Whenever I think about Leonardo Da Vinci, I think about art and The Mona Lisa, then I think about Tom Hanks and The Da Vinci Code book by Dan Brown. In fact, I’m a little ashamed I had no idea that Da Vinci, aside from being an incredible genius, was also an inventor.

Da Vinci, who was born in 1452 in Vinci, Florence, is what many consider the epitome of the Italian Renaissance Man. Many know him for the same reasons I do, his famous paintings like The Last Supper and The Mona Lisa, but he was also an engineer and scientist. He enjoyed studying astronomy, anatomy, chemistry, botany, physics, zoology, cartography and several areas of mathematics, and while it might be fitting to call him a Jack of All Trades, we certainly can’t add the popular “Master of None,” to the end of Da Vinci’s nickname.

Combining his art studies with his scientific studies, Da Vinci was known to do elaborate human and animal anatomy sketches, even sketching the things he saw while dissecting and studying humans and animals.  As well as sketching the anatomy, he also drew some of the earliest elaborate images of the human skeleton and the heart.

He was also one of the first to diagram and draw internal body organs, like the appendix, and he created incredibly detailed sketches of the sexual organs, cervix and the fetus.

He was also quite the engineer, inventor and idea man.

Da Vinci was a huge advocate for human flight, creating hundreds of drawings on the possible ways man could fly. Though none of his drawings were ever actually put into practice at the time he created them, some believe the machine he sketched called the ornithopter flying machine, was the basis for the modern day helicopter.

Among some of his most well-known inventions was the automatic bobbin-winder, a tool most people who sew today could not live without. Considering you once had to wind thread and yarn around bobbins by hand, imagine the tedious work and sore fingers his invention cured. He also invented the viola organista, the first recorded bowed keyboard instrument.

Da Vinci’s ideas were larger than life, and a good number of them were well beyond the scope of his time. In fact, they were so large, many of them weren’t actually able to be created and tested until hundreds of years after his death. War machines, flight mechanisms, bridge structures… his scope and vision far exceeded the constraints of his time, which reminds me a little bit of my favorite inventor, Nikola Tesla.

The unfortunate thing is I’ve only just dipped my finger into the icing that is Da Vinci’s cake. He was a fascinating and incredibly innovative mind that has inspired volumes and volumes of work in the last five hundred years.

(Image via curatedobject)