Leonardo DaVinci

Leonardo Da Vinci was born in 1452 Milán, Lombardy Italy. He was a painter, astrologist, paleontologist, and engineer. Throughout his painting career, he made around 25 paintings in total, which include the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. In addition, he drew a sketch of various inventions, including a machine that would enable people to fly based on the flight of birds, before Leonardo drew it lots of other people tried to invent a flying machine and Leonardo's design most likely inspired the Wright brother’s plane , he also made a sketch of a tank-like vehicle that was shaped like a somewhat flattened cone and had canons coming out all around it. Leonardo is also known for drawing the Vitruvian man, which depicts a person in a cross-like position with four arms and four legs. It represents Leonardo's conception of ideal body proportions.

We learnt most of these things when we went to some museum in Milan, the museum we went to was the Milan museum of science and technology and the other one was only about Leonardo DaVinci and is named Leonardo3 - Leonardo DaVinci experience. At the DaVinci experience museum there was a reproduction of the last supper and a large interactive screen that told you all the details of the painting and its history such as it took Leonardo 3 years to paint it and he used tempera paint instead of oil paint, which made it easily degrade over time. The paint was tried to be restored multiple times, but all the restoration attempts just made it worse. The last supper was originally painted inside of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, that we passed on our way to the museums. The painting was removed from its original place and now you now have to pay just to see the original painting.

In the Leonardo DaVinci experience museum, there were multiple reconstructions inventions he sketched, like the flying machine and the armored fighting vehicle mentioned above, as well multiple other ones like an early concept of a parachute and a diving suit. Leonardo did actually end up building a “robot”, it was a mechanical lion made for King Francis I of France, the mechanical lion was made of bronze and could supposedly walk around like a wind-up toy and move its head as well it had a compartment in its chest that could open up and reveal flowers.