15 April: Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was born on this date in 1452. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. He was the illegitimate son of Messer Piero Frosino di Antonio da Vinci, a respected notary and lawyer, and a young peasant woman named Caterina di Meo Lippi. Being born out of wedlock wasn’t too much of a stigma in those days, and in fact, may have worked in Leonardo’s favour, as a legitimate son would have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and study to be a notary. As it was, Leonardo was able to follow his own interests.
2. Da Vinci isn’t his surname. It means “of Vinci” meaning he came from Vinci, a village near Florence.
3. He didn’t go to school. His father taught him some maths and Latin at home and then at 14 he was apprenticed to an artist in Florence where he would have learned what he needed to know about arts, crafts and sculpture.
4. He was a musician as well as an artist. He could sing and also play the lyre and the flute. He liked to listen to Music as he worked, and even did a bit of composing, as evidenced by some of his manuscripts containing his musical compositions.
5. At 24, he was accused of sodomy, potentially a capital office at the time. He was acquitted, but afterwards disappeared for two years. He came back to take on a commission at a chapel in Florence in 1478. It’s possible, then, that he was gay.
6. His writing was very difficult to read. Not only could he write and draw equally well with either hand, he often wrote from right to left, creating mirror image writing. The jury’s out on whether this was to keep his musings secret or because he was trying to avoid blots and smudges.
7. He didn’t write about his personal life, but he did enjoy word games and puns. Folio 44 of his Codex Arundel contains a long list of playful synonyms for a penis.
8. One of da Vinci’s jobs was to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. He made numerous drawings of human anatomy during this time, including the Heart and vascular system.
9. He was a vegetarian and would buy caged Birds from the market just so he could set them free.
10. He may have been responsible for painting by numbers. A paint company employee named Dan Robbins remembered reading somewhere that Leonardo would teach his apprentices to paint using number-sorted canvases, although there’s no actual proof that he did. It can be verified, however, that Robbins made millions out of selling the painting by numbers concept in the 1950s.

Character birthday

Zenith, aka Tristram Ogilvy. As a student he experimented with potions to give him superpowers, although he tried them out first on his sister rather than on himself. When she developed powers, he took the potion himself. He and his sister, Nadia, teamed up as supervillains, killing their grandfather in order to inherit his fortune, and went on to infiltrate chemical and pharmaceutical companies in order to steal secret formulas and sell them. His powers are speed and strength. His skills are a vast knowledge of chemistry.