowns for it, though neither the date of the transaction nor the other party to the sale was recorded.

His Majesty was so enthralled with his new acquisition that he hung it in his extravagant bathroom in the Palace of Fontainebleau, where it suffered the ravages of steam and heat.

In a misguided attempt to undo the damage, a royal restorer—perhaps the Dutch artist Jean de Hoey, perhaps his son Claude—covered the painting with a thick coat of lacquer, which destroyed Leonardo’s original colors and created a spider’s web of distinctive surface cracks.

Placed on public display in the Louvre in 1797, the painting was admired mainly by members of the intelligentsia.

It was not until its shocking theft in August 1911 that Leonardo’s masterpiece, the Mona Lisa , would achieve worldwide fame.

But what about the other paintings that devilish Salaì removed from the chateau at Amboise during the twilight of Leonardo’s life?

Or the works bequeathed to Francesco Melzi?

Or the works that doubtless slipped from Leonardo’s studios in Florence and Milan?

Were they all accounted for, or had a handful of paintings—perhaps as many as five—been lost to the mists of time?

A legion of so-called Leonardists believed that to be the case and were scouring the globe in search of them.

Gabriel, for his part, had never come across a painting he believed to be a lost Leonardo.

Nor, he had to admit, had he ever given the matter much thought.

Until half past two that same afternoon, when Antonio Calvesi, chief of painting conservation at the Vatican Museums, showed him a photograph of Madonna and Child with John the Baptist , oil on walnut panel, 78 by 56 centimeters, perhaps eighteenth century, perhaps by an imitator of Raphael.