LEONARDO DA VINCI - Born 1452,
Died 1519
His paintings, particularly the Mona Lisa, are known world wide.
He believed that new and better machines could be built if the designer
understood the workings of all the parts that went together to make the
whole machine.
As a scientist, Da Vinci helped set an ignorant and superstitious world
on a course of scientific experimentation, reason, and learning.
Da Vinci was probably best known as an artist.
He tried to find the “why” in the way things worked so others could
gain knowledge from his findings.
He defined and developed linear perspective in paintings, making his
paintings studies in mathematical proportion as well as art.
As an inventor, Leonardo designed various machines including a tank,
helicopter, parachute, catapult, machine gun, and many driven by
hydraulics.
He experimented with new techniques for making and applying
paint.
His artworks helped define the High Renaissance style.
Da Vinci's analytic, visionary, and
creative inventiveness has yet to
be matched. As a scientist, inventor, and artist, Leonardo da
Vinci
created ideas that we recognize and appreciate today.
He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he
left only a handful of completed paintings.
His curiosity led him to experiment
in forbidden areas, such as human anatomy.
He used his artistic
abilities to explain his scientific experiments and inventions, leaving
many notebooks for us to study.
He also created sculptures.
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He had a keen eye and quick mind that led him to make important
scientific discoveries, yet he never published his ideas.
Thus he applied his scientific discoveries to the method of designing
new machines; he was so successful that rulers commissioned him to
invent effective war equipment.
. . . , the most famous of which, a giant horse, could not be built
until
recently because the technology needed was not available at the time he
lived.
He even developed a method for channeling the course of the Adda River.
However, many
parts of his life remain as contradictions.
As a result, The Last Supper is in poor repair because he painted it on
a wall surface that began to disintegrate.
Yet he was also a man of great contrasts and contradictions.
He was a gentle vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he
worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons.
. . . , so he sometimes wrote his
notes backwards so people could not read what he had been doing.
He
carefully documented his experiments and observations, paving the way
for the scientific method used today.
He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian
Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings.
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