It's not by random chance that this creative boom came after the print press was invented - in Europe.
After it, the knowledge that was limited to a few people, was spread out via a media development: books, the medium that fueled all of this.
Leonardo was just curious, and had fuel to feed the curiosity, with answers.
Additionally, the major change people usually aren't aware of was the spread of papermaking knowledge through Europe around the 12th and 13th century. Before that point, most books were created on Parchment, which was much more expensive. I've read somewhere that a single bible took ~3000 sheep to produce.
Regarding the papermaking, I believe we can fit it in the same boat as other craftsmanship that evolved previously and allowing for the development for the press itself (but definitely papermaker had a greater role in some dimension - cost/manufacturing/distribution).
If you struggle, you can ask your highly educated peers (<1% of literacy at the time) to provide some help, or you ask the scientific elite at the time, a bunch of theocratic fanatics that would prosecute you, torture you and burn you alive along with all your findings as soon as you publish them.
Stop hoarding the credit. The Reinassance wasn't a self-emergent phenomenon. It required external influence to happen and that is factual.
Of course, that literature was not originally in Latin, and had to be translated. Where and when was it translated? In great part, in Toledo, Spain after the fall of Al-Andalus.
e.g: Nicolaus Copernicus started his studies using almanacs and tables such as the Alfonsine tables, the tables were originally in Arabic and were collected/translated by Alfonso X of Castile in Toledo. They included observations ranging from the days of Ptolomy onwards. Without that, Copernicus could not have done what he did.
St. Albertus Magnus, the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, studied the works of Aristotle, commented by Averroes, translated from Arabic and Greek into Latin. Without that, St. Thomas Aquinas' works on philosophy and everything based on that would not exist.
Many Western discoveries came from innovations in optics (e.g: telescope, microscope). The foundation from that in great part can be credited to the Islamic empire. They experimented with reflection, refraction, lenses, etc... and that is original work with literature to support it.
There is of course much more but I don't really have the time to go through all that, e.g: numerals, medicine, trade, etc.
So, wrapping up, without their influence this is what would have happened: no scientific method, no real philosophy and/or theology, unsafe medicine, no microscope, no telescope, using ridiculous impractical numerals... a scientific setback worth hundreds of years. Today you would be at best in the middle of the first industrial revolution.
Philosophy changed that, and you might want to take a look at where that philosophy came from, who translated it and when.
In that Age there was so many processes in the name of Plato or Aristoteles...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...
What really happened was:
After the Spanish Reconquista (the fall of Al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain), the Toledo school of translators translated all the material brought from early Islamic Universities (aka Madrasas) into Latin. Those books were then used in the first European universities and scholar centers such as Oxford.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...
...also the Islamic empire was razed to the ground by the Mongols after the Siege of Baghdad. A bunch of knowledge carefully collected for centuries conveniently fell in European hands and today we have this urban myth of people like Leonardo Da Vinci figuring it all out on his own.
There is merit in the Reinassance and people like Leonardo, but they are a part of an uninterrupted chain of teaching and learning, not reclusive geniuses that came out with all the answers out of nowhere, a premise that has been used as the foundation for an arrogant sense of exceptionalism.
You can downvote this all you want but it won't make it false.