Leonardo da Vinci has often been described as the Italian archetype of the "Renaissance man" or universal genius. He was a scientist, a mathematician, an engineer, an inventor, an anatomist, a painter, a sculptor, an architect, a musician and a writer. It is primarily as a painter that Leonardo was and is renowned. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper occupy unique positions as the most famous, most reproduced and most imitated portrait and religious painting of all time. As an engineer, Leonardo conceived ideas vastly ahead of his own time, conceptualising a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, and the double hull, and outlining a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields ...more >>of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.