This larger than life marble sculpture of Leonardo da Vinci depicts him standing, wearing a long cloak and hat. He has a long beard and casually seems to be adjusting his right cuff with his left hand while deep in thought. The 1872 work was sculpted by Pietro Magni.
Wikipedia (
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"Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci ... April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519, Old Style) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci states that while there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, in Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded him by Francis I.
Leonardo was, and is, renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number because of his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised flying machines, a tank, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull, also outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on later science."
As for the asteroid, Wikipedia (
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"3000 Leonardo (1981 EG19) is a main-belt asteroid discovered on March 2, 1981 by S. J. Bus at Siding Spring.
Discovered by S. J. Bus
Discovery site Siding Spring
Discovery date March 2, 1981
Designations
MPC designation 3000
Named after Leonardo da Vinci
Alternative names 1981 EG19
Orbital characteristics
Epoch May 14, 2008
Aphelion 2.7758108
Perihelion 1.9264256
Eccentricity 0.1806343
Orbital period 1316.7706507
Mean anomaly 345.40402
Inclination 2.74843
Longitude of ascending node 201.04373
Argument of perihelion 173.22666
Physical characteristics
Absolute magnitude (H) 13.0"