Cricket's renaissance man

No. 6: LD da Vinci
Tuscany C.C.C., Medici All-Stars XI, Italy
LHB; LF, LFM, LM, SLA, SLC, RMF, LBG

Leonardo da Vinci, the left-handed Renaissance art celeb with staggering natural all-round talents and a natural personal charisma, was unquestionably the Garfield Sobers of the late-15th and early-16th centuries. Arguably, the Tuscan Tearaway possessed an even greater range of skills than his 20th-century Caribbean counterpart, and could have had a similar impact on the sport, if only he had been a professional cricketer rather than a painter, sculptor, architect, polymath, poet, musician, engineer, award-winning procrastinator, mathematician, inventor, writer, anatomist, geologist, notebook scribbler, helicopter aficionado, botanist, cartographer, arms manufacturer and incorrigible beard-grower who died almost 500 years ago.

Some have argued that Leonardo (or Lennie Scribbles, as he was known to his friends) would have struggled to conform to the demands of the 21st-century cricket calendar. Indeed, his spectacular range of jobs and hobbies perhaps led to his artwork going the same way as Stuart Broad's batting - increasingly sketchy.

Nevertheless, not only does his prodigious spectrum of abilities suggest that da Vinci would have been a major all-round cricketer in any era, there is ample evidence from within his remarkable oeuvre to show that Big Len was, in fact, so far ahead of his time that he was a massive cricket fan more than 200 years before the laws of the game were even codified.

Da Vinci's reputed first surviving complete work, The Annunciation, clearly shows the Archangel Gabriel demonstrating to the Virgin Mary the grip for a perfect outswinger. Most art pundits consider his defining masterpiece, The Last Supper, to be the quintessential lads'-night-out painting. However, given the array of concerned faces, raised fingers, outstretched arms and uneaten bread rolls, the more logical conclusion is that the picture is in fact a depiction of a heated tea-interval discussion among a disgruntled cricket team that has just been skittled out for less than 100 in a flurry of controversial umpiring decisions. And at the centre of it all, is that a skipper who has "lost the dressing room" after questionably choosing to bat first on an obviously spicy surface?

Some critics believe that The Mona Lisa exhibits a woman crossing her hands in preparation for signalling "dead ball" - which gives a convincing explanation for her rather ambivalent look

In fact, da Vinci appears to have taken a keen interest in umpiring. His John The Baptist displays a man decisively giving an unseen batsman out, whilst his Vitruvian Man sketch unmistakably demonstrates a characteristically futuristic proposal for a new umpiring signal for a two-run bouncer-wide, in which the umpire would jump from the conventional "wide" gesture to an arms-raised, legs-akimbo pose, signalling that the ball was not only unreachably wide but also excessively high.

This drawing of a clothesless umpire has also led to speculation that da Vinci was involved in the clandestine Tuscan Naked Cricket League, which flourished briefly in the late 1480s and formed the basis for the many cricketing scenes cleverly hidden on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Lennie's arty contemporary Michelangelo, when he did his famous stint of interior decoration for the Pope some years later.

Some critics even believe that Leonardo's multimillion-pound-rated smash-hit portrait The Mona Lisa exhibits a woman crossing her hands in preparation for signalling "dead ball", an analysis which gives the most convincing explanation yet proffered for the rather ambivalent look in her eyes.

A renowned engineering whiz as well as being more than handy with a paintbrush, Leonardo is now thought by most reputable historians to have provided a prototype for a bowling machine with his catapult, capable of flinging down missiles at anything up to 189mph. With his intimate knowledge of physiology, da Vinci calculated that this was the maximum bowling speed theoretically possible with the human body and a Kookaburra ball less than ten overs old (an estimation that a peak-confidence Shoaib Akhtar considered "unduly conservative").

Moreover, da Vinci's own notes, if wrongly translated, suggest that his renowned helicopter design was intended for the aircraft to be flown above cricket grounds, trailing banners offering tactical advice to the fielding captain.

Described by his 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari as being "so lovable that he commanded everyone's affection", Leonardo would have been a positive dressing-room presence who could even have acted as a middle man in the irreconcilable three-cornered battle between Kevin Pietersen, the England board, and reality. Being "a sparkling conversationalist", in Vasari's words, da Vinci would also have slotted seamlessly into any commentary box, especially one containing Ravi Shastri, another allrounder and visionary who has shaped humanity's understanding of what it can achieve.

Andy Zaltzman is a stand-up comedian, a regular on BBC Radio 4, and a writer

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