Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest artists of his time, but these days most people only remember him from a couple of paintings. Find out what else the most famous man of the Renaissance lived and how his life influenced modern times in this collection of fun facts from the “Today I Learned” subreddit. 
1. Leonardo da Vinci left behind more than 13,000 pages of notes and drawings on anatomy, physiology, engineering, mechanics, geometry, mathematics, bird flight, aircraft, botany, proportions, topology, weapons, musical instruments, art and much more . He recorded all this using a special mirror stenography, from right to left. 
2. Leonardo da Vinci designed a robot in knight's armor, controlled by cables. When modern engineers built a replica based on da Vinci's drawings, the robot was fully functional. 
3. Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, as it exists today, is largely a modern reconstruction. The painting deteriorated greatly in just sixty years after it was painted and has since suffered from floods, bombing, French revolutionaries, rough fabric covering the painting, and the use of the room where it was located as a prison cell. 
4. Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli planned to steal the Arno River from Pisa when the city was at war with Florence. 
5. Leonardo da Vinci wrote: “All the branches of a tree at every stage of its height, when added together, are equal in thickness to the trunk.” In 2011, Christophe Eloy conducted a study and found that trees that followed Leonardo's rule best resisted destruction caused by wind. 
6. Leonardo da Vinci firmly intended to publish all his works and left them to his student, who was unable to get through all the master’s notes and during his lifetime only managed to compile a treatise on his painting, and the rest of the papers were sold by his heirs, who were not interested in their content. 
7. Leonardo da Vinci slept only 20 minutes every 4 hours. 
8. Portrait of Ginevra de Benci is the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci that is located in the Western Hemisphere (in Washington, DC). 
9. Leonardo da Vinci did not have a real last name because he was born out of wedlock. His “surname” became da Vinci (literally: from Vinci), since he was born in the city of Vinci. 
10. Leonardo da Vinci once conducted an experiment to understand how blood flows through the heart valves. To do this, he poured hot wax into the heart, made a thin glass mold based on the cast, and then pumped water and seeds through it. This allowed him to see that the heart regulates itself. 
11. Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi sold at auction in 1958 for £45 and in 2005 for less than $10,000. In 2011, the painting was recognized as an original work by Leonardo. After that, in 2013, the painting was sold for $75 million, resold again for $127.5 million, and then again at auction in 2017 for $450.3 million. 
12. The most expensive manuscript in existence is the Codex Leicester, a notebook of Leonardo da Vinci's notes. Adjusted for inflation, it is worth $53 million and is currently owned by Bill Gates. 
13. “The Adoration of the Magi” is an unfinished work by Leonardo da Vinci, commissioned by a Florentine monastery in 1480. Leonardo tended to abandon projects, so in the end, when he got tired of work, he simply abandoned everything and moved to Milan. Then the monastery paid Filippino Lippi to complete the painting. 
14. Before becoming a famous artist, Leonardo da Vinci was a wedding planner. He originally developed the table layout for the Last Supper for the wedding of the Duke of Milan in 1491. 
15. Although Leonardo da Vinci was one of the leading artists of the High Renaissance, only 15 of his works have survived to us. This is due to Leonardo's constant unsuccessful experiments with new techniques and his chronic procrastination. 
16. In 1998, the city of Des Moines, Iowa rejected a pedestrian bridge project as "too modern." The design was based on drawings made by Leonardo da Vinci in 1504. 
17. “Portrait of a Musician” is an unfinished painting that many experts attribute to Leonardo da Vinci. This is his only known male portrait. It has many similarities with other Leonardo paintings such as the Madonna of the Rocks and Lady with an Ermine. 
18. Leonardo DiCaprio was named Leonardo because he first started pushing in his mother's stomach while she was looking at a Leonardo da Vinci painting in a museum in Italy. 
19. Leonardo da Vinci scratched his initials into the right eye of the Mona Lisa. 
20. One of the few references to sexuality in Leonardo da Vinci's notes reads: “The act of reproduction and everything that has anything to do with it is so disgusting that if beautiful faces and sensual inclinations did not exist, human beings would rather prefer become extinct." 
21. People of the early Italian Renaissance, such as Leonardo da Vinci, had never seen or tasted tomatoes in their lives. 
22. Once, when Leonardo da Vinci was still a student in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, he instructed him to draw an angel in his work “The Baptism of Christ.” Seeing the beauty of the angel painted by his young student, Veriocco never touched his brush again. 
23. Leonardo da Vinci could write and draw with both hands. 
24. Leonardo da Vinci’s last words were: “I have offended God and humanity by doing so little in my life.” 
25. Leonardo da Vinci bought caged animals at markets only to release them into the wild. 
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