Leonardo Da Vinci

Italian renaissance artist, inventor, engineer, sculptor and painter, he was truly a universal genius. He invented engines of war and built bridges and chariots as an engineer in the science of artillery and sieges. Leonardo experimented in oft-repeated attempts to build an airplane. He left examples of his talents as a scientist, architect, musician, mathematician, teacher and businessman. He designed sewers and palaces, built stables and chapels, dug latrines and raised fountains, dissected corpses and painted angels, identified ten different varieties of noses in profile and envisioned a utopian bordello. In his "Notebooks," he drew cartoonist prototypes of not only the airplane but the submarine, helicopter, machine gun and tank. As a sculptor and painter, he was unparalleled in his brilliance. Though he rarely finished a work of art, his work embodied beauty, grace and might.

The son of a wealthy notary and a peasant mother, he was stigmatized by his illegitimate birth. As a teenager, he joined his dad in Florence but his status as a bastard barred him from joining guilds that would have led him into a conventional career. The Renaissance had begun, fueled by a new merchant class anxious to patronize the arts, as well as a desire to repair the damage from centuries of war and the decimation of the plague. Leonardo was apprenticed as a studio boy to the painter Verrocchio, who was a leading metal smith, painter and sculptor in Florence. There Leonardo became familiar with the production of religious and more secular paintings as well as sculpture. In 1472, he joined the painter’s guild of Florence, and by age 26 he had become an independent master. A homosexual, he was charged with sodomy on April 9, 1476 OS in Florence. The humiliation of this public denouncement was a factor in his decision to leave Florence, beginning his celebrated career shuttling back and forth between various eminent patrons.