Leonardo da Vinci

1. Leonardo da Vinci Man of Two Worlds

2. Skills: • Civil Engineering • Chemistry • Geology • Geometry • Hydrodynamics • Mathematics • Mechanics • Engineering • Optics • Physics • Pyrotechnics • Zoology • Writing • And, of course, painting, sculpting, sketching, and the arts in general! Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) • What is a ‘Renaissance Man’? A person with many talents or interests, especially in the humanities. Brief Biography: • Leonardo was born to a Florentine landlord and a peasant woman, but was treated as a legitimate son. • He received the usual education of the day • He spent his life traveling the different courts of Italy, where he was hired for his art and engineering skills • He had an unlimited thirst for knowledge, and jumped around one subject to another • He was, in many regards, a father of empiricism -- the idea that all knowledge is based on what can be seen, and the basis of the scientific method. • In terms of art, he is particularly famous for the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper

4. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Leonardo da Vinci was a great painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, inventor, and scientist. He is most likely the epitome of the RENAISSANCE man. He was the output of that extraordinary period of human history which was the Italian Renaissance, a period of great cultural advances and of great projects. He may be called as a man of "both" worlds as he found a plane of thought that encompassed both the world of art along with the world of the sciences. Leonardo was and is best known as an artist, the creator of such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Yet he was far more than a great artist: he had one of the best scientific minds of his time. He made painstaking observations and carried out research in fields ranging from architecture and engineering to astronomy to anatomy and zoology to geography, geology and paleontology. In the words of his biographer Giorgio Vasari: "The most heavenly gifts seem to be showered on certain human beings. Sometimes supernaturally, marvelously, they all congregate in one individual . . . This was seen and acknowledged by all men in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, who had an indescribable grace in every effortless act and deed. His talent was so rare that he mastered any subject to which he turned his attention . . . He might have been a scientist if he had not been so versatile." He had a keen eye and quick mind that led him to make important scientific discoveries, yet he never published his ideas. He was a gentle vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons. He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings. There were many instances where Leonardo was commissioned by the government to design elaborate state buildings or churches or to conceive of new weaponry that if ever utilized would have taken the enemy by great surprise. Not only was he a great inventor, he was one of the greatest scientific minds ever to have lived. Da Vinci's sketchbook, overall, showed extreme genius. His sketches covered a spectrum of topics including life studies, science, and architecture. All of his notes are written backwards in his notebook so that only someone intelligent enough to realize it could read it. His sketches are still studied and marveled today.

5. “The Virgin, the Infant Jesus and Saint Anne”

8. “A pillar of which the thickness is increased will gain more than its due strength, in direct proportion to what its loses in relative height.” “The arch is nothing else than a force originated by two weaknesses, for the arch in buildings is composed of two segments of a circle, each of which being very weak in itself tends to fall; but as each opposes this tendency in the other, the two weaknesses combine to form one strength.”

11. “Though human ingenuity may make various inventions which, by the help of various machines answering the same end, it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous, and she needs no counterpoise when she makes limbs proper for motion in the bodies of animals. But she puts into them the soul of the body, which forms them that is the soul of the mother which first constructs in the womb the form of the man and in due time awakens the soul that is to inhabit it.” “Nature being capricious and taking pleasure in creating and producing a continuous sucession of lives and forms because she knows that they serve to increase her terrestrial substance, is more ready and swift in her creating than time is in destroying, and therefore she has ordained that many animals shall serve as food one for the other; and as this does not satisfy her desire she sends forth frequently certain noisome and pestilential vapours and continual plagues upon the vast accumulations and herds of animals and especially upon human beings who increase very rapidly because other animals do not feed upon them.”