Leonardo Da Vinci

The phrase "there is a fine line between genius and insanity" has bounced around inside the rings of my ears on innumerable occasions in my life. When approached with such a phrase, I tend to hear the sounds the words create resonating like some ill-struck chord on the somewhat tune deaf organ of my mind. My hero, Leonardo Da Vinci, did not only embrace such a chord and such a tune, but the song of his entire life was built upon those exact notes.

Born on the fifteenth of April 1452, Leonardo Da Vinci started small. However, being born and raised in a small farmhouse did very little, if anything, to hinder a boy who would soon become the focal point of the artistic, scientific, and medical worlds of his own age and of many ages to come. Leonardo and his father moved to Florence, Italy when he was barely seventeen. This would come to be the beginning of Leonardo’s artistic education, as he would soon study under the most famous artist and sculptor of that time, Andrea del Verrocchio. Leonardo soon surpassed his teacher and painted what are now some of the most famous paintings that will ever exist.

Leonardo did not stop in the artistic world; he soon became fascinated with the human body. In order to please such a fascination, Leonardo would often dig up the corpses of dead criminals and proceed to perform some of the first autopsies ever recorded. Not only did this educate the medical world but he also used this knowledge to paint and draw some of the most realistic and influential pieces of human based art that will ever be created. Leonardo would push the envelope even further in the later years of his life by delving into the engineering and science fields. Leonardo drew design plans for things that would not be built until thousands of years later. The tank, the machine gun and the helicopter are just a few of his remarkably genius inventions.

Leonardo Da Vinci defines the line between genius and insanity and that is precisely why I chose him as my hero.