Why is Leonardo da Vinci so important to our history?

Is he really "so important"? He seems to me to be more "interesting" than "important."

Historical figures tend to get highlighted in narratives for one of two reasons. Individuals who clearly have a wide impact on their world can obviously be seen as agents of change; Hitler is an obvious one, but a lesser-known one might be Justus von Liebig, whose ideas about chemistry, nutrition, and agriculture were very influential in the mid-nineteenth century. He was also involved in publishing a lot of research by himself and his students, so if you want to know how some chemical, physiological ideas developed at that time, he's a useful person to know. Now, in the old days, history was seen as driven by people like this, "Great Men." We have more recently come to understand that the social, cultural, and political context in which people operate gives a better understanding of how historical change occurs. Still, there are individuals who are undeniably important and influential.

Alternatively, individuals in history can be used as a lens through which to view bigger processes. In these cases, we don't really need the individual to have been important; indeed, sometimes it's better if they're NOT "important" because we can learn so much about the various social strata and not merely elites. A great example of this is Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms, a "microhistory" of one sixteenth-century heretic, Menocchio, a miller from northern Italy. This guy was totally unimportant in the "Great Men" sense; he had no appreciable effect on anything we might consider a major trend in history; he was not a "cause" of historical change the way a "Great Man" might be seen to be. That doesn't matter, though, because he actually teaches us a great deal about the spiritual, intellectual, and religious world of non-elites in the sixteenth century.

So, when we look at Leonardo da Vinci, he's kind of poorly suited to either category. While a very interesting character, he isn't usually associated with any major "discoveries" (I hate that term, but whatever) in, say, the history of science; his wacky designs and inventions were not to my knowledge all that influential. He was part of a burgeoning Renaissance culture, but he always seemed to me to be a bit of an outlier to that, such a unique character that you couldn't use him to generalize about the Renaissance as a bigger thing. So, he doesn't really fit neatly into the way that we construct historical narratives. Thus, he remains "interesting," but not especially "important." Granted, early modern Europe is not my specialty, but I don't think I've ever read an academic piece that used him as evidence for anything.