500th Anniversary of the Death of Leonardo da Vinci

An angelic figure from Andrea del Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ, the portion inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. Along the inner rim: upper left, the name "SAN MARINO"; curving from upper right to lower right, the commemorative inscription "LEONARDO" flanked by the dates "1519" and "2019". The "R" mintmark of the Rome mint appears lower right; the monogram of designer Uliana Pernazza is at centre left.

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most influential polymaths in European history. Born in 1452 in Tuscany, he produced a body of work that combined painting, anatomy, engineering and natural science in a unique way. His surviving paintings - including The Last Supper in Milan and the Mona Lisa, now in the Louvre - are among the most discussed works in the whole of Western art. What was formative was not only the result but the process: Leonardo worked through observation and experimentation, filling thousands of notebook pages with sketches, calculations and anatomical studies that were only fully understood centuries later. His early years in Florence in particular - first as an apprentice in Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop - laid the foundation for a visual language that decisively shaped the Renaissance.

San Marino, a microstate geographically and culturally closely tied to the Italian peninsula, draws with this issue on a shared cultural heritage. Leonardo da Vinci spent the last years of his life in France, where he died in 1519 at the court of King Francis I in Amboise - 500 years before this coin's year of issue, 2019. The anniversary of his death was marked across Europe with exhibitions and scholarly programmes, including a major show in Paris and retrospectives in Italy. San Marino honoured this anniversary with its own 2-euro commemorative coin, linking to Leonardo's significance as a figure of identification for the whole of Italy and Europe.