Leonardo da Vinci designed chariots with spinning blades and bought caged birds at market just to set them free. This episode strips away the superhuman aura to examine the actual person: born out of wedlock in 1452 near Vinci to a notary father and a lower-class mother, locked out of the guild path, denied Latin and formal schooling, and therefore shielded from the flawed scholastic science of his day. That accident of birth pushed him to trust his own eyes over ancient texts.

We follow him from Verrocchio’s Florentine workshop and the terrifying painted shield that sold for 100 ducats, to his 1482 pitch letter offering Milan’s Duke Ludovico Sforza portable bridges and armored vehicles, with painting mentioned almost as an afterthought. Along the way: the doomed 24-foot bronze horse whose metal became cannons, the scaled map of Imola made for Cesare Borgia, cadaver dissections that anticipated 20th-century discoveries about heart valves, and the guarded private life he engineered into an unsolvable puzzle.

• Why being barred from Latin education inoculated Leonardo against the bad science of his era
• The horse-skull lyre, the mechanical lion, and other inventions built for dukes and kings
• How his experimental tempera-and-oil method doomed The Last Supper and how sfumato shaped the Mona Lisa
• Why his anatomical breakthroughs sat unpublished in notebooks for centuries
• The 1476 court charge, his devotion to pupils Salai and Melzi, and his death at Clos Luce in 1519