Italian painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor and architect of the High Renaissance

Leonardo da Vinci

was born,

April 15, 1452

in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, Italy

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Leonardo is among the greatest painters in the history of art and is often credited as the founder of the High Renaissance.

Despite having many lost works and less than 25 attributed major works—including numerous unfinished works—he created some of the most influential paintings in Western art. His magnum opus, the Mona Lisa, is his best known work and often regarded as the world’s most famous painting. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time and his Vitruvian Man drawing is also regarded as a cultural icon. Salvator Mundi*, attributed in whole or part to Leonardo.

Revered for his technological ingenuity, he conceptualized flying machines, a type of armored fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. Some of his smaller inventions, however, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, but he did not publish his findings and they had little to no direct influence on subsequent science.

^✽ Long thought to be a copy of a lost original veiled with overpainting, it was rediscovered and restored. Christie’s claimed just after selling the work that most leading scholars consider it to be an original work by Leonardo, but this attribution has been disputed by other specialists, some of whom posit that he only contributed certain elements.

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So here’s a glimpse of this master’s work & words

❝ The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.❞

❝ Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.❞

❝ There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.❞

❝ Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.❞

❝ Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.❞

❝ Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.❞

❝ He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.❞

❝ The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.❞

❝ Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.❞

❝ People react to fear, not love – they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.❞

❝ Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.❞

❝ Art is never finished, only abandoned.❞

❝ Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?❞

❝ Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity.❞

❝ Learning never exhausts the mind.❞

❝Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.❞

❝ Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature.❞

❝ Our body is dependant on Heaven and Heaven on the Spirit.❞

❝ Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.❞

❝ While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.❞

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As the title suggests, this is the second part of my tribute to Da Vinci. Here is the first part:

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For more information on Da Vinci:

https://www.museoleonardodavincifirenze.com/

https://www.leonardoda-vinci.org/

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/leon/hd_leon.htm

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/leonardo-da-vinci

https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1479.html

https://www.mos.org/leonardo/node/1

https://www.leonardodavinci.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci

Enjoy!

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