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Leonardo da Vinci: The Last Supper (1498)
Leonardo is well known for his paintings, such as Mona Lisa (La Gioconda, now at the Louvre in Paris) and the Last Supper (Ultima Cena or Cenacolo, in Milan). Only seventeen of his paintings, and none of his statues, survive. Leonardo often planned grand paintings with many drawings and sketches, only to leave the projects unfinished in the end. In 1481 he was commissioned to paint the altarpiece "The Adoration of the Magi". After grand plans and many drawings, the painting was left unfinished and Leonardo left for Milan. There he spent many years making plans and models for a monumental 8 metre (27 feet) high horse statue in bronze ("Gran Cavallo"), to be erected in Milan. Because of war with France, the project was never finished. Based on private initiative, a similar statue was completed according to his plans in 1999 in New York, given to Milan and erected there. Back in Florence, he was commissioned for a large public mural; Michelangelo was to paint the opposite wall. After producing a fantastic variety of studies preparing for the work, he left town. Maybe even more impressive than his artistic work are his detailed studies in anatomy (see "Vitruvian Man" below), engineering, bird flight and many other areas. He recorded his results in detailed notebooks which combine art and science. He was left-handed and used mirror writing[?] throughout his life.
In 1502 Leonardo da Vinci produced a drawing of a single span 720-foot (240 m) bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Sultan Bajazet II[?] of Constantinople. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosphorus known as the Golden Horn. The bridge was never built, but Da Vinci's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. His approach to science was an observatory one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanations. Throughout his life, he planned a grand encyclopedia based on detailed drawings of everything. His notebooks contain drawings of several innovative machines, among them various flying machines and a helicopter, machine guns, an armored tank, a submarine, and a cog-wheeled device that has been interpreted as a mechanical calculator. On January 3, 1496 he unsuccessfully tested a flying machine he had constructed. Leonardo did not publish or otherwise distribute the contents of these notebooks. The notebooks remained obscure until the 19th century, and were not directly of value to the development of science and technology until that time. On this basis, L. Sprague de Camp, in his book, The Ancient Engineers, considered Leonardo not the first modern engineer, but "the last of the ancient ones", pointing out that after Leonardo's time the practice of disseminating and publishing scientific discoveries began in earnest. In 1994, one of da Vinci's notebooks was purchased by American entrepreneur Bill Gates Chairman of Microsoft Corporation, for US$25 million.
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