Could Leonardo Da Vinci Draw Forward With One Hand While Writing Backward With The Other?

Leonardo-Da-Vinci(Discover) 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Leonardo da Vinci

By Alex Stone, Jason Stahl| Sunday, May 28, 2006

1. Leonardo was the love child of Caterina, a peasant, and Ser Piero, a lawyer and landlord. He was homeschooled and lacked a formal education in Greek and Latin.











12. And he figured out why the entire moon is dimly visible when it is a thin crescent. Its nightside is lit by light reflected from Earth, which appears 50 times brighter from the moon than the full moon appears here.

13. An ambidextrous, paranoid dyslexic, Leonardo could draw forward with one hand while writing backward with the other, producing a mirror-image script that others found difficult to read—which was exactly the point.

14. The Louvre recently spent $5.5 million rehanging the Mona Lisa inside a display case set into a wall, six feet behind a wooden barrier.

15. In August 2003, da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder, valued at $65 million, was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland by two men posing as tourists. They escaped in a Volkswagen Golf.

16. Leonardo designed an armored car, a scythed chariot, a pile driver, a revolving crane, a pulley, a lagoon dredge, and a flying ship.

17. In December 2000, skydiver Adrian Nicholas landed in South Africa using a parachute built from one of Leonardo’s designs.

18. I wonder what happens if . . . After dissecting cadavers, Leonardo replaced the muscles with strings to see how they worked.

19. Sometimes he could be such a dick: He was a big fan of puns and word games, and Folio 44 of his Codex Arundel contains a long list of playful synonyms for penis.

20. He crushed intelligent design before anyone even thought of it: His studies of river erosion convinced him that the Earth is much older than the Bible implies, and he argued that falling sea levels—not Noah’s Flood—left marine fossils on mountains.

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