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50 free Leonardo Da Vinci trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Leonardo da Vinci left fewer than 25 major paintings, two of them the most famous pictures on Earth, plus 13,000 pages of notebooks written backwards in mirror script and stuffed with anatomy, flying machines, fossils and friction laws that nobody read for centuries. He was born illegitimate in a Tuscan hill town, trained under Verrocchio, served the Sforzas and Cesare Borgia, and died in the arms, legend says, of the King of France. This quiz covers the painter, the engineer and the man. Easy questions ask about the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and Vitruvian Man. Harder ones want the master who supposedly put down his brush after seeing his pupil's angel, the horse that became a cannon, the reason The Last Supper began flaking within a century, the meaning of Salaì's nickname, the mechanical lion built for Francis I, the codex owned by Bill Gates, the price Salvator Mundi fetched in 2017 and what a 19th-century excavation found in the chapel at Amboise. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Leonardo da Vinci, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for art and history teachers, students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Renaissance Art and History, Famous Painters and Inventions.
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Q 01Which Paris museum refused to move the Mona Lisa even into its own 2019 Leonardo blockbuster?
The Louvre
The portrait was left in its usual gallery because of the demand from ordinary visitors.
Q 02The Last Supper shows the consternation just after Jesus has said what?
"One of you will betray me"
It is the most reproduced religious painting of all time.
Q 03Which of Leonardo's drawings, a study of human proportions, is a cultural icon in its own right?
Vitruvian Man
It is owned by the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, which fought a legal battle over lending it to the Louvre in 2019.
Q 04Near which Tuscan hill town, about 35 km from Florence, was Leonardo born on 15 April 1452?
Vinci
Local tradition puts the birth in the hamlet of Anchiano, private enough for an illegitimate child.
Q 05What was the profession of Leonardo's father, Ser Piero?
Legal notary
He fathered Leonardo out of wedlock with Caterina di Meo Lippi; both parents married other people the following year.
Q 06How many half-siblings did Leonardo eventually have from his father's four marriages and his mother's?
16
The last was born when he was 46; he had very little contact with any of them.
Q 07In his earliest memory, what bird did Leonardo recall opening his mouth with its tail in his cradle?
A kite
He recorded it in the Codex Atlanticus while writing about the flight of birds; Freud later made much of it.
Q 08In whose Florentine workshop did Leonardo train from around the age of 14?
Andrea del Verrocchio
The workshop taught everything from metallurgy and plaster casting to drawing and sculpture.
Q 09Per Vasari, what did Verrocchio do after seeing Leonardo's angel in The Baptism of Christ?
Put down his brush and never painted again
The claim is probably apocryphal, but the young angel and much of the landscape do show Leonardo's hand in oil.
Q 10Per Vasari, what did Leonardo paint on a shield that so terrified his father he sold it?
A fire-spitting monster inspired by Medusa
A Florentine dealer paid 100 ducats and sold it on to the Duke of Milan.
Q 11Which body, for artists and doctors of medicine, admitted Leonardo as a master in 1472?
The Guild of Saint Luke
He nonetheless kept collaborating and living with Verrocchio.
Q 12What is Leonardo's earliest known dated work, from 1473?
A pen-and-ink drawing of the Arno valley
He is also said to have been the first to suggest making the Arno a navigable channel between Florence and Pisa.
Q 13What charge did the 24-year-old Leonardo and three others face in 1476, then dismissed?
An accusation of sodomy
Q 21Which Florentine woman's portrait, begun in 1503, became Leonardo's most famous painting?
Lisa del Giocondo
The portrait's Italian name, La Gioconda, means "the laughing one".
Q 22What is the smoky shading technique for which Leonardo's most famous portrait is renowned called?
Sfumato
The word means "Leonardo's smoke"; the subtly shadowed corners of mouth and eyes make the smile impossible to pin down.
Q 23Which mural did Leonardo paint in the Palazzo Vecchio in 1505 while a great rival got the opposite wall?
The Battle of Anghiari
Michelangelo was given the Battle of Cascina; Leonardo's work deteriorated rapidly and is known today from a copy by Rubens.
One of the accused was related to Lorenzo de' Medici, which may explain the dismissal.
Q 14Which Milanese ruler did Leonardo serve from 1482 to 1499?
Ludovico Sforza
The letter mentioned almost as an afterthought that he could paint; he brought a silver lyre shaped like a horse's head.
Q 15What became of the bronze intended for Leonardo's giant equestrian monument, the Gran Cavallo, in 1494?
It was used to cast a cannon
Ludovico gave the metal to his brother-in-law to defend Milan against Charles VIII; only the clay model was ever finished.
Q 16For the refectory of which Milan convent was The Last Supper commissioned?
Santa Maria delle Grazie
The prior hounded Leonardo over his pace until the artist threatened to use him as the model for Judas.
Q 17Why did The Last Supper deteriorate so rapidly that it was called "completely ruined" within a century?
He used tempera on a gesso ground instead of fresco
The surface proved subject to mould and flaking.
Q 18Who is the presumed sitter for Lady with an Ermine?
Cecilia Gallerani
She was the lover of Ludovico Sforza; the head turned away from the torso was unusual when most portraits were still in rigid profile.
Q 19Which Divina proportione author fled Milan with Leonardo in 1500 and taught him mathematics?
Luca Pacioli
Leonardo drew the skeletal regular solids that illustrate the book, published in 1509.
Q 20Which notorious son of Pope Alexander VI hired Leonardo as chief military engineer and architect in 1502?
Cesare Borgia
Leonardo won the job with a remarkably modern town plan of Imola.
Q 24What did Leonardo sit on a committee to decide in January 1504?
Where to place Michelangelo's David
The two artists were rivals; a year later they were painting opposite walls of the same hall.
Q 25What does the nickname of Leonardo's assistant Salaì mean?
"The Little Unclean One", i.e. the devil
Leonardo called him a thief, a liar, stubborn and a glutton, yet kept him for thirty years.
Q 26Which pupil, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, became Leonardo's favourite student and principal heir?
Francesco Melzi
He inherited the paintings, tools, library and the notebooks he spent decades trying to publish.
Q 27Which king invited Leonardo to France in 1516 and installed him at Clos Lucé near Amboise?
Francis I
The king visited often, and Leonardo built him a mechanical lion that opened its chest to reveal lilies.
Q 28What did Leonardo's mechanical lion do when struck by a wand during a pageant for the French king?
Opened its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies
The lily was the emblem of the French crown.
Q 29What ailment, confirmed by a 1517 visitor, may explain why Leonardo left his most famous portrait unfinished?
A paralysed right hand
A drawing by Figino shows the elderly artist with his right arm wrapped in clothing.
Q 30According to Vasari, who held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died on 2 May 1519?
King Francis I
The story may be legend; sixty beggars carrying tapers followed his casket, as his will requested.