LEONARDO DA VINCI

LEONARDO DA VINCI
(THE OBSERVER – THE SCIENTIST – THE INVENTOR)

Leonardo Fa Vinci was an Italian polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. He was born in the year 1452 and lived up to the age of 67 years. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived

Leonardo was renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works – “The Mona Lisa” and “The last supper” are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time. His drawing of the “Viruvian Man” is also regarded as a cultural icon. Only 15 of his paintings survived, the small number due to his constant and frequently disastrous experimentation with new techniques and his chronic procrastination

He was revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualized a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double bull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively a few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his life time but some of his smaller inventions such as automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics and hydrodynamics.

Because of his multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every filed of knowledge, Leonardo Da Vinci can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries passed, yet the entire world still views Leonardo with awe.