Leonardo decoded

By Andy Rooney - 06/15/2006

Leonardo da Vinci, who died in 1519 when he was 67, would certainly be amused and flattered to see all the attention he’s getting in 2006 because of the movie with his name on it. He ought to be getting a piece of every ticket sold.

Considering how familiar the name is to all of us today, it’s strange to read about the man and find that his name was really just ‘‘Leonardo.’’ ‘‘Vinci’’ is the town in which he was born, and ‘‘da’’ simply means ‘‘from’’ or ‘‘of,’’ That’s how he got to be called ‘‘Leonardo da Vinci.’’

Leonardo (I’m not going to call him ‘‘da Vinci’’ if that wasn’t his name) was one of the most talented human beings who ever lived. We know him mostly because of his paintings, many of which can still be seen at the Louvre in Paris. The Mona Lisa and The Last Supper may be the best paintings ever done by anyone.

Da Vinci lived in Rome for two years and knew both Raphael and Michelangelo, but his paintings are better known than any of theirs.

Yet, Leonardo’s paintings may not even have been the best things he ever did. He was a genius who designed and drew sketches of helicopters, airplanes, calculators comparable to our computers, a 700-foot-long bridge and a device designed to make practical use of solar power.

It strikes me as a flaw in our civilization that we’re struggling with a shortage of oil as a source of energy when we know about solar power but haven’t bothered to develop it very much. If da Vinci was alive, I’ll bet he’d have come up with ways to harness more solar power.

Notebooks containing more than 13,000 pages of sketches and ideas of Leonardo’s still exist. He put down everything with his left hand. It’s amazing how many of our most talented artists and even creative people in other forms of art are left-handed.

Several years ago, Bill Gates acquired the collection of Leonardo’s scientific writings called the Codex Leicester. I guess that’s the sort of thing you do with money if you’re the richest man in the world. You have to admire him for it.

Leonardo grew up with his father — I don’t know where his mother was — and when he was about 14, it became apparent that he was talented, so his father sent him to study with one of the best-known painters of the time, Andrea del Verrocchio.

It turned out to be a bad move for del Verrocchio. He watched what this 14-year-old kid was able to paint and it was so much better than what he could do that he got discouraged and stopped painting anything at all himself.

Like most geniuses, Leonardo was kind of a nut, too. He was a vegetarian, which isn’t really nutty, but he went so far as to believe that taking milk from a cow was stealing. When he was living in Florence, a friend reported that when Leonardo had some extra money, he’d go down to the market and buy some of the birds they had in cages. Then, he’d open the cage doors and let the birds out.

It seems likely that for all his talent, Leonardo was not perfect. All his life, he accepted money for doing work that he never finished. He’d draw the sketches for what he planned to paint but then never got at actually painting it. (I like this about Leonardo because it reminds me of myself.) It seems more than likely that Leonardo was gay. He never married and had a lifelong companion named Andrea Salai.

Leonardo and Salai found another young friend named Francesco Melzi and the three of them traveled everywhere together for many years.

As you may have detected, I’ve been reading about Leonardo da Vinci. Now, I guess I’ll go to the movie to see why all the Catholics are so upset about it.

— Write to Andy Rooney at Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207, or via e-mail at a.rooney@yahoo.com