Man and myth

1Leonardo didn't have a proper surname. "Da Vinci" was just to distinguish him from all the other Leonardos in Florence. This was because he was born outside of wedlock in a town called Vinci. His father got custody soon after his birth in 1452: later, his mother married someone else. Between the jigs and the reels, he ended up with 17 stepbrothers and sisters.

2What did he look like? Think Gandalf crossed with George Washington: tall, athletic, handsome, with long hair and beard. He was a snappy dresser, too, sporting bright colours, short tunic and hose.

3He was one of he most famous ciotógs of all time - though in 15th-century Italy, the term applied was mancino, and it wasn't necessarily a compliment.

4He was a vegetarian for much of his life, thanks to his abhorrence of the "evil and violent death" meted out to animals in Renaissance slaughterhouses.

5Apart from his skills in painting, engineering, geology, palaeontology, music, astronomy, botany and whatever you're having yourself, he turned his hand to book illustration when his friend Luca Pacioli produced The Divine Proportion in 1509. Leonardo's drawings of polyhedra are as close as dammit to three-dimensional computer graphics.

6Is there anything he didn't do? Not really. He even wrote fables - as in Aesop and Confucius - short tales with opaque moral messages, designed not for the amusement of children, but for the edification of adults. In conversation, he was a bit of an Oscar Wilde.

7Oh, and he was a special FX whizz. Fetes, ballets and tableaux vivants were all the rage in the Renaissance. A typical Leo stunt was the one which greeted Louis XII's entry into Milan; a mechanical lion strolled across the banqueting hall, stopped in front of the monarch, opened its mouth - and burped up a shower of lilies.

8Dissection was another favourite pastime. He chopped up at least 10 bodies in the years before he wrote the Codex Leicester.

9He designed the Autostrada outside Florence. Okay, he didn't - but he might as well have. Its route follows his original toll road plan.

10 Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (movie scene, above) may be the most famous Leonardo tribute in pop culture, but it isn't the only one. Terry Pratchett's character "Leonard of Quirm" is an affectionate pastiche: and what about Leonardo of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame?