DiCaprio to portray the more famous Leonardo

Actor will produce and star in biopic on painter Da Vinci

Los Angeles: Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio is all set to portray the leading artist and intellectual of the Italian Renaissance Leonardo da Vinci in an upcoming biopic.

The film marks DiCaprio’s ninth project in which he plays a real life character. In his last film The Revenant, DiCaprio portrayed frontiersman, Hugh Glass, the role which won him the best actor Oscar for the first time.

He will also produce the latest film under his Appian Way banner alongside president of production Jennifer Davisson for Paramount, which has acquired the rights to Walter Isaacson’s book on Leonardo da Vinci, reported Variety.

DiCaprio’s desire to portray da Vinci on film is no coincidence. The actor’s mother famously claims to have chosen the artist as her son’s namesake when she felt an in uterus DiCaprio kick for the first time while examining a da Vinci piece at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy back in 1974.

Da Vinci, who was born in 1452 and died in 1519, painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. He also was a skilled inventor.

Isaacson is a New York Times Best Selling author who has written biographies on other notable thinkers such as Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, Steve Jobs, and Benjamin Franklin.

According to information from the publisher, Isaacson used Da Vinci’s notebooks to weave a narrative that connects his art to his science and voracious curiosity and imagination.

Aside from his priceless paintings, he pursued innovative studies of anatomy (his iconic drawing of Vitruvian Man). He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, drew the muscles that move the lips and then painted history’s most memorable smile.

He explored the math of optics, showed how light rays strike the cornea and produced illusions of changing perspectives in The Last Supper. According to the book, he also was a bit of a misfit: illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted and at times heretical.