LEONARDO DA VINCI AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF EXPANDING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci  is regularly given as the best example of the 'all round genius'. In other words, as the individual who has most dramatically demonstrated the use of all his intelligences. Leonardo's genius was so great that some people rate him the greatest genius of all time in many of the individual intelligences too. He was an Italian Polymath: Painter, Sculptor, Architect, Musician,Scientist, Mathematician, Engineer, Inventor, Anatomist, Geologist, Cartographer, Botanist and Writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention.  He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.What makes this interesting is that he was almost entirely self-thought and provides a tremendous example to us of just what someone can achieve with a determination to expand and develop all of his intelligences.
Contrary to assumptions, Leonardo was not from a wealthy, well-to-do family. He was an illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence. His formal education is very basic. He was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.

Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious paintings of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on everything from the euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. 

Leonardo himself said that he became the genius that he was because of the application of his brain to learning how it - and especially his senses - worked. In other words, the person we hold up as the ultimate genius became so because he worked at it. Leonardo was very proud of the fact that he was self-educated, and he used to purposely refer to himself as a 'Disciple of Experience'.