- His full name was Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci.
- He was not just a famous painter. He was a polymath (is a person whose expertise fills a significant number of subject areas), interested in: science, maths, engineering, inventing , anatomy, painting, sculpting, architecture, botany, music and writing.
- He was the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina.
He was born in 1452 in Vinci, Italy. He is best known as the painter of the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, which took three years to complete. His lesser known talents were architecture, sculpture, geology, engineering, military arts, and hydraulics.
The name Leonardo da Vinci translates to Leonard from the town of Vinci. He is normally referred to as simply Leonardo.
4 Random interesting facts:
· Used 'mirror writing' so other would not steal his work and/or to hide his work from the Roman Catholic Church.
· Dug into graveyards at night to steal corpses and study human anatomy (and find out where the soul was).
· He was a humanitarian and therefore a vegetarian. Yet he made sketches of hundreds of war machines.
· He was a left-handed dyslexic and procrastinating perfectionist who left many paintings unfinished and destroyed most of his work.