Leonardo da Vinci was a Renaissance man. He was highly skilled in many areas like being a painter, a sculpter, a writer, an inventer, a botanist, a scientist, an architect, a musician, a genius, a designer, an athlete, and a teacher. I think the most important talent too the world is his talent as a scientist. He made many inventions. He drew many drawings of items he wanted to make, but never had time to make them.
One of his 30 famous notebooks is the Codex Leicester. It was sold to Bill Gates in 1995 for 30.8 million. In the notebook it has an article telling us about why fossils can be found on mountains. Leonardo believed that mountains had previously formed sea beds, which were gradually lifted until they formed mountains. Another topic the Codex Leicester covers is the movement of water. Leonardo wrote about the flow of water in rivers. He made recommendations in bridge construction and erosion. He invented the bridge that could fold up easily if he wanted it to, if enemies came He also wrote about the luminosity of the moon. He speculated that the moons surface was covered with water, which reflects sunlight from the sun. In another codex he wrote about the flight of birds. He made many attempts to launch some inventions but they failed. One of them was the wing that he made. He though if he made some wings we might be able to fly like birds. Leonardo drew a picture of a parachute. He never tried it but Adrian Nicholas tried it and it worked.
He was also deeply into anatomy me made many pictures in his notebooks and mentioned it a lot. He studied anatomy on the arm, muscles, and tendons. The Vitruvian man is one of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous drawings with a mixture of art and math. Leonardo made a list ratios stating that: a palm is the width of four fingers, a foot is the width of three palms, a cubit is the width of 6 palms, a man’s height is four cubits, a pace is four cubits, the length of a man’s outspread arms is equal to his height, the distance from the hair line to the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of a man’s height, the distance from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin is one-eighth of a man’s height, the maximum width of the shoulders is a quarter of a man’s height, the distance from the elbow to the armpit is one-eighth of a man’s height, the distance from the elbow to the tip of the hand is one-fifth of a man’s height, the length of the hand is one-tenth of a man’s height, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the nose is one-third of the length of the head, the distance from the hairline to the eyebrows is one-third of the length of the face, and the length of the ear is one-third of the length of the face. These are the observations Leonardo da Vinci made about men body proportions.
Leonardo is now known for being a good painter because he painted the “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper”, but he was also good at athletics and played a few instruments. He was known that he could play any stringed instrument of that time. No one knows if he wrote music as well at painted. He also taught a few students. One of them were Count Francesco Melzi the son of a Lombard aristocrat.
As Leonardo wrote he also wrote mirror writing it could only be read with a mirror. He also thought of a triple barrel cannon. If it was made it would be a deadly weapon on the battlefield. It would be light and fast. He also built and sculpted the bronze horse. He crafted it all with clay, but when it was time to cast it with bronze. The French soldiers stopped it from happening. The soldiers used the horse as target practice and casted the bronze into bullets. It was intended to be 24 feet high. Leonardo was very sad of the lost and left Milan and went back to Florence.
Leonardo never attended a public school and was taught by his father because his parents were never married. Commonly people from courts could not trust him because he almost never finished a job or pictures. He spent up to 8 or 9 years for something and then left to do something else.
As I have shown, Leonardo da Vinci was a genius! He may be the smartest person ever. He was a painter, a sculpter, a writer, an inventer, a botanist, a scientist, an architect, a musician, a genius, a designer, an athlete, and a teacher. He was always thinking and never wasted time.