- Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t stern and serious at all. His notebooks are full of puns and rebuses. Many jokes also litter the pages such as: “A painter was asked why he produced such beautiful figures, even though they were dead objects, but produced such ugly children? To which he replied that he made his paintings by day and his children by night.”
- He was dyslexic. This has been determined from his peculiar writing style of writing backward, left to right. He also used erratic spelling and his habit of starting projects he never finished has been identified today as an ADD tendency.
- His habit of writing in reverse had another benefit – the style made his writing difficult to read, making it basically impossible for anyone to dig through his notes and steal his ideas.
- Da Vinci’s fascination for anatomy is widely known, but did you know that he also replaced muscles in cadavers with strings to see how they worked?
- Despite his father being a wealthy legal notary, his mother Caterina was a peasant, and the two were not married when he was born.
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