Famous Artists

Throughout history, a handful of artists have invented entirely new ways of seeing and showing the world. Their paintings still astonish visitors in museums hundreds of years after they were made. Studying these artists is not just about memorising names and dates — it is about understanding how each one solved a problem, broke a rule, or captured a feeling that nobody had managed to capture before.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was not only a painter but also a scientist, engineer, and inventor. He studied human anatomy by dissecting bodies so he could paint people as accurately as possible. His most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is remarkable for her mysterious, almost-smiling expression and for the way Leonardo used sfumato — a smokily blended shading technique — to make her look like a real person and not a flat illustration. The Mona Lisa is the most visited painting in the world, kept behind bullet-proof glass in the Louvre museum in Paris.