National Non-Fiction Day: Learn about Leonardo!

At Book House, we love a good natter about anything strange-but-true, so a whole day dedicated to fascinating facts is right up our street!

So…where do we begin?! What treats shall we give you from our ever-growing Book House shelves? Shall we pour over some Very Peculiar Histories, delve into the world of Scary Creatures or perhaps some ghastly things you wouldn’t want to know from our Top 10 Worst series? Decisions, decisions…

After scratching our heads, we’ve decided to bring you some selected handy hints from one of our latest The Danger Zone titles, so you can see what being Leonardo da Vinci was really like.

Inventor, military engineer, scientist, botanist and mathematician, as well as an accomplished painter and sculptor: you name it, Leonardo da Vinci’s done it! In this Danger Zone title, you’ll learn all about the life of the man who painted the most famous picture in the world, who designed the first-ever flying machine and who spent ten years making a seven-metre tall horse! But what was he like as a little kid? theSalariya investigates…

So, at just twelve years old as an artist’s apprentice, Leonardo was already experimenting with weird and wacky creations! Did you know Leonardo used to say that a truly convincing monster can only be created from the parts of known creatures… can you think of any examples of this?

Fast forward a few years, and Leonardo is still obsessed with body parts. He believed that the human body reflected the workings of the universe, as seen in his famous drawing ‘Vitruvian Man’. He also believed that you could never draw the human figure well unless you know which bits do what, and how they hang together. So, whenever a local hospital could supply a body to him, Leonardo would cut open the corpse and study every organ closely, preserving parts in wax and drawing them from every angle.

Often he would work all night, until the smell would become unbearable. His dissections were much to the disgust of many people, who believed that he was prying into God’s secrets, or that he was dabbling in black magic. In fact, in 1515, he was reported to the Pope by an ill-wisher!

So, what has become of Leonardo da Vinci nowadays? Well, he’s still rated as a super genius of art. Crowds throng to see the Mona Lisa — the most famous painting in the world! His scientific methods are also widely accepted and respected in today’s research — but what became of his many notebooks?

Leonardo was left handed, and would write his notebooks so they looked like mirror images. Since the whereabouts of some of the pages of his notebooks are unknown, theSalariya is on the lookout for them! If you happen to find some old looking papers written back-to-front, make sure you let us know!

Find out more about the extraordinary life of Leonardo da Vinci, and countless other charismatic characters in The Danger Zone series, by checking out our series website page.