The greatest of all time

1. The sixteenth-century Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci must be one of the greatest men who has ever lived. He is best remembered as a painter and a sculptor, but the extent of his abilities in other areas of knowledge is still a source of astonishment to scholars today. A recently published book describes him as the world’s first real scientist and shows just how great his achievements really were.

2. Leonardo’s imagination was so vivid, his thirst for knowledge so powerful, that he dreamt up inventions that, at the time, seemed quite impossible. He produced drawings, plans and diagrams of pieces of equipment which have come into being only in the last hundred years or so. For example, he worked out the principles for a parachute, a diving suit, contact lenses and the camera, long before the world was ready for them.

3. What drove Leonardo was his desire for information. Rather than accept what people at the time could understand and explain, he looked for a new understanding of how nature worked, gained through observation and experiments. Leonardo’s ideas remained largely unpublished and unknown for years after his death, however. Meanwhile, other people, ignorant of his findings, struggled to make the discoveries described in his notebooks all over again. If his ideas had been common knowledge, western science might have progressed much faster. For example, he had sketched designs for a telescope one hundred years before Galileo came up with the same idea.

4. Although Leonardo was a very good painter, and was in great demand, he was more interested in his experiments. He wrote details of these in his notebook. By nature, Leonardo was a secretive man and always suspicious that others might steal his ideas. So from the beginning, his notebooks were written in various codes, including one known as mirror writing, where the words are written in such a way that they can only be read in a mirror. Although Leonardo’s discoveries destroyed many theories which existed at the time, unfortunately, few of them came to light during his lifetime.

5. And, what’s more, all was nearly lost when he died in 1519. He entrusted the job of sorting out his notes to a young man called Francesco Melzi. But the task was beyond his capabilities. Melzi’s son, who inherited them, was equally unable to cope and abandoned them in an attic cupboard. When the notebooks were eventually rediscovered, there were 13, 000 pages remaining, containing 1, 500 diagrams and anatomical drawings. Some had, however, already been lost to treasure hunters. The pages are now divided between museums and libraries all over Europe.

6. One of the great mysteries of Leonardo’s character is that he started so much and finished so little. Only a handful of his paintings were completed, few of his inventions were ever made and the books he aimed to write remained unpublished. It’s almost as if he was involved in so many investigations, which led him on to even more unanswered questions, that he was never able to call a halt. Towards the end of his life, he must have realized that the world of nature was too large and complicated for even a brain like his to fully understand.

Задание № 2. Ответьте письменно на вопросы:

1. Why were Leonardo’s inventions so remarkable?

2. How many people knew about Leonardo’s findings?

3. Why did he write his notes in such a way that others could not understand them?

4. What did Leonardo care about most?

5. Were Leonardo’s ideas published?

Задание № 3. Прочтите и переведите текст на русский язык, раскройте скобки, употребив выделенные глаголы в нужной видовременной форме: