Hi my name is Derek, Derek Bair! Welcome to my site. I've been working on a book called: "Discovering Da Vinci's Daughter: Leonardo's Legacy" since 2006. It's mostly about different discoveries I've made within Leonardo da Vinci's art-work(s): Including the Mona Lisa, Last Supper, Vitruvian Man, Shroud of Turin (See what I did there?) and a whole lot more. It's a really long and complicated story (hence the book) but I found that Leo used a previously un-discovered and/ or un-attributed artistic techniques to hide/ disguise additional images and information in his art that can't be seen without knowing how.

“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” 

What happened was that some strange situations led me to notice certain things that should not have been present in art work from over 500 years ago. I was seeing modern day innovation implemented in artwork that was created hundreds of years before these inventions supposedly happened. At first I couldn't believe that what I was seeing was really possible and that I had gone crazy. It's taken me years to comprehend not only if what I saw was really real but to understand it enough to attempt to write a book about it!

To properly describe what I've found has led me to research other subjects that include optics, perception, perspective, humanities, optical illusions, and basically all the aspects of our vision system that allow for what I saw to be possible. These exact same subjects were documented in obsessive detail in Leonardo's own notebooks. It was through his journals and studying them with modern technology, that I have been able to understand how he achieved these "new" techniques.

""Study me, reader, if you delight in me, because on very few occasions shall I return to the world, and because the patience for this profession is found in very few, and only in those who wish to compose things anew. Come, oh men, to see the miracles that such studies will disclose to nature." 

He was the first to conceive of tanks, planes, robots, automobiles, parachutes, devices to breath underwater and to walk on it, the ball bearing, a rail machine gun, a pedometer, the calculator, the contact lens, and other things that were FAR ahead of their time. This inventiveness wasn't only limited to engineering and technical inventions but also to revolutionizing the visual arts - specifically painting, .Anamorphosis, stereography, "photography" (Camera Obscura), 3D  and painting with transparent layers “Sfumato” were in his technical artistic arsenal. What I’ve discovered will add even more advanced achievements to the ever increasing legacy of the amazing Leonardo da Vinci. Some of which are so sophisticatedly complex that we are only today catching up. There are even some that could be considered "Futuristic" - but are from the past..

"Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past. Prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly." 

My book will also follow the past few years of my own life in something i'm calling "Interjections" that are interwoven between each chapter. How did a naive and relatively uneducated -20' something, who knew absolutely nothing about Leonardo da Vinci OR how to write a book, discover anything at all, let alone things that no one else has in over 500 years? Why me? How did it happen? How the f*^k do I write a book!? I really didn't know, but I have learned a LOT over these last few years, not only about Leonardo da Vinci and humanities -but about myself and humanity itself. We are pretty complicated people, aren't we?

You can preview "Discovering Da Vinci's Daughter: Leonardo's Legacy" by going through this site and visiting my blog. There are posts that document some of the 'progress' and events that have led up to today that go as far back as 2007. But there is also a huge amount of the story and what I have found that I have intentionally not posted anywhere. Why? Because some is controversial, (and i'm working up the courage to share the whole story-) and some because "it's not ready yet." It's an anti -*!Spoiler Alert!* kinda thing.

"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" 

 Thanks for visiting and stay tuned future readers!!