When Leonardo da Vinci died on May 2, 1519 (at the Château du Clos Lucé in France; he was 67), he left behind a body of work that radically upended every discipline it encompassed — which was pretty much every discipline. The illegitimate child of a 15-year-old orphan from the Tuscan town of Vinci began his career as a teenager in the workshop of the Italian artist Andrea del Verrocchio, but over the decades his long résumé would come to include so much more than just painting and sculpture.

His polymathic genius — in such disparate fields as architecture, anatomy, geology, mathematics, design and civil engineering (he is said to have conceived of the mechanics behind the helicopter and the parachute centuries before these were invented) — made him, in the words of his 16th-century biographer, Giorgio Vasari, “more divine than human.”