Leonardo Buys Birds Just to Set Them Free

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452, possibly in Anchiano near the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a notary and a peasant woman. He grew up to dissect corpses, design flying machines, and paint the most reproduced face in the world. The detail that keeps resurfacing in his biography is smaller than any of that. Giorgio Vasari, writing Leonardo's life story decades after his death, said he would stop wherever birds were sold in Florence, pay the asking price, and open the cages with his own hands. No page in Leonardo's own notebooks confirms the habit in his own words, so the story rests entirely on Vasari's account. It has outlived nearly everyone who might have contradicted it.