Leonardo Da Vinci's Impact On The Renaissance Man

Who was Leonardo da Vinci? Was he an engineer? An architect? A scientist? Or was he just an artist? Da Vinci was all of the above and even more. He is the epitome of the term “Renaissance Man”. His ingenious inventions and thoughts paved the way for some of the more modernized tools we may us on a day-to-day basis, such as the bicycle, helicopter, and parachute. Leonardo’s work was not only famous during the Renaissance era, but the modern era as well. The impact da Vinci had on the Renaissance inspired others to form new ideas to mold the world into one of the most freethinking eras in history. Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci, or Leonardo da Vinci, was born on April 15, 1452 in a small town near Florence called Anchiano. Born to Caterina,

It became a way for artists to share their true feelings with the world. To Leonardo “painting is the poetry that is seen rather than felt and poetry is the painting that is felt rather than seen (Leonardo da Vinci)”. In a world that grasped art that was often examined as strange and unrealistic, Leonardo’s work was like a breath of fresh air. He had no interest in changing the nature of something it wasn’t actually perceived to be. He wanted to paint every aspect of nature, whether it was good or bad. For example, The Last Supper. Leonardo captured the true essence of a true event (right from the Christian Bible) at the moment Jesus revealed to his disciples that one of his apostles will betray him that next day. Leonardo was the only one to catch the authentic sentiments of each apostle with different amounts of fury, dismay, and confusion. Many reactions to the painting were mainly focused on what many people thought of as “hidden details”. What they were actually missing out on was the perspective of the painting. The way he angled the sharp, distant walls showing the type of day added to the calm composure of Christ. The techniques he used in the Last Supper inspired other painters to use his technique in their own work. To get a more “fuzzier” appearance, Leonardo used the concept of an aeronautical perspective. The farther the eye views his paintings, the hazier the picture

He found displeasure in using educational books to expand his learning experience. He believed by conducing experiments, more knowledge would be gained and “saper verde (knowing how to see) was crucial to living all aspects of life fully (Leonardo da Vinci)”. To learn the basic functions of the human body, Leonardo participated in autopsies with Michelangelo and other like-minded artists. They studied the human body to dissect and learn more about the details of musculature and anatomy. From these autopsies, Leonardo illustrated the Vitruvian Man in one of his many notebooks. The Vitruvian Man was drawn to reveal the perfect proportions of the human body. Leonardo stated that “a human body can be symmetrically inscribed within both a circle and a square; this idea influenced his architectural practice (Vitruvian Man)”. The text written on the image clarifies the theory created by Vitruvius, a Roman architect. Leonardo’s purpose in creating the image brought in new ideas of science, anatomy, architecture, and art that are still studied and used to this day. Although there are an extensive amount of his inventions that have gone unnoticed throughout history, Leonardo was quite busy in his somewhat long life. As a result of having his work being claimed as someone else’s, Leonardo never fully published his findings from his notebooks. These are the inventions we use in the modern world, the world Leonardo da Vinci truly