Leonardo Da Vinci was a painter, inventor, and student of all things scientific. His natural genius crossed so many different subjects and is widely referred to as the “Renaissance man.” Today he remains best known for his art, including two paintings that remain among the worlds most famous and admired, Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Art, Da Vinci believed, was indisputably connected with science and nature. Leonardo was self-educated and he filled dozens of secret notebooks with his inventions and theories. As a result, though he was lauded in his time as a great artist, his contemporaries often did not fully appreciate his genius the combination of intellect and imagination that allowed him to create, at least on paper, such inventions as the bicycle, the helicopter and an airplane based on the physiology and flying capability of a bat. …show more content…
In his notebooks, he sketched ideas for new machines which weren’t actually invented until hundreds of years after his time. Some of these include parachutes, helicopters, army tanks, airplanes and an underwater breathing apparatus. He was a military engineer who made contributions to the advancement of weapon design. He studied water and had ideas for canals, steam-powered cannons and waterwheels. Today, almost 500 years after his death, Da Vinci is still considered as a great engineer. He is credited with coming up with some of the first designs for flight machines, and many of which couldn't be done until about a hundred years after his