Describes the life and work of the courageous man who changed the way people saw the galaxy, by offering objective evidence that the earth was not the fixed center of the universe.

Leonardo da Vinci was born in a small Italian town in 1452. He trained to be a painter, but he only completed around 13 paintings-one of which was the famous Mona Lisa. Even though Leonardo wanted to learn all he could, he never received a formal education. Struggling to make a living in his 20s, he then moved to Milan, where he flourished. New worlds of discovery opened to him and his interests in engineering, art, theatre, and much more were satisfied....

For more than thirty years-half his life-he was obsessively devoted to investigating Everything in the natural world. Nothing escaped his interest-how our eyes see, why the sky is blue, what forces build mountains, how light travels, where water comes from, and-most fascinating of all to Leonardo-the inner workings of the human body. Nothing stopped him. It was illegal to dissect human corpses, so he did autopsies in secret, even devising a clever...