Analysis Of Leonardo Da Vinci: The Quintessential Renaissance Man

1270 Words3 Pages

Madelyn Russo
Professor Young
Humanities 1302
14 November 2014
Leonardo da Vinci: The Quintessential Renaissance Man The illegitimate son of a 25-year-old notary, Ser Piero, and a peasant girl, Caterina, Leonardo di ser Peiro da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Italy, just outside of Florence. His father took custody of him shortly after his birth, while his mother married someone else and moved to a neighboring town. They kept on having kids, although not with each other, and they eventually supplied Leonardo with a total of 17 half sisters and brothers (“Renaissance”). When he was very young, he always had access to scholarly texts owned by family and friends. This influenced his intelligence greatly. When he was about fourteen …show more content…

The manuscripts are called the Notebooks. They are handwritten. It seems that Leonardo planned to publish them as a great encyclopedia of knowledge, but like many of his projects, this one was never finished. The manuscripts are very hard to decipher: “not only did Leonardo write in mirror-image script from right to left, but he used peculiar spellings and abbreviations, and his notes are not arranged in any logical order” (“Da Vinci”). The scientific suggestions found within these notes were very advanced for the time period that Leonardo da Vinci lived in. In fact, when it came to the questions of how shells could be found on the tops of mountains, Leonardo da Vinci hypothesis was very close to fact. Leonardo believed that “it must be presumed that in those places there were sea coasts, where all those shells were thrown up, broken, and divided.” Leonardo said that the mountains must have been covered in water before and that where there is water, there is now land. In reality, the modern answer to this question is that fossils were once-living organisms that had been buried a time before the mountains raised up. This advanced hypothesis is just one instance among many that proves that Leonardo da Vinci did indeed have one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. After his death his notes were scattered around to libraries and collections all over the Europe area. Today you can find them in museums, libraries, and collections all over the

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