Leonardo da Vinci, a genius and a great Italian inventor. While many of his masterpieces and inventions are known worldwide, there are still some fascinating facts about Leonardo’s life and creativity that remain lesser-known.
A great painter, scientist, engineer, and anatomist, Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most distinguished representatives of Renaissance art and science. He was born in 1452 in Anchiano, near the town of Vinci, Italy.
In addition to his famous paintings and sculptures, the genius Leonardo also left behind handwritten manuscripts covering many fields of knowledge.
He studied mathematics, fluid mechanics, geology, natural geography, meteorology, chemistry, astronomy, botany, human and animal anatomy, and physiology.
Although some of Leonardo’s masterpieces, such as The Mona Lisa, are well-known, several events in his life and creativity remain obscure.
For instance, Leonardo’s mother was an ordinary peasant, he received an informal education at home, was an accomplished lyre player, was the first to explain why the sky is blue, and why the moon shines, and he was ambidextrous but suffered from dyslexia.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
1. Leonardo was born into a wealthy family; his father was a prominent notary named Piero da Vinci, and his mother was a peasant named Caterina. He received a good education at home, but he did not formally study Greek and Latin.
2. He was an accomplished lyre player. When the court of Milan tried a case involving Leonardo, he appeared in court as a musician, not as a painter or inventor.
3. There is evidence to suggest that Leonardo was homosexual. While studying in the workshop of the famous artist Verrocchio in Florence, he was accused of abusing a young boy who modeled for him. The court acquitted him.
4. Leonardo da Vinci spent about 10 years painting the lips of Mona Lisa.
5. According to one theory, Mona Lisa is smiling because she knows she is pregnant, which was still a secret to everyone.
6. Another theory suggests that musicians and jesters made Gioconda smile while she was posing for Leonardo da Vinci.
7. Scientists from the University of Amsterdam and American researchers, while studying the mysterious smile of Gioconda using a new computer program, found that her smile contains: 83% happiness, 9% contempt, 6% fear, and 2% anger.
8. Leonardo left behind designs for submarines, windmills, tanks, cannons, machine guns, aircraft, ball bearings, irrigation systems, and even parachutes…
One of Da Vinci’s design sketches.
9. Leonardo clearly did not leave behind a self-portrait that can be definitively attributed to him. Scientists have questioned the famous self-portrait in brown chalk attributed to Leonardo (often believed to have been created between 1512-1515), depicting him as an old man. They suggest it might just be a sketch of the head of an apostle in The Last Supper. Doubts that this is not Leonardo’s self-portrait have been raised since the 19th century, with recent assertions made by one of the leading experts on Leonardo, Professor Pietro Marani.
10. Leonardo had a passion for water: he wrote manuals on underwater diving, invented and described diving equipment, and breathing devices for swimming underwater. All of Leonardo’s inventions laid the groundwork for modern diving equipment.
11. Leonardo was the first to explain why the sky is blue. In his book On Painting, he wrote: “The blue of the sky is due to a thick layer of air particles illuminated between the earth and the blackness above.”
12. In 1994, billionaire Bill Gates spent $30 million to buy the Codex Leicester – a collection of works by Leonardo da Vinci. Since 2003, it has been displayed at the Seattle Art Museum.
The Codex Leicester collection by Da Vinci.
13. Another hypothesis suggests that the painting of Mona Lisa is actually a self-portrait of Leonardo.
14. In December 2000, British skydiver Adrian Nicolas jumped from a balloon at an altitude of 3000 meters using a parachute designed based on Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches.
15. Leonardo was ambidextrous, using both his left and right hands with equal skill. Some say he could write different documents simultaneously with each hand. He suffered from dyslexia – a condition often referred to as “word blindness,” believed to be linked to diminished brain activity in a region of the left hemisphere. As we know, Leonardo wrote and drew in mirror image. Most of the works in his famous notebooks were written with his left hand, from right to left in reverse writing style. Many believe he did this to keep his research secret. Another hypothesis suggests that mirror writing was his personal characteristic, with some opinions stating that it was easier for him than writing conventionally. The term “Leonardo’s writing style” still exists.
16. He was a perfectionist who abandoned many paintings and destroyed most of his works. Leonardo liked to borrow money but did not enjoy completing the work he had started, which is why he often changed locations.
17. Leonardo was a vegetarian for humanitarian reasons. He enjoyed buying caged birds to set them free. He once said: “If a man wishes to attain freedom, why does he imprison birds in cages?… A man is truly the lord of beasts because he kills them cruelly. We live by killing others. We are like graveyards that know how to walk! Even as a child, I renounced meat.”
18. His observations of the moon during the waxing phase led Leonardo to one of his most important scientific discoveries – he determined that sunlight reflects from the earth back to the moon as secondary radiation.
19. In 2005, the Louvre Museum spent $5.5 million to move the famous masterpiece The Mona Lisa to a specially equipped gallery. The painting was given 2/3 of the State Room (Salle des États), which has a total area of 840 m2. The vast room was renovated into a display area, with Leonardo’s masterpiece hanging on the far wall. The room was redesigned by Peruvian architect Lorenzo Pikeras over nearly four years. The Louvre decided to relocate the Mona Lisa to a private gallery because, in its previous position, this masterpiece was overshadowed by other Italian paintings, and visitors had to jostle in line to admire the famous painting.
The famous painting Mona Lisa.
20. In August 2003, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Virgin of the Yarn Winder, worth $50 million, was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle owned by one of the richest landowners in Scotland, the Duke of Buccleuch. This theft is listed among the top 10 most famous art crimes by the FBI in November 2005. In October 2007, police recovered the painting. Subsequently, it was loaned to and displayed at the National Gallery of Scotland.
21. Leonardo was the first painter to dissect cadavers to learn about the arrangement and structure of muscles. At night, Leonardo would sneak into graveyards, stealing corpses to study human anatomy.
22. As an extremely passionate wordsmith, Leonardo left in the Codex Arundel a long list of synonyms referring to the male anatomy.
23. Da Vinci slept for only 15 minutes every 4 hours, totaling just 90 minutes of sleep each day, instead of the usual 7-9 hours.
24. Among Leonardo’s passions were cooking and the art of hosting banquets. In Milan, for 13 years, he presided over court feasts. He invented several cooking methods to ease the work of chefs. A unique dish named after him, featuring thinly sliced meat braised with vegetables on top, was very popular at court dinners.
25. While constructing canals, Leonardo da Vinci made an observation that later became known in the field of geology as a theoretical principle defining the time of formation of soil layers. He concluded that the Earth is much older than the perspective stated in the Bible.
26. The concept of contact lenses was first introduced by Da Vinci in 1508.
27. Leonardo da Vinci’s last words before his final breath were self-reproach, feeling that what he had done was not enough.
Biography of Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Italian pronunciation: [leoˈnardo da ˈvintʃi]; commonly transliterated in Vietnamese as Lê-ô-na đờ Vanh-xi) (born April 15, 1452, in Anchiano, Italy; died May 2, 1519, in Amboise, France) was a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, physician, engineer, anatomist, inventor, and natural philosopher.
He is regarded as a polymath genius from Italy. The name of the city Vinci, where he was born, is located in the territory of the province of Florence, about 30 km west of Florence near Empoli, which is also his surname. He is commonly referred to simply as Leonardo because “da Vinci” means “from Vinci,” not his actual surname. His full name, Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, translates to “Leonardo, son of Ser Piero, from Vinci.” He is the author of famous paintings such as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.
Leonardo had ideas that were far ahead of his time, especially concepts like the helicopter, tank, parachute, solar energy convergence, computer, theoretical drafts of topographical engineering, double-hulled ships, and many other inventions. Some of his designs were realized and feasible during his lifetime. The application of science in metallurgy and engineering during the Renaissance was still in its infancy. Additionally, he made significant contributions to the knowledge and understanding of anatomy, astronomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydraulics. The remnants of his life include only a few paintings, alongside several sketchbooks (scattered across various collections of his works), containing sketches, scientific illustrations, and notes.
