Page 30 - All About History 58 - 2017 UK

Da Vinci

was he really a

Genius?

y work worko
Famed as the inventor of many machines that didn’t actually work mmm
Fa Fa y
s the h
and known during his lifetime for abandoning projects, has the
original Renaissance man been overrated?

Written by Jessica Leggett

eonardo da Vinci has captivated the was born in 1452, in Anchiano, a tiny hamlet
world for centuries, acclaimed as a near the small town of Vinci, in rural Tuscany.
polymath who produced breathtaking He was the illegitimate son of a wealthy notary,
art, engineered fantastic flying Ser Piero d’Antonio da Vinci, and a woman
Lmachines and uncovered secrets about known as Caterina, believed to have been a
the body and the wider world. This reputation peasant and possibly a servant.
inspired Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code Being a ‘non legittimo’ in Renaissance Italy
as well as many other far-fetched theories. This was not a disgrace but the status did carry legal
gal
g
is an incredible legacy for a man who painted no limitations. In particular, he couldn’t take his isis
more than 20 panel paintings in his entire career, father’s surname — he was simply Leonardo o.
uld
never completed a sculpture and was slow to find As an adult, the artist asked Piero if he cou
fame in his own lifetime. adopt the title ‘da Vinci’ to differentiate
He did leave behind a library’s worth of private himself from other Tuscan artists with
diaries and notebooks full of his scientific the same name.
observations and ideas for inventions but few of His father agreed, though ‘da Vinci’
his contraptions went beyond an initial sketch. wasn’t his legal name either — his fam y
mily
Modern-day engineers have also found that more had adopted the suffix to distinguish h
than one of them would never work. So how did themselves from others (in Italian
da Vinci posthumously earn such high praise —
da V it just means ‘of Vinci’). When
and Leonardo went to Milan, he called d
a d does he deserve it?
It’s perhaps a sign of our distorted view that himself ‘Leonardo the Florentine’ e’
w
we even call the artist ‘da Vinci’ at all. Leonardo but the old name had stuck.