Facts you did not know about Leonardo da Vinci

• Leonardo Da Vinci was born near Florence in Italy in 1452.
• Leonardo’s parents were not married and therefore he did not have a family name just Da Vinci meaning from Vinci.
• Leonardo was the son of a notary Pietro and a peasant woman Caterina who never married.
• Even from childhood he was fascinated by water properties and movement, and he was spending time looking at waterfalls at a mill and he noticed the waves produced by throwing  stone in a lake thinking the sound is similarly transmitted through air.

• He was studying and observing the birds and he was trying to understand in what way their anatomy helps them fly. He noticed some birds have bones filled with air.

Animal lover

• Da Vinci was a huge animal lover, and he was a vegetarian. He was having his room filled with animals alive or stuffed such as lizards, snakes, bats, mouses or birds. He was studying them, and he was especially fascinated by birds trying to understand their how would they be able to fly.
• Leonardo was left-handed. He was ambidextrous when painting and he was doing two separate things with both hands many times.

Self educated

• Leonardo obviously had an amazing mind but believe it or not he never went to school! He was self-educated and at the age of 14 was given for training to Andrea del Verrocchio.
• He was sent to Florence to serve as an apprentice for Andrea del Verrocchio and he was classmate with Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. After da Vinci painted one of the angels in Verrocchio’s work “The Baptism of Christ,” the much more experienced artist was so humbled by the young man’s talent that he vowed never to paint again.

Chef

• He was running an auberge at some point and he was a chef creating rich food dishes but because his customers were not that interested in rich food, he abandoned the project. Leonardo started this auberge with his old friend from Andrea Del Verrocchio painting school , Sandro Botticelli.
• The name of his auberge was “The three frogs of Sandro and Leonardo”. He tried innovations in fine dining,  but these were too advanced and did not make him famous.

He carried La Gioconda for ten years

• The Mona Lisa is a portrait of the wife of a Florentine official, but same believe it was a self-portrait with hidden messages.
• He carried Mona Lisa with him for 10 years, until his death, and he was doing touch ups every now and then, improving his art until his last day.
• He lived and worked in Florence, Milan, Rome and  Amboise, France.
• Many of his works are unfinished. He stated: “Art is never finished, only abandoned”. He was looking for perfection in his paintings and he was having so many interests and because of that he let unfinished many paintings. He was always trying to innovate the colors and his painting technique, and he was complicating his life even though he stated : “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Scientist

• He is known as a famous painter, but he left behind very few paintings, he had much more interest in studying anatomy, engineering, building military weapons, studying birds, and trying to make humans fly.
• He discovered that Earth is much older than the Bible stated, and he tried to give a better explanation for fossils than the bible flood theory.

Charged for sodomy

• He was persecuted at some point.
• When da Vinci was young, he was arrested along with several male companions on charges of sodomy. When no witnesses came forward to testify against the artist and his friends, the charges were dropped.
• In 15th century Florence, sodomy was a crime punishable by death. Not long after his case was dismissed, the artist left Florence for Milan.
• He was single and he is not known to have had any significant other, maybe his love for science and knowledge was absorbing him.

War machines engineer

• Leonardo designed numerous “war devices.” Included in da Vinci’s sketchbooks are plans for cannons, smoke machines, portable bridges, and even tanks or armored vehicles; he designed an automatic gun machine, and he improved  the crossbow or medieval fortifications. He designed bridges for sieges and catapults. In his attempts to understand water circuit on Earth, he designed canals surrounding Venice that , if opened could flood the city in case of warfare. He designed a scuba diving costume to be used to attack enemy’s ships.
• Like his flying machine, however, there is no evidence that any of these war machines were ever constructed.
• He designed in his sketches a scuba diving costume, an underwater breathing device,  and he also designed a city with better sanitation and his plans were used as inspiration in modernizing Paris in the 19^th century. In designing his modern city, he seemed to understand that the plague was due to poor sanitation. He is credited to have invented the napkin or table towel.

Leonardo’s notebooks

• He was writing his ideas in his famous notebooks that he did not share with no one and later were discovered. Only his military projects were probably shared with his patrons, but few were built because they were looking weird at that time.
• One of his notebooks, the Codex Leicester, was purchased by  Bill Gates through a public auction for 30 million USD. It is containing information about water physics and properties
• He had interest in natural sciences, and he was fascinated by  the properties of water, as well as the movements of birds of prey. He tried to imitate  and to understand birds flight throughout his life.

Anatomist and medical scientist

• He described correctly human brain ventricles which he filled with wax and created a cast.
• He gave the first crude diagram of cranial nerves, the optic chiasm, and the brachial and lumbar plexuses. His most remarkable contribution was his wax casts of the four ventricles. In what might have been a personal experiment he described that a section of a digital nerve in the finger produces anesthesia. He observed that when the spinal medulla is perforated a frog would suddenly die. He studied and understood the optics of the eye.
• His notebooks have sketches, notes and drawings and they use specular writing which can be read only by using a mirror. He has notes on astronomy, anatomy, military engineering, invention he designed or improved and musical instruments. He designed an automobile, a tank, a parachute , a scuba diving costume and many flight devices such as a helicopter and a sky glider or hand glider or delta plane. His sketch depicting a bicycle was considered by some scholars to be a fake.

The Last Supper

• When he painted the last supper, he chose an inmate as a model for Judas  Iscariot. When he painted the last supper he tried to depict the moment when Jesus told the apostles “ One of you will betray me” He worked for Ludovico Sforza of  Milan organizing banquets and he invented the table napkin. The first users cleaned their shoes with the table napkin, some put their table napkin on their heads, and many thought it was useless.
• Leonardo was good in finding a Maecena which is a patron, a rich gentleman that would pay artists to encourage progression of art. The most notable Maecenas of Leonardo were Lorenzo de Medici – Il Magnifico, Ludovico Sforza –  Il Moro, Cesare Borgia – Il Valentino and Francis I of France.

First CV ever written

• Apparently, he has written the first CV in history which was a letter in which he presented his accomplishments when looking for a job for Ludovico Sforza.
• While working for Ludovico Sforza he designed and started working on the biggest equestrian statue ever weighting 70 tons. He never finished the project because the French occupied Milan and his bronze was used to build cannons.
• He was carrying a notebook with him and was always writing down his observations and later he was compiling them. His notebooks covered a variety of subjects from flight to weaponry to musical instruments, Leonardo being a musician as well and from mathematics to botany.
• It is believed  that he had notebooks with 16.000 pages but just 8.000 are remaining , the rest are lost.

Hydraulics passionate

• From all the natural science topics Leonardo seemed to be mostly fascinated by water : its forms, its power, its tides and currents, water effect in the environment: geological, atmospheric, and erosive effects. He designed canals , water mills, artesian fountains, and he designed ways to divert rivers and to create irrigations. He observed the movement of water and he described them in the Codex Leicester. Among other things, Leonardo wrote about the flow of water in rivers, and how it is affected by different obstacles put in its way. From his observations he made recommendations about bridge construction, and he understood erosion. His fascination for hydraulics, water properties and circuit in nature is noticeable in his paintings as well. In Mona Lisa painting there are two lakes in the background at different levels and they are probably merging through a waterfall just behind Mona Lisa ‘s head. One can notice a fast river on her left and a bridge. Similarly, we see water in the forms of rivers, clouds, in : The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, Anunciation.
• He understood the tectonics movement. Hundreds of years before plate tectonics became accepted scientific theory, Leonardo believed that mountains had previously formed sea beds, which were gradually lifted until they formed mountains.

Planetshine effect

• Leonardo speculated that the Moon’s surface is covered by water, which reflects light from the Sun. Leonardo explained that the pale glow on the dark portion of the crescent Moon is caused by sunlight reflected from the Earth. Thus, he described the phenomenon of planetshine one hundred years before the German astronomer Johannes Kepler proved it.
• Leonardo introduced the painting technique of sfumato, which means the contours are not that  clear, and are like in a fog. He used sfumato in painting La Gioconda.
• Leonardo did not get along with Michelangelo who was 20 years younger.

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