The Life and Work of Leonardo da Vinci, King Henry VIII, and Sir Isaac Newton

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Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 in a small Tuscan town called Vinci that was near Florence. Most people know him for his skills as an artist and his many famous paintings. These paintings included the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and Virgin of the Rocks. An artist was only one of the activities that da Vinci was good at. He was known as the quintessential Renaissance man. Da Vinci was also a mathematician, inventor, sculptor, musician, and writer. Leonardo is stated to be one of the most diversely talented men maybe ever to be alive. He studied at the studio of Verrocchio in Florence in his younger years. Studying with Verrocchio he was introduced to many different challenges to paint and that ended up diversifying his styles and abilities. Some of the inventions that Leonardo came up with back then are used today in our modern world such as the helicopter which he sketched hundreds of years before it was invented. Some other inventions that he sketched included a tank, a parachute, landing gears, and air tanks used for scuba diving. These were thought of hundreds of years before they were actually invented and produced. He had all of these ideas and more written down in notebooks that he wanted to publish, although he died before he could get his book of ideas out. Leonardo was then hired buy the Duke of Milan in1482 to create sculpture and paint. He would also work in the fields of science and architecture. The Duke would have him design new weapons, buildings, and other architecture that has never been seen before. This started a new era for science and architecture. He had so many new ideas for art and new inventions to create that he ended up not finishing most of his work that he started resulting in him finishing only about six works of art in the last seventeen years of da Vinci’s life. Some facts that you might not have known about Leonardo is unlike most other Italians in the fifteenth century was that he was a vegetarian. He loved animals so much that it was reported that he would buy animals that were caged then set them free into the wild. He was also known to have invented the bicycle long before it was actually produced. Some people have also reported him as a homosexual because he never had a relationship with a woman, no kids, and was thought to have a relationship with Giacomo Salai who was claimed to be a homosexual.

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