DARE TO DREAM BIG!: From Illegitimate Son to “The Ultimate Renaissance Man”

Imagine This: Because you are illegitimate, you are denied the educational privileges of children born within a marriage. This means that you receive the basic elementary education for boys of your day, but you are not allowed to attend any of the new universities. So do you give up any dreams you might have that require a formal education?

You’re born on April 15, 1452, the son of a peasant mother, Caterina, and a country gentleman, Ser Piero. Your father, Ser Piero, is a lawyer and a leading citizen of Vinci, Italy, but instead of marrying Caterina, he marries a woman of his own class.

By the time you’re five, your mother has married someone of her own class, and you’re living with your father and stepmother at your grandfather’s house near the village of Vinci, twenty miles from Florence.

Since you’re illegitate, you’re denied the privileges of children born within a marriage. You receive the basic elementary education for boys of your day (reading, writing, and arithmetic), but you are not allowed to attend one of the new universities.

Instead, your “university” is the workshop of the famous Florentine artist Andrea del Verrocchio who takes you on as a fifteen-year-old apprentice and fosters your talents.

After you have been studying with Verrocchio for some time, you help paint a picture of St. John baptizing Jesus. Verrocchio has already finished most of the painting, but you paint one of the angels and complete the background. It is said that when Verrocchio sees your angel, he is so struck by how much finer it is than anything else in the painting that he never picks up a paintbrush again.

When you’re twenty, you’re accepted into the painters’ guild but you begin projects only to abandon them. You enjoy sketching and planning the composition of the picture, but you don’t particularly enjoy the long and meticulous process of painting itself, so many of your projects are left unfinished. And only seventeen of your paintings survive.

You begin writing in your famous notebooks when you’re about thirty, and over the years, you fill thousands of pages with the outpourings of your amazing mind. In 1994, Bill Gates, chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, buys one of your notebooks for $30 million.

Your notebooks include drafts of letters, sketches for future paintings, plans for inventions, moral observations, designs for weapons, drawings of anatomy, and observations of nature.

Much of what you draw does not technically get invented for centuries: contact lenses, cars, bicycles, expressways, airplanes, helicopters, prefabricated houses, burglarproof locks, automatic door closers, submarines, life preservers, steam engines, and tanks.

When you die on May 2, 1519, at age sixty-seven, the King of France is at your bedside and you have become known as a man for all seasons: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, and so much more!

Although you’ve received very little formal education, you had such an inquiring mind and so many talents in so many areas that you become known as one of the greatest intellects in the history of mankind. You are considered “the ultimate Renaissance man”--an all-around genius whose contributions to the arts and sciences changed the world!

“There are three classes of people. Those who see; those who see when they are shown; those who do not see.”

                                                      Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Excerpted from They Stood Alone!: 25 Men and Women Who Made a Difference by Sandra McLeod Humphrey

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfu4nL1mU-k

Giving Back:  There is almost no field of knowledge where Leonardo da Vinci has not made a contribution to the world: including anatomy, physiology, mechanics, hydraulics, physics, philosophy, mathematics, botany, optics, writing, and engineering.

Did You Know that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is probably the most famous painting in the world?

Something to Think about: How do you think Leonardo da Vinci’s  insatiable curiosity about how the world worked contributed to his impressive list of accomplishments?

Willoughby and I hope you enjoyed this week’s true story and will be back next week for another story to inspire you to DARE TO DREAM BIG!