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A great engineer, inventor, tinkerer and painter, living in Ankh-Morpork. Also known as "Leonardo" or "da Quirm". His bald head looks like it has risen up through his hair.

Leonard currently resides as a prisoner in the Patrician's Palace where he can work in peace except for when the Patrician needs him. "Prisoner" may be too strong a word, as Leonard is perfectly happy where he is, as long as he gets his drawing supplies and his washing done. In fact, the very cunning and subtle traps that lead to his prison were designed by him. The reason why he is locked up is that the Patrician finds Leonard's naiveté dangerous, and yet due to his unique nature, the Patrician is reluctant to kill him outright.

In addition to designing powerful weapons while believing that nobody would be so bad as to use them, Leonard also tends to scribble designs of these weapons on books that he is reading, inadvertently revealing to these bad people that such a thing has been designed and may, in fact, have already been manufactured (see Men at Arms). An Alchemist once commented that Leonard was a dabbler and ought to call himself "Mr. Scribble". Usually, the Alchemists are the worst dabblers in non-magic matters (magical matters being the domain of the wizards); it is significant that Leonard is considered by the Alchemists as a dabbler.

Works

Leonard likes inventing weapons of war but refuses to believe that anyone really would use his dangerous inventions. In fact, Leonard's brain is particularly receptive to particles of raw inspiration, ideas that sleet through the universe and strike inventors' or artists' minds in the dead of the night. As such, Leonard has engineered the gonne and siege engines alongside flying machines, submarines, message encryption/decryption devices, pub game devices, and engines for making very fast coffee. Oddly enough, his creativity seems to stop when needed to give appealing names to his inventions: for example, for his machine capable of travelling submersed in a marine environment he came up with the name of "Going-Under-The-Water-Safely Device".

The most famous painting by Leonard is the Mona Ogg. This shows an attractive young woman with a wide smile, showing her teeth. Some say that the teeth from this painting would follow the viewer around the room and all the way to the street outside. Another description of Leonard's paintings, although unclear whether it's about Mona Ogg or another piece, is that it would follow the viewer home and do the washing-up. The woman in Leonard's Woman Holding Ferret is considered the epitome of beauty.

Annotation

He is the (pretty obvious) parodistic Discworldian counterpart of Roundworld's Leonardo da Vinci, with a heap of Sir George Cayley (the Roundworld "father" of aeronautics) thrown in.