Factor 1: Because of his eccentricUnconventional and slightly strange life and personality, historians have never left him alone.
He was a vegetarian, openly gay, overly concerned about his looks and fashion, left-handed and illegitimate (his father, an attorney, and his peasant mother were never married to one another).
All these were big issues in the 15th century (he was born in 1452) and how he navigated his life despite these “handicaps” has always intrigued historians.
His journey has also been exciting to the researchers because of the well-known, and mutual, dislike between him and Michelangelo (another genius).
Because of these things, a lot more is known (and kept alive) about him as compared to other geniuses of his time.
E.g., him being a painter and an engineer is considered a big deal but in those days everything was so connected (super-specialisations were yet to set in) that is likely that many artists were engineers & painters.
Factor 2: But he was not just engineer + painter; he was much more.
While he is famous as a painter, during his lifetime he was active as a painter, sculptor, architect, draughtsman, theorist, engineer & scientist.
Thousands of surviving pages of his notebook reveal his explorations in geology, anatomy (which he studied in order to paint the human form more accurately), flight, gravity, and optics, etc.
On paper, he ‘invented’ the bicycle, airplane, helicopter, and parachute hundreds of years ahead of their time.
He invented great techniques like Sfumato, which means there were no sharp borders and the painting was produced with softened outlines or hazy forms.
For The Mona Lisa (which took 4 years to paint), he spent many pages in his notebook dissecting the human face to figure out every muscle and nerve that touched the lips.
Factor 3: He is the creator of the most famous paintings in the world.
He is famous for The Mona Lisa & The Last Supper, and his Salvator Mundi is known to be the most expensive work of art ever sold at an auction — it was bought for $450 million by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 2017.
While The Mona Lisa can’t be sold as per French heritage law, it was assessed to be worth around $830 Million in 2018.
Recently the CEO of a French tech company proposed the idea of selling The Mona Lisa for $64 Billion to rescue France’s economy (hit by COVID-19).
His Vitruvian Man (backdrop in the image above) is considered iconic because it introduced the concept of perfect proportions of the human body (four fingers equal one palm; four palms equal one foot, etc.)
