Factor 1: <\/b>Because of his {tooltip}eccentric{end-text}Unconventional and slightly strange{end-tooltip} life and personality, historians have never left him alone.<\/li>\n

<\/b>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).<\/li>\n

<\/b>All these were big issues in the 15th century (he was born in 1452) and how he navigated his life despite these \u201chandicaps\u201d has always intrigued historians.<\/li>\n

<\/b>His journey has also been exciting to the researchers because of the well-known, and mutual, dislike between him and Michelangelo (another genius).<\/li>\n

<\/b>Because of these things, a lot more is known (and kept alive) about him as compared to other geniuses of his time.<\/li>\n

<\/b>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.<\/li>\n

Factor 2: <\/b>But he was not just engineer + painter; he was much more.<\/li>\n

<\/b>While he is famous as a painter, during his lifetime he was active as a painter, sculptor, architect, draughtsman, theorist, engineer & scientist.<\/li>\n

<\/b>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.<\/li>\n

<\/b>On paper, he ‘invented’ the bicycle, airplane, helicopter, and parachute hundreds of years ahead of their time.<\/li>\n

<\/b>He invented great techniques like Sfumato<\/span><\/a>, which means there were no sharp borders and the painting was produced with softened outlines or hazy forms.<\/li>\n

<\/b>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.<\/li>\n

Factor 3: <\/b>He is the creator of the most famous paintings in the world.<\/li>\n

<\/b>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 \u2014 it was bought for $450 million by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 2017.<\/li>\n

<\/b>While The Mona Lisa<\/a> can\u2019t be sold as per French heritage law, it was assessed to be worth around $830 Million in 2018.<\/li>\n

<\/b>Recently the CEO of a French tech company proposed the idea of selling The Mona Lisa for $64 Billion to rescue France\u2019s economy (hit by COVID-19<\/a>).<\/li>\n

<\/b>His Vitruvian Man <\/i>(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.)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
Also Read:\u00a0<\/strong>
\nWhat is so special about The Mona Lisa?<\/a><\/strong>
\nHow did The Mona Lisa become famous?<\/a><\/strong>
\nWhy is Pablo Picasso so famous?<\/a><\/strong>
\nWhy is Vincent van Gogh so famous and why did he commit suicide?<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n
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