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Around 100 years before the Scientific Revolution, one of the great geniuses of all time was living and working in Italy. Leonardo da Vinci is best known as an artist, yet he was also an inventor, scientist, architect, and mathematician, whose notebooks were filled with ingenious designs and observations.

Leonardo da Vinci

Flying machinę

From an early age, Leonardo was obsessed with the idea of flying. This is a reconstruction of Leonardo’s design for a flying machinę. The pilot’s feet activate a system of pulleys and rods to move the wings up and down.

Other designs included a helicopter and a    *

parachute.    „..T

Leonardo the man

Bom in 1452 in the smali Italian town ofVinci, Leonardo was fascinated by how the world worked. Unusually for the times he was a vegetarian.

This self-portrait shows him a few years before his death in France in 1519.

Mona Lisa

It took Leonardo four years to paint the Mona Lisa the world’s most famous painting. Although he completed less than 30 paintings, Leonardo is regarded as one of the great masters of Renaissance art.

Naturę studies
Leonardo’s notebooks	— * ' » p -
filled with drawings of	-A - - p- -
the natural world.	F _
Fle observed the	* ~ A| ( / — -
wildflowers he saw	_ Jgy ^# | f
around him in the Italian	-7 ^ i
countryside, making	~ JL ? a—
detailed notes of their structure and the types
of soils that they grew in.
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