Who Am I

I peeled flesh off faces of cadavers to delineate the muscles that move the lips and then painted the worlds most memorable smile. I studied human skulls and made drawings of bones and teeth and conveyed the skeleton agony of Saint Jerome in the wilderness, I explored the mathematics of optics and showed how light rays strike the cornea and produced magical illusions of changing visual perspectives in the Last Supper. In the last year’s of my life I tried to make a theory why the sky appears blue.

My ability to make connections across disciplines art science humanities and technology was the key to my innovation, imagination, and genius, Even though I could barely read Latin and do long division I married observation with imagination.

In over 7200 pages of notes I did math calculations, sketches of boys, birds, flying machines, theater props, eddies of water, water valves, grotesque heads, angels, plant stem’s, split apart skulls, tips for painters, notes on optics, weapons of war, fables, riddles and studies for painting, observations that if the gooses foot always open or always closed the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement, questions on why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when I one would think the contrary since water is heavier and thicker than air, questions to describe the tongue of a woodpecker.... who would ask such questions? I also made notes like go every Sunday to the hot bath where you will see naked men next to a note on page to inflate the lungs of a pig and observe whether they increase in width and in length or only in width.

I liked to wear rose-colored tunics that reached my knee (renaissance shorts) when others were long garments. In my time, the 15th century of Columbus and Gutenberg were inventing and exploring and spreading new technologies and knowledge,

I was illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left handed, and so easily distracted i only finished 15 painitngs, Who was i?