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The works of Leonardo da Vinci, sometimes called the finest intelligence the world has ever produced, have had some curious outcroppings. Examples:>A Hollywood portrait of Fanny Brice painted in the pose of the Mona Lisa.

> A copy of the Last Supper made in Germany entirely of postage stamps.

>A painting of an American Indian Chief named Moon Trail by a blind woman who said her hand was guided by Leonardo from the spirit world.

>A truculent sputter from the late U.S.

Painter George Luks: ";Da Vinci is the bunk--a mathematician, a subway digger." >An offer by a Manhattan tattooist to prick the Last Supper in eight colors for $100.

Last week the real Leonardo, in all his masterly diversity, was better represented at popular prices than he ever has been before. Phaidon Press, formerly of Vienna and now of London, published a crown-folio-size book, Leonardo da Vinci, which was first-page art news for its broad inclusiveness, handsome reproduction, excellent taste and $4.50 pricing.* Included with the book's full gallery of Leonardo's paintings, drawings, mechanical designs and sculpture was a short foreword by compiler Ludwig Goldscheider and a reprinting of Vasari's classic 16th-Century life of the artist.

Immortal Charmer. Leonardo's life, with its lustrous and peculiar glints through the obscurities of history, will always have a fascination comparable to his work. He was born, out of wedlock, at the Tuscan town of Vinci, in 1452. His father was a prominent lawyer, his mother a peasant woman. The bastard was brought up by his father. Precociously gifted in painting and drawing, he was sent to work with Andrea del Verrocchio, a sculptor and art teacher of Florence.

Leonardo was a youth of great personal charm and extraordinary physical beauty which he paraded without reserve in the streets of Florence. Contemporaries picture him wearing a curly blond beard and walking in a short pink tunic while everyone else wore cloaks. He was proud to the point of arrogance, fastidious to the point of inhumanity. Evidence, including anonymous accusations, strongly suggests that Leonardo was a homosexual. Wrote the late Sigmund Freud in his Leonardo da Vinci: "In a period where there was a constant struggle between riotous licentiousness and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo presented an example of cool sexual rejection.

. . . It is doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in love. . ." Leonardo's first patron was Lorenzo de' Medici, lavish ruler of Florence. But Leonardo served himself miserably: he was ridden by a perfectionism which prevented him from finishing a work. Even the patient Lorenzo finally let his artist go--to Milan, where he served the great Duke Ludovico Sforza. There Leonardo ranged through "interior decoration, gadget design, city planning, court painting and sculpture. His painter's mind was increasingly and almost ruinously engaged by intellectual curiosity about the physical world. Leonardo ended by turning from art to science. His very painting was a scientific search--the plants and rocks in the background of the Portrait of Ginevra de' Bend seem to have been executed by a botanist and a geologist. As he began to satisfy himself with technical improvements in such matters as perspective and chiaroscuro, he gradually lost interest in tirt for art's sake.

Inefficiency Expert. The almost patho logically detached Leonardo also served the most bloodthirsty power politician of the Renaissance period -- Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI. Leonardo was Borgia's military engineer, with no inter est whatever in politics. There exist some remarkable maplike bird's-eye views of the Italian terrain which Leonardo drew for Borgia's ill-fated campaigns.

Late in his life, Leonardo spent two un happy years in Rome. He found it increasingly difficult to finish work, and impossible to compete with such productive paint ers as Michelangelo and Raphael. Finally Leonardo's health began to fail; his right hand became paralyzed. At 64, he took his intimate friend, Francesco Melzi, and two servants to the Court of Frangois I at Tours. Leonardo died in France at the age of 67.

Recently a genealogist toiled down the generations of the master's family and found a living collateral descendant, a peasant trudging behind his oxen in Italian fields. His name: Leonardo da Vinci.

*Distributor for the U.S. is Oxford University Press.

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