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The person I chose for my Italian alter ego was Leonardo da Vinci. He was born on April 15th, 1452 (Mansur, 2023). Leonardo was very influential, not only in Italian history, but in human history. He helped advance many fields such as the sciences, the arts, and the humanities. He was a very influential person during the Italian Renaissance.
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Leonardo da Vinci is known as an artist, an inventor, an engineer, and a scientist. He started painting around the age of 15, when his father sent him to apprentice under an artist named Andrea del Verrocchio (Heydenreich, 2025). He was taught how to paint and sculpt, but he also made many technical sketches of the machines around him. He apprenticed there until 1482, when he moved to Milan and lived there for about 17 years (Heydenreich, 2025). While there, he painted and sculpted, and worked as a hydraulic and mechanical engineer. It was also during this time when he created one of his most famous paintings: The Last Supper.
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Eventually, Leonardo made his way back to Florence, where he worked on multiple projects over several years. He was commissioned to build a canal through the city, but the project was never built. He was also commissioned to create a giant mural for a council hall. He worked on it for three years, but it ultimately ended up unfinished. During the same time, he painted another one of his famous paintings, the Mona Lisa (Heydenreich, 2025). He was also busy extending his anatomical knowledge by studying dead bodies and drawing diagrams of the human body. He studied the brain, skull, and cerebral ventricles (Pevsner, 2019). As if that wasn’t enough, he was also studying water and how it worked, along with studying the flight patterns of birds (Heydenreich, 2025). This time in Florence was one of artistry and scientific discovery for Leonardo da Vinci.
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In 1508, he moved back to Milan and continued his scientific studies. His knowledge in anatomy and physiology flourished. He learned more about the brain and cranial nerves. He even created a cast of the ventricular system with hot wax (Pevsner, 2019). Along with this, his mathematical, mechanical, geological, and botanical studies also continued. Eventually he moved to Rome during a time of great artistic growth. St. Peter’s was being built, and artists like Michelangelo and Raphael were working on big projects. Now in his 60s, Leonardo was said to feel disappointed while living there, most likely because he felt he was past his prime. Another project he was commissioned for while he was in Rome was, again, never built (Heydenreich, 2025). At age 65, he moved to France, where he died a couple years later in 1519. During his lifetime, apart from the many paintings and drawings, he also had many sketches of machines. He had sketches of airplanes, automated carts, mechanized boats, marine crafts, and land vehicles (Dibner, 1979). He helped create, on paper, ideas for the bicycle, the airplane, and the helicopter, inventions that wouldn’t come until decades or centuries later (Nix, 2009). While many of his sculptures, paintings, and projects were either never started, never finished, or were lost through history, Leonardo was a very influential man.
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The main trait I admire about Leonardo da Vinci is his thirst for knowledge. He continued to expand his knowledge throughout his whole life in multiple fields; mathematics, art, science, botany, anatomy, etc. Even in his 60s in Rome, he continued to learn more about what he was passionate about. I also really admire his perseverance. He had so many projects throughout his life that were never finished or started, but he never let that stop him from creating and learning. He continued to do what he loved and create art. I’d like to do these things more throughout my life. I want to continue to learn about what I’m passionate about my whole life. I love to learn; it's one of my favorite things. I want to try and incorporate learning and continuing to learn during my lifetime. I also want to be able to persevere through hard times or when I feel like I’m failing. I think being able to pick yourself back up and grow from mistakes is a really admirable trait that I would like to work on in myself.
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If Leonardo da Vinci lived today, I think he would feel proud about how his inventions and ideas came to fruition. I think he would appreciate that his paintings are famous, and maybe find it amusing that we still don’t really know who the Mona Lisa is. I think he would be baffled by the technology we have today, such as the internet, AI, Bluetooth (mostly because even I don’t fully understand how it works) because these are inventions that he would have never imagined could exist. The knowledge and technology we have now would blow his mind. We know so much about so many things, I think it would be overwhelming for him since he lived so long ago.
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I’m not sure if there would be anything Leonardo da Vinci would try to change about today. I don’t think he would be able to change anything really. He might not fully understand our technology today, so it would be difficult for him to try and change things in the present. He might try to modify designs of things or try to invent something new, but I think he would need to understand the technology of today better in order to do that. While he is a brilliant man, he was brilliant for his time, centuries ago. Now, I’m not sure how he would go about trying to understand the technologies of today. I do think he would continue to paint, though. Instead of going into the sciences, he would probably go more into the arts and create new paintings, sculptures, or enter a completely new artistic field that didn’t exist while he lived.
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Dibner, Bern. “The Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci by Charles Gibbs-Smith (review).” Technology and Culture, vol. 20, no. 3, 1979, pp. 625-626. Project Muse, https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.lib.uni.edu/article/890534/pdf.
Heydenreich, Ludwig Heinrich. “Leonardo da Vinci | Biography, Art, Paintings, Mona Lisa, Drawings, Inventions, Achievements, & Facts.” Britannica, 28 April 2025, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leonardo-da-Vinci.
Mansur, Samira, and Javier DeFelipe. “Empathy and the Art of Leonardo da Vinci.” Frontier Psychology, vol. 14, 2023. frontiers, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1260814.
Nix, Elizabeth. “Leonardo da Vinci: Facts, Paintings & Inventions | HISTORY.” History.com, 2 December 2009, https://www.history.com/articles/leonardo-da-vinci.
Pevsner, Johnathan. “Leonardo da Vinci's Studies of the Brain.” The Lancet, vol. 393, no. 10179, 2019, pp. 1465-1472. The Lancet, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)30302-2/abstract.