Leonardo da Vinci

Statue of Leonardo da Vinci in Tuscany, Italy.

Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 - May 2, 1519) Italian architect, anatomist, sculptor, engineer, inventor, mathematician, musician, painter and Renaissance humanist.

Born and raised in Vinci, Italy, Leonardo is famous for his beautiful painting of the Mona Lisa. But painting was by no means Leonardo’s greatest accomplishment. He imagined hundreds of devices that are still used today and were years ahead of their times, such as a bicycle, a submarine, a self-propelling car, a steam engine, a clock, and machine tools. Leonardo sketched these inventions and hundreds more in special notebooks, where he wrote his notes backwards so they could only be read using a mirror.

Another of Leonardo’s famous ideas could be found his sketches and ideas of “flying machines.” Although at the time the idea of flying seemed like a fantasy, little did Leonardo know his ideas would, hundreds of years later, become a reality.

The website The Legacy Project states concerning Leonaro da Vinci:

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A genius by every conceivable measure, Leonardo Da Vinci envisioned the first airplane, conceptualized a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull – and plate tectonics – while advancing the study of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics – all detailed centuries before modern science would prove him right. Though born out-of-wedlock and the recipient of only a modest education, Da Vinci was gifted with an insatiable curiosity about how things worked. He indulged his fascination with nature, and honed his considerable artistic gifts, by capturing in exquisite detail virtually every aspect of the world around him in hundreds of notebooks. Through his studies of light and shadow, his mastery of perspective drawing, and his experiments with pigment and media, Da Vinci perfected a muted style of portraiture that produced reflected depth through the application of thousands of nearly transparent - but slightly tinted - brushstrokes. Notorious in his own time for having far more unfinished artistic works than completed commissions, Da Vinci is nonetheless considered to be the greatest artist of all time; with his Last Supper and Mona Lisa among the most famous paintings ever created.^[1]

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