Leonardo da Vinci, who was forty years old when Columbus discovered America, died in 1519 at sixty-seven. Just two years earlier, in 1517, Martin Luther had posted his Ninety-five Theses on a church door in Wittenberg, launching the Protestant Reformation the same year Ferdinand Magellan had set sail from Spain, aspiring to circumnavigate the earth.

Quoted from

Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci by Bulent Atalay