You Know His Paintings, But He Was More Than An Artist

If you mention the name Leonardo da Vinci – you’d think of him first as an artist. The Mona Lisa and the Last Supper are his two most famous paintings. There’s evidence he did over a hundred paintings, but only 18 of them survive.

But da Vinci was more than a painter. He was a sculptor, an architect, a musician, a scientist, a writer, a mathematician and an inventor.  He was a true genius.

He lived in the late 1400’s and early 1500’s but he envisioned solar power, a calculator, airplanes, a helicopter, a tank, an umbrella, even something so simple as scissors which didn’t exist back then.

Thousands of pages of his notes had designs of airplane wings and how they might work, designs for weapons and his observations on people and animals. He was brilliant and had so many interests. And most of what he knew he taught himself. He could also paint with one hand and write with another.