Da Vinci was not an artist!
I would argue that Da Vinci shouldnt be classified as an artist, as that box is too tiny to capture all of what this Dood could do.. To quote Wikipedia, Da Vinci was an Italian "polymath" - and no, Dan, that doesnt mean he had lots of wives.. nor does it mean he taught his parrot to multiply and divide.. it means that he was a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. (He was also ALLEGEDLY a member of the Freemasons who encoded his paintings with all kinds of signs, "symbology" and riddles for us armchair detectives who like to read Dan Brown novels to use to stoke up the conspiracy theories of old..)
It seems unfair to categorize as an "artist" a man who had this said about him:
"There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries."
-Hippolyte Taine
Da Vinci drew the first known pictures ever of a foetus, he discovered "hardening of the arteries" (something that was not rediscovered for well over a 100 years afterwards), he discovered all kinds of scientific laws and engineering truths - about light, flight, biology, hydraulics etc - that were not fully appreciated until hundreds of years later..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQM0bfBQvDA
If there is one person in history the term "genius" should truly be used for, its Da Vinci
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