Feb 27

8 min read

HISTORY | PEOPLE

7 Facts About Da Vinci You Never Knew

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci — the man who inspired Steve Jobs and Bill Gates

Leonardo Da Vinci's painting of John the Baptist

Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. I’d also heard of The Last Supper and Dan Brown’s book; Da Vinci Code. But what I didn’t expect was that he wanted to know about the science of fatigue, the tongue of a woodpecker, the jaw of a crocodile, the centre of Milan, helicopter and various forms of intestines in the human species.

His life is a suspense novel and his relentless curiosity is the twist that we don't expect.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci is one of the greatest lofty geniuses who have ever walked on earth. He is the hero of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The inventor of many things we see daily but never know whose product of genius are they. He was a handsome man with a loveable personality, one whom everyone considered his only true closest friend.

So, here are the facts you may have never heard about him:
· An Illiterate Man
· A Chronic Procrastinator
· A Strict Vegetarian
· Almost Everything was His Cup of Tea
∘ 1. Leonardo Loved Playing Pranks
∘ 2. Military Engineering
∘ 3. Cadaver Dissection to understand Anatomy
· Quirky Way of Writing
· He Did Not Like His Hair Going Grey
· Bill Gates Owns One of His Notebooks

An Illiterate Man

Leonardo was an illegitimate child born in the Age of Bastards as called by Jacob Burckhardt. It still turned out to be very fortunate for him to not be a true heir because his father, Piero da Vinci came from a long line of notaries as a family occupation and it was gifted down only to a true heir.

If he had become a notary, we would never be able to wonder about the secrets behind Mona Lisa’s smile.

But his illegitimacy had one downside, he could not receive formal Latin education. Therefore, Leonardo got a little training in an abacus school.

But he never considered himself any less than regularly schooled people, instead, he would get very defensive of his unlettered personality because he relied on something he considered much more valuable than formal education — experience.

He wrote in his notebook:

“I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man, certain presumptuous persons will think that they may reasonably blame me; alleging that I am not a man of letters. Foolish folks! do they not know that I might retort as Marius did to the Roman Patricians by saying: That they, who deck themselves out in the labours of others will not allow me my own. They will say that I, having no literary skill, cannot properly express that which I desire to treat of, but they do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words; and experience has been the mistress of those who wrote well. And so, as mistress, I will cite her in all cases.”

A Chronic Procrastinator

Yeah, that’s true!

He was a perfectionist and an easily bored person, both habits leading to his procrastination.

There are many projects that he left incomplete.

The Last Supper is one example. Somedays he would continuously paint forgetting to even eat or drink. While on other days, he would go to the studio just to paint one or two strokes. He also would go for three or four days without even touching his paintbrushes.

“Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” — Leonardo Da Vinci

A Strict Vegetarian

In his notebook again, he wrote of humans:

“If you are, as you have described yourself, the king of the animals, why do you help other animals only so that they may be able to give you their young in order to gratify your plate?”

Because of his scientific explorations, he understood well that plants don’t feel pain. He also considered a vegetarian diet to be simple and nourishing enough. He loved animals so much that he would buy caged birds and restore them to their freedom.

Ginevra de’ Benci . Observe the smile. It was painted years before Mona Lisa but her particular smile can quite easily be traced back to the master of painting with moving emotions.

Almost Everything was His Cup of Tea

Leonardo Da Vinci was an insanely curious man, not only a chronic procrastinator but also chronically curious.

He was highly interested in human anatomy including muscles, bones, neurovasculature, human proportion, sneezing, yawning, epilepsy, fatigue, hunger, comparative anatomy, embryology; optics in physics; in engineering; war weapons and machinery, friction, pulley, momentum, bridges and hydraulics, flight and musical instruments; botany and geology, astronomy and alchemy; geometry in mathematics, maps and philosophy, and still — so much more.

Really, everything was his cup of tea.

Leonardo’s notebook page for learning Latin which he clearly was not enjoying

1. Leonardo Loved Playing Pranks

He worked as a court entertainer at Sforza. In his notebooks, are found about three hundred scribbles of riddles, pranks, prophecies, novellas that he would perform or read aloud.

“Boil ten pounds of brandy to evaporate, but see that the room is completely closed, and throw some powdered varnish among the fumes. Then enter the room suddenly with a lightened torch and it will be set ablaze.” — Extract from Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Imagine the sober genius doing this. And not only this, he would often frighten his friends with lizards.

2. Military Engineering

Leonardo Da Vinci’s life is divided into eras according to the places he called home. When he decided to move to Milan from Florence, he wished to work for its ruler. So, he wrote his cover letter and in the cover letter he wrote the most iconic lines:“……and likewise in painting, I can do everything possible, as well as any other man, whosoever he may be.”

Throughout the job application, he cast himself as an engineer and did not mention any of his paintings which were Saint Jerome in Wilderness, Adoration of Magi, Ginerva de’ Benci and a few more epic masterpieces.

Scythed Chariot is a great example of his military engineering niche.

Observe spinning 4-bladed shafts that are dragged behind as the horse seems to be galloping in a forward direction. On left, two bodies are sliced in half and the two others are in the moment of being sliced. According to Walter Isaacson, even though Leonardo was a vegetarian and fond of creations, it may be his inner turmoil that he represented in this horrifying depiction of death.

3. Cadaver Dissection to understand Anatomy

Leonardo dissected around 30 corpses throughout his lifetime.

1. Skull Dissection 2. Comparison between the leg of a man and a dog 3. Investigation of motions of an arm

Quirky Way of Writing

Leonardo Da Vinci was left-handed so he wrote in mirror transcript meaning he wrote written backwards that seem normal when viewed by a mirror!

Vasari wrote about Leonardo’s writing: “he wrote backwards, in rude characters, and with the left hand, so that anyone who is not practised in reading them, cannot understand them”.

But this idea is only a hypothesis like others as well. The other two are:

“He was hiding his scientific ideas from the powerful Roman Catholic Church, whose teachings sometimes disagreed with what Leonardo observed. OR he was trying to prevent smudging: writing left-handed from left to right was messy, the ink just put down would smear as his hand moved across it.”

Da Vinci mirror writing in Vitruvian Man

He Did Not Like His Hair Going Grey

Leonardo might have been the genius, a handsome man, a thinker, a scientist but having grey hair on his beautiful head with beautiful curls freaked him out too. So, he came up with a recipe:

“To make hair tawny, take nuts and boil them in lye and immerse the comb in it, then comb the hair and let it dry in the sun.” — Walter Isaacson in Leonardo’s Biography quoting him

Bill Gates Owns One of His Notebooks

I think Leonardo’s notebooks are the treasures pirates talked about.

His notebooks show a map of his mind in which one idea jumped to another, forming a collage of creativity. Only a single page of Leonardo’s notebooks contain so much more than we can imagine. The content seems haphazard. It seems Leonardo didn't let his childish instinct of curiosity ever grow old.

“The most astonishing testament to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper.” — Toby Lester in Da Vinci’s Ghost

Turns out Bill Gates is that pirate who owns one of his notebooks costing $30.8 million which he bought in 1994. The notebook Codex Hammer also called the Codex Leicester has 72 pages and was written between 1506 and 1510.

Closing Thoughts

Vasari in his biography of Leonardo Da Vinci says: “In the normal course of events many men and women are born with various remarkable qualities and talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind… Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty who displayed infinite grace in everything he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied were solved with ease.”

“Life well spent is long.” — Da Vinci

Get an email whenever Aima Tariq publishes.

Jan 28

4 min read

10 — Scythed Chariot. Leonardo da Vinci. 1483.

10 Amazing Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance Art Sketches You Should Know

For art lovers. Leonardo da Vinci sketches and studies.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci. Italian. 15 April 1452–2 May 1519, more commonly Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography.

Was one of the most important and influential figures of the Renaissance. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer.

Leonardo Da Vinci died in 1519 in Cloux in France. He was one of the most revered painters of his time and remains among the most important figures in art history.