Leonardo da Vinci is best remembered as the painter of the Mona Lisa
(1503-1506) and the mural The Last Supper
(1495). But he's almost equally famous for his astonishing multiplicity of talents: he dabbled in architecture, sculpture, engineering, geology, hydraulics and the military arts, all with success, and in his spare time doodled parachutes and flying machines that resembled inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Leonardo da Vinci made detailed drawings of human anatomy which are still highly regarded today. (His drawing of the proportions of a human male, set inside a circle and a square, is now known as Vitruvian Man.) Leonardo also was quirky enough to write notebook entries in mirror (backwards) script, a trick which kept many of his observations from being widely known until decades after his death.