Amazing facts about Leonardo da Vinci and his works
1. Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a woman named Caterina and Sir Piero, who was a lawyer and landowner. He was homeschooled and lacked a formal education in Greek and Latin.
2. He was very skilled at playing the harp, and when he first applied to the court of Milan, he defined his job as a musician, not an artist or inventor.
3. He was accused of having same- sex relations after a male model filed a lawsuit accusing him of having relations with him, but the court ruled that he was acquitted.
Painter and sculptor Leonardo Da Vinci
4. One of the theories about the Mona Lisa is that her smile meant she was secretly pregnant.
5. Another theory about Mona Lisa is that she was transfixed by the musicians and clowns who tried to amuse her when Leonardo painted her.
6. There is another hypothesis that says that Mona Lisa is a picture of Da Vinci himself, but he disguised himself as a woman. James Beckk, an art historian at Columbia University, says: “Just as we are sure that the moon is not made of green cheese, it is certainly not Da Vinci himself.”
7. Da Vinci did not leave any specific painting or image for himself, unlike other painters.
8. Researchers from the University of California determined that the face in the Mona Lisa painting: 83% happy - 9% disgusted - 6% afraid - 2% angry, using facial recognition techniques.
9. In 1995, Bill Gates bought the Leicester manuscript for $30 million. The manuscript contains Da Vinci's studies on hydraulics and water movement.
10. Da Vinci loved the water and designed snowshoes to float, a scuba device, a life jacket, and a submarine that attacked ships from below.
11. Leonardo was the first to explain “why the sky is blue” and how air scatters light.
12. He discovered why the Moon is dim and barely visible when it becomes a thin crescent, and explained how the Moon reflects light.
13. Da Vinci managed to write backwards with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.
14. The Louvre spent $5.5 million to put the Mona Lisa in a box for display on the wall.
the Mona Lisa painting
15. In August 2003, two men disguised as tourists stole the $68 million Da Vinci painting Madonna of the Yarnwinder from a castle in Scotland and escaped with it in a Volkswagen Golf.
16. LEONARDO DESIGNED ARMORED CAR, A GROUND EXCAVATOR, A HYDRO-DRAGGER, A ROLLER AND A FLYING SHIP.
17. In December 2000, a skydiver named Adrian Nicholas landed in South Africa using a parachute designed by Leonardo da Vinci.
18. Leonardo dissected cadavers and replaced muscles with strings and tendons to see how they worked.
19. He was so skilled at wordplay that he invented 44 synonyms for the word penis.
20. He denied the idea of intelligent design for the earth, as he believed that the earth is much older than what was mentioned in the Bible, due to his studies of the earth's topography, such as rivers and the different levels of the sea's surface.
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