Artist Link: Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci, full name: Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, was born on 15th April 1452, and died 2nd May 1519. He was born the out-of-wedlock son of the wealthy lawyer Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci and a peasant woman by the name of Caterina. We know very little about his early life, except that he lived the first five years of his life with his mother, then later went to live with his father. His father married four times during his lifetime. He was informally educated in Latin, geometry and mathematics.
 
He was a Italian polymath, an individual with an expertise in a range of skills. His skills spanned from painter and sculptor to inventor and engineer to botanist and geologist. He is widely regarded as the archetypal Renaissance man, and perhaps the person to be skilled in the most diverse range of applications. His primary skill, as recognised by many people, is painting. His relatively few (approximately 15) surviving works include the almost universally famous Mona Lisa, believed to be the most famous portrait; The Last Supper, the most reproduced religious painting of all time and the iconic anatomical drawing of the 'Vitruvian Man'. Da Vinci is also well known for his ingenuity as an inventor, producing designs for a tank-like armoured vehicle, flying machines (less functional than many of his other designs, although he did design a helicopter style machine), concentrated solar power, an adding machine and the double hull design of ship building. Few of these designs were feasible with the technology available to him. He also made important discoveries in other fields, such as creating a rudimentary theory regarding geological plate tectonics, but he did not publish these findings, so these discoveries had no great effect on later scientific developments.
 
Personally, I have always been greatly inspired by Da Vinci's prowess in both technical drawing and inventing, hence my image in his style, and choice of subject for this project.