The Successes and Failures of Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci led a very full, very interesting, and very quirky life. He made major contributions to science, art, and mechanics — and incorporated his religious beliefs into his art. Here's a look at some little-known (and a few rather odd) facts about this beloved Renaissance man. If nothing else, you can always use these tidbits to impress your friends at dinner parties.

Fresh out of the oven

Not everyone's born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and Leonardo was no exception. He experienced some hardships in his youth, many relating to his illegitimate birth. Yet, he survived, as most adolescents tend to do . . . even if they don't have all the answers. He was a love child and, as a result, couldn't enter most professions. Scholars speculate that had he been legitimate, he may have been a doctor, not an artist. But he made do with what he was given (and did a pretty good job of it, no less).

His lovable traits . . .

Yep, he had personality — besides charm, good looks, incredible strength, and unparalleled genius. Leonardo had some respectable qualities that made him endearing.

• He respected all life, animal and human — and was a vegetarian. (Despite his reverence for life, he fashioned himself as a military engineer and got a job designing weapons of war for Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan. Go figure.)

• He loved maps and walked around towns like Imola, kicking up dust and measuring things.

• He was possibly a synasthete, meaning that he could "see" music or "feel" colors, which probably contributed to his artistic genius.

. . . and his quirky ones

Although he was amazing, to say the least, Leonardo had a few bad habits and oddities that put him on his own plane (or universe, maybe?).

• He was a perfectionist and terrible procrastinator, rarely finishing what he started. In many ways, these two tendencies conspired against him.

• He stalked handsome, ugly, or otherwise interesting-looking people on the street, recorded their features in his mind, and then drew them. His affinity for interesting visages partly explains why his sketches and portraits of people fall into essentially two camps: the beauties and the beasts — or, in art circles, Leonardo's grotesques.

• He was a prankster who enjoyed the last laugh. Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo's biographer, relates an incident in which Leonardo painted a monster of lizards, newts, and serpents breathing fire on a shield to scare his father. And in the court of Pope Leo X, Leonardo designed a terrifying lizard with quicksilver wings — which he kept as a pet.

Measuring Leo's skill set

There's nothing so special about being a jack-of-all-trades if you're master of none. Leonardo (not to diminish your own skills, of course) was master of all.

• He was a skilled musician and played a number of instruments from the lyre to the lira de braccia. He even tried to improve upon them in some of his designs.

• He wrote fables, like Aesop's. He used animals to offer lessons about human foibles, from jealousy to greed.

• He was a general handyman; in Ludovico Sforza's court, he fixed the plumbing and designed spectacular parties.

• He was a true intellectual. He studied everything, from how to square a triangle (basically, find a square with the same area as the triangle), why tree branches grow towards the sun, how rivers deposit fossils, and how birds move their wings.

• He carried out dissections, contrary to some of the Church's leanings. He wanted to map the site of the soul on the human body and understand the brain's role in human emotion.

• His beautiful angel in the Baptism of Christ supposedly made Andrea del Verrocchio abandon painting forever.

Cultivating those contradictions

Leonardo was a bundle of paradoxes, which helps explain his genius and, in some ways, makes him more difficult to understand today.

• He had a peculiar, backward penmanship, called mirror writing.

You may have heard that Leonardo was so secretive about his work that he wrote it backward in Latin, thus making deciphering his musings that much more difficult. Well, that idea isn't entirely true. He did write backward, and one of his reasons may have been to protect his ideas from the casual observer, but he didn't write in Latin. The reason? Leonardo taught himself Latin only later in life, but probably never mastered it fully, as he was banned from a formal education because he was illegitimate.

• He was a pacifist by nature, but drew many military weapons — some of which, as befitting his disdain for war, he designed with faulty parts on purpose so they wouldn't work!

• He left thousands and thousands of pages in notebooks, which various people later rearranged loosely according to subjects. But he kept his notebooks a mess during his lifetime, scribbling thoughts about water, for example, next to drawings of figures.

• Despite the acclaim he garnered during his lifetime, he left around two dozen paintings.

Besting all around him: Leo's firsts

Although Leonardo caught the wave of Renaissance innovation and built on many techniques, concepts, and tools, he had many firsts.

• He was one of the first Italian artists to use oil paints. He preferred the longer drying time, which enabled him to paint and repaint to his heart's content. He even had his own recipe for his paints.

• He invented the first real robot. It has a human figure dressed in armor and powered by water or weights.

• He was obsessed with flying and sketched flying contraptions and even a parachute (just in case one of his planes was shot down by one of his rapid-fire crossbows, perhaps). Had human power not limited his endeavors, the airplane may have existed half a millennium before it did.

• He estimated the diameter of the earth to be about 7,750 miles, which wasn't too far off. The actual diameter, as measured at the equator: 7,926.5 miles. — a mere difference of just 176.5 miles!

• He wrote in his notebook that the sun doesn't move, a revolutionary concept for the time when people still believed that the earth was the center of the universe (geocentric) and all other heavenly objects revolved around it. But in other places in these same notebooks, he still believed in the geocentric theory of the universe.

Taking a hit: Leo's failures

His blunders were few and far between, but Leonardo was only human.

• The Last Supper was a disaster. It started to deteriorate almost as soon as he finished it because of the materials he used. Instead of using the traditional water-based paint on wet plaster (a combination known as fresco), Leonardo used oil-based paint over a combination of pitch, gesso, and mastic (a type of cement). Because of Leonardo's technique, the painting isn't even a real fresco.

• He never wrote any of the treatises he intended to write on myriad subjects, from flight and anatomy to hydrology and geology.