Indulge fantasy. His giant crossbow? The turtle-like tanks? His plan for an ideal city? The man-powered mechanisms to flap a flying machine? Just as Leonardo blurred the lines between science and art, he did so between reality and fantasy. It may not have…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

In a larger sense, Leonardo’s maps are another example of one of his greatest, though underappreciated, innovations: devising new methods for the visual display of information. In his illustrations for Pacioli’s book on geometry, Leonardo was able to show models of a variety of polyhedrons that were perfectly shaded to look three-dimensional. In

In his quest to figure out how the centenarian died, Leonardo made a significant scientific discovery: he documented the process that leads to arteriosclerosis, in which the walls of arteries are thickened and stiffened by the accumulation of plaque-like substances. “I made an autopsy in order to ascertain the cause of so peaceful a death, and

As with so many topics, he said that he was planning to write a treatise on astronomy, but he never did so.

sexual drives can be sublimated into ambition and other passions. Leonardo said so himself. “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks.24

When they were in Bologna together, Francis probably invited Leonardo to come to France. Leonardo instead returned to Rome, but only briefly, perhaps to get his affairs in order. During that period, Francis and his court kept up efforts to recruit him, encouraged in that task by Francis’s mother, Louise de Savoie. “I beg you to urge Master Leonardo

Gypsies from the Balkans had spread throughout Europe in the fifteenth century and become such a nuisance in Milan that they were banished by a decree in 1493.

The fact that Leonardo was not only a genius but also very human—quirky and obsessive and playful and easily distracted—makes him more accessible. He was not graced with the type of brilliance that is completely unfathomable to us. Instead, he was self-taught and willed his way to his genius. So even though we may never be able to match his

As Leonardo’s de facto and perhaps legally adopted son and heir, Francesco Melzi was named the executor and bequeathed most of the estate. This included Leonardo’s pension, all sums of money owed to him, his clothes, books, writings, and “all the instruments and portraits pertaining to his art and calling as a painter.” To his most recently hired