Da Vinci: 15th Century Artist or Scientist?

Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the most profound artists of the Italian Renaissance. Surely that is my opinion; however, it is an opinion which is supported by historians all over the world, across several generations. While many people think of him as merely an artist, they do not realize his genius went far beyond simple pigments. He was an artist, a scientist and a mathemetician. He left behind hundreds of sketches that may never have made it to the Louvre, but they do offer insight into the mind of the master.

Da Vinci was a thinker. Let's take his work the "Vitruvian Man". At a glance, it looks like one of his overworked sketches, with the man's limbs flaling about, posed within a circle overlapping a square. Let's read the sketch shall we. First of all, at the top of the sketch you'll notice his handwritten note to himself is backwards, something not at all uncommon for Da Vinci's personal journals. Below that is the subject of the piece, the man. I invite you to survey the image yourself and take this ride with me.

The "Vitruvian Man", is not only an anatomical analysis of the human form, but a mathematical experiment rendering a circle and a square with the same area, without measuring either one. You'll take notice of the fractions written at the bottom of the image. Da Vinci spent his lifetime trying to figure out such things and left behind pages and pages of his toiled research and experiments. Much of the paintings we know of, are deeply scientific and were created from his understanding of the human body and physics. In his unpolished notebooks, he left behind the world as he understood it, repleet with inventions that were to come hundreds of years later.

With that said, who do you think invented the bicycle, airplane, helicopter, and parachute?
BBC - Science & Nature - Leonardo - Vitruvian Man