Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

Leonardo painted the two most famous paintings in the world: The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, but I think what I have always found so fascinating about Leonardo is his breadth of genius. Leonardo designed ideal cities, studied optics, advanced the world of anatomy (by dissecting scores of cadavers, human and animal), accurately explained why the moon shines and why you can see portions of the moon that are not lit beyond its crescent, drew up plans to divert rivers, created entertaining court spectacles with flying machines and realistic dragons, planned military devices such as armored tanks, chariots with scythe-bearing wheels, and massive cross-bows, figured out why the sky is blue, how beams of light refract as they enter the eye and how to use that information to create paintings that would look real when viewed from any angle. He engaged in architecture, geometry, urban planning, civil engineering, sculpture, geology, and in many ways presaged the invention of science at a...