LEONARDO DA VINCI - Born 1452, Died 1519.

Leonardo da Vinci’s genius was unbounded by time and technology. He was the foremost thinker of his time, producing works and ideas that are fascinating even today.  He was one of the greatest scientists of recorded history, as well as a great inventor and artist.  Yet he was also a man of great contrasts and contradictions.

As a scientist, Da Vinci helped set an ignorant and superstitious world on a course of scientific experimentation, reason, and learning. He tried to find the “why” in the way things worked so others could gain knowledge from his findings.   He carefully documented his experiments and observations, paving the way for the scientific method used today.  His curiosity led him to experiment in forbidden areas, such as human anatomy, so he sometimes wrote his notes backwards so people could not read what he had been doing. He had a keen eye and quick mind that led him to make important scientific discoveries, yet he never published his ideas.

As an inventor, Leonardo designed various machines including a tank, helicopter, parachute, catapult, machine gun, and many driven by hydraulics. He even developed a method for channeling the course of the Adda River.  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. 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.  He was a gentle vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons.

Da Vinci was probably best known as an artist.  His paintings, particularly the Mona Lisa, are known world wide.  He defined and developed linear perspective in paintings, making his paintings studies in mathematical proportion as well as art. He experimented with new techniques for making and applying paint.  As a result, The Last Supper is in poor repair because he painted it on a wall surface that began to disintegrate.  He used his artistic abilities to explain his scientific experiments and inventions, leaving many notebooks for us to study. He also created sculptures, 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.  His artworks helped define the High Renaissance style. He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings.   

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.  However, many parts of his life remain as contradictions.