Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath known for his painting and inventions.

Biography
Circa 1492, Leonardo and his then-patron the Duke of Milan were among the guests invited to the masque organised by the young Duke Giuliano of San Martino. Being caught up in the Mandragora Helix's attempt to conquer 15th century Earth, the Fourth Doctor missed this opportunity to meet Leonardo, later noting it was probably for the best. (TV: The Masque of Mandragora)

Circa 1505, Leonardo was hired by a new patron he knew as "Captain Tancredi", in reality, Scaroth of the Jagaroth. Tancredi asked him to paint six extra copies of his most famous work, the Mona Lisa. (TV: City of Death) One of these copies was painted using oil pigments he borrowed from a neighbouring artist, Giuseppe di Cattivo. Unbeknowst to both of them, the minerals used in this paint would bring the painting to life in future. (TV: Mona Lisa's Revenge, Sarah Jane's Alien Files episode 5)

In 1505, the Fourth Doctor arrived from 1979 Paris to seek clues to the plot of Count Scarlioni (another of Scaroth's time-splintered selves) to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. After being briefly captured and interrogated by Tancredi, the Doctor wrote "This is a fake" in felt pen on the boards Leonardo would paint the extra Mona Lisa copies before returning to the future to try to stop Count Scarlioni. (TV: City of Death)

Undated events
The Eighth Doctor recounted a tale to Alex Campbell that he took Leonardo for a trip in the TARDIS to around 0 AD, in Bethlehem, where Leonardo checked the lighting for his painting Adoration of the Magi. There, he was given the possibility to watch the nativity of Jesus Christ, but he didn't dare to. (AUDIO: Relative Dimensions)

The diary of the renegade Time Lord known as the Monk recorded a meeting with Leonardo in which he claimed to have provided the inspiration for at least some of Leonardo's inventions which would later seem so advanced for their time. The main one of these was the Monk's claim that he gave Leonardo the blueprints for flight. (TV: The Time Meddler)

Legacy
The flying machine design was used by Astrolabus while he was fleeing from the Sixth Doctor. (COMIC: Voyager) By the late 21st century, his sketches or a copy thereof, were displayed on the wall of Professor Daniel Eldred's space museum; the TARDIS landed in front of the sketches, carrying the Second Doctor, Jamie McCrimmon, and Zoe Heriot. (TV: The Seeds of Death)

Among a long strip of business cards for various famous scientists and luminaries owned by the Sixth Doctor was one which read "da Vinci." (TV: The Two Doctors)

Grace Holloway had a print of a Leonardo sketch in her home. The Eighth Doctor, upon seeing it, noted that he had a cold when he drew it. (TV: Doctor Who)

In 2020, the Eleventh Doctor used Leonardo as one example of people who had dyslexia that did great things, in order to encourage Elliot Northover to continue trying. (TV: The Hungry Earth)

Behind the scenes

 * "Da Vinci" was not a family name, and Leonardo was never known to have used a surname in the modern sense. This part of his name merely means "of Vinci," indicating that Leonardo was born in Vinci, a town near Florence. It is therefore grammatically incorrect to refer to Leonardo as simply "da Vinci," though that form of address remains in somewhat common use and has appeared in The Two Doctors, the TV movie and The Hungry Earth as well as the title of Da Vinci's Robots.
 * The title of the episode The Shakespeare Code is a play on the title of the popular Dan Brown novel  which dealt with a centuries-old conspiracy theory involving secret codes allegedly included in some of Leonardo's works. (No mention as whether a felt-tip message behind the Mona Lisa reading, "This is a fake" was among them.) The Da Vinci Code was itself heavily inspired by the non-fiction book by former Doctor Who scriptwriter Henry Lincoln.
 * Leonardo da Vinci is one of very few characters to be referenced in both the Doctor Who and Star Trek franchises, with an immortal human claiming to have been him appearing once in ' (""), and a holographic recreation of him appearing twice in ' ("" and "").
 * According to The Brilliant Book 2012, a book that contains non-narrative based information, in an alternate universe where all of history happened at once, Da Vinci seemingly wrote.
 * He was played by Patrick Godfrey in the 1998 film Ever After.