Happy Birthday, Leonardo!
On April 15th, 1452 Leonardo da Vinci was born. True renaissance man, he is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.
Did you know that Leonardo was the first to explain why the sky is blue? Also, because of his vegetarianism, Leonardo had a habit of purchasing caged birds and then releasing them into the wild.
He kept his private life rather secret. We can be almost sure he was gay. Leonardo’s most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi. Court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with ‘sodomy’ in an incident involving a well-known male prostitute.
He conceptualised flying machines, a tank, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull, also outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. Way ahead of his time, he was born at least couple hundreds of years too early.
