Leonardo da Vinci

Greater Feast of Leonard da Vinci, died May 2, 1519, Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise, France in Hermeneuticon at Hermetic Library

Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, Leonardus Vincius, Leonardo of Vinci, a region of the city state of Florence, before Italy

Italy 1452 – 1519

The multifaceted Genius artist, engineer, inventor, anatomist; sculptor, architect, musician, geologist, cartographer, botanist, the model of the Renaissance Man; Controversial, but I'll say Freemason, (more specifically a Fellow Craft Free Stone Mason of his time), see the Angel in The Annunciation painting (1472–1475) for his display of the Fellowcraft secrets to the discerning eye; also, the Vitruvian Man sketch has the proportions of Pi, it's sine and cosign, built in, to solve for triangles thru trigonometry if 2 arms and an angle is known, or two angles and one arm, in planes or spheres, very useful for statistics, astronomy and astrology;

“3. Every failure proves that one or more requirements of the postulate have not been fulfilled. (Illustrations: […] There may be failure to employ the correct medium, as when Leonardo da Vinci found his masterpiece fade away.”—Chapter I: What is Magick?

“Almost every day blesses the traveller with some delightful geographical surprises. […] A less accurate but perhaps more intelligible analogy is that of the curiously luminous, exquisite and irrational landscapes which were used as backgrounds by such painters as Mantegna, Memling and Leonardo da Vinci.”—Chapter 56

Teachers

Nature; John Argyropoulos; Vitruvius; Callimachus; Plato; Andrea del Verrocchio; Donatello; Marsilio Ficino; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; Rogier van der Weyden ; Dr. Marcantonio della Torre; Filippo Brunellschi AKA Filippo Brunelleschi, designer of the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, 1296; Leon Battista Alberti , 1404-1472; Johannes Gutenberg, printer, whose press created a demand, and thus supply, of cheap paper; Antonello da Messina, who replaced egg white paint with oils; Imhotep, engineer / architect for Pharaoh Djoser; Themo Judaei aka Themo the Jew aka Rabbi Timon, @ 1325 - @ 1371;

Students

Lorenzo di Credi; Bernardino Luini; Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio; Marco d'Oggione; Raphael Francesco Melz aka Francesco Melzi,; Rembrandt van Rijn; Nicholas Poussin ; Giorgio Vasari; Dr. Sherwin Nuland (RIP Shep); Chuck Furnace; Phoenix AKA Joe Z***; Michael White; Prof. George R. Bent; Frank Zollner; Serrge Bramley; Fritjof Capra; John James Audubon, bird painter; Stephen Jay Gould; Dan Brown, novelist; Jean Paul Richter; Jean Paul Richter; Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, AKA Le Corbusier; Kenneth Clark ; Dr. Francis Wells; Martin Clayton; Marcantonio della Torre; Caravaggio AKA Michelangelo Merisi; Worked on the Architecture Structure Problem inspiring Galileo, who disproved of Leonardo da Vinci's theory that wire's strength was related to it's length; Robert Hooke who captured it in Hooke's Law,“ut tensio sic vis” or “as the extension, so the force” AKA F= -Kx.; Augustine Couchy AKA Augustin-Louis Cauchy made it clearer; That was great until Leonhard Euler clarified it for different structural materials so the load-carrying and deflection characteristics of beams could be mathematically, rather than empirically, tested (don't have to have it fall down to know it is not strong enough). This was one of the ancient secrets of the Operative Freemasons, along with the capstone, how to make a Square and the Arch; Curator Annalisa Perissa Torriani; Professor Martin Kemp, Trinity College, Oxford; Prof. Carlo Pedretti, University of California, Los Angeles; Sławomir Zubrzycki, who created his Viola Organista instrument; William Harvey, discoverer of circulation; Dr. Paul Segond; Francesco Laparelli of Malta; Franz Helm of Cologne, inventor of the Rocket Cat!; Giovanni Saccani; King Carlo Alberto of Savoy, 1839; Giovanni Volpato; James Hall; Liz Rideal; Br. Ryan J. Flynn, Masonic Artist, 2016;

Friends

Lorenzo de' Medici, patron; Cesare Borgia, patron; Francis I of France, patron; Ludovico Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, patron; Domenico Ghirlandaio; Perugino; Botticelli; his assistant Salai AKA Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno aka Little Devil; Luca Pacioli, mathematician; Franchinus Gaffurius; Isabella d'Este; Niccolò Machiavelli; Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino aka Raphael, the Renaissance painter;

Rivals

Michelangelo; Andreas Vesalius, author of “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” (“On the Fabric of the Human Body”), 1543;

Organizations

Garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence, a Neo-Platonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers

Author

The Notebooks; Codex Leicester ; Treatise on Painting ; 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds; “Book entitled On the Human Figure”, 1489; Anatomical Manuscript B, in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, 1507-08; Anatomical Manuscript A, also in the Royal Collection;

Paintings

Mona Lisa; The Last Supper; sketch of the Vitruvian Man, on display again in 2013, after 30 years in a vault to protect it; self portrait in red chalk; The Adoration of the Magi; Virgin of the Rocks; The Battle of Anghiar; St. Jerome in the Wilderness; John the Baptist; Virgin and Child with St. Anne; the Annunciation

Discoveries / Inventions

flying machine; Glider; helicopter; tank; underwater breathing helmet; solar power; calculator; double hulled ships; theory of plate tectonics; mirror writing; cryptography; new paints; how water flows; how clouds move;

Quotes

“Iron rusts from disuse; stagnant water loses its purity and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind”; “Science is the captain, and practice the soldiers”; “He who walks straight rarely falls”; “It vexes me greatly that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters”; My works are the issue of pure and simple experience, who is the one true mistress; “The penis has dealings with human intelligence and sometimes displays an intelligence of its own”;

“Among other things, I shall not scruple to discover a new method of assisting the invention; which though trifling in appearance, may yet be of considerable service in opening the mind and putting it upon the scent of new thoughts, and it is this: if you look at some old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landskips (sic), battles, clouds, uncommon attitude, draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects the mind will be furnished with abundance of designs and subjects, perfectly new.”—Quoted at Automatic Drawing

 

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