Rocky Road: Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

From Leonardo: Art and Science edited by Claudio Pescio

In one of his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci saw fit to copy lines from Dante's Inferno:

Lying in a featherbed will not bring you fame, nor staying beneath the quilt, and he who uses up his life without achieving fame leaves no more vestige of himself on earth than smoke in the air or foam upon the water.

It sounds a little surprising that da Vinci feared obscurity, but he had to cope with certain disadvantages early on. Born out of wedlock in 1452, he had humble beginnings. His mother was a peasant girl, and though she may have cared for him as a baby, she married and started a new family while he was still a little boy — a situation, some historians speculate, that may have caused him to feel lifelong resentment. His father was a successful notary, but Leonardo was barred from a similarly respectable profession. Yet although it was constraining, his illegitimacy was also liberating. He was raised largely by his nature-loving uncle, and the boy's awkward station in life may have freed him from expectations of a traditional career. The occupations of artist and self-styled inventor were not too respectable for an illegitimate youth, to the great benefit of the Renaissance.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, da Vinci had virtually no formal education, and he developed an abiding contempt for received learning. Da Vinci eventually realized that his lack of Latin shut him off from other intellectuals, and he launched a self-education program. As a result, his famed notebooks include — along with ground-breaking anatomical illustrations and flying-machine diagrams — careful inflections of Latin verbs.

Besides da Vinci's lack of a formal education, his "peasant manners" may explain the reluctance of Florentine patron of the arts, Lorenzo de Medici, to use him as a cultural ambassador. On the other hand, the dandy da Vinci fussed about his appearance — a trait conspicuously absent from his rival Michelangelo — and his flamboyance was somewhat at odds with the restrained culture of Florence, the city of his youth. He eventually quit Florence for Milan, where he both found a patron and spent some of the most productive years of his life. His good fortune lasted only a little while, however, before the French invaded. After that, da Vinci adopted a fairly nomadic lifestyle, frequently working as a military advisor despite his own distaste for warfare. He lived and worked for a time in Rome, where he enjoyed the patronage of Lorenzo de Medici's sons, Pope Leo X (for whom he drained marshes) and Giuliano. There he tolerated the presence of his prickly rival Michelangelo and poked around the fossil shells of Monte Mario. Giuliano's death, however, left da Vinci looking for a patron once more. At the age of 64, he embarked on the longest journey of his life: to France. There he spent his final years.

Da Vinci lived at a time of amazing cultural change. Gutenberg invented movable type when da Vinci was a child. When the Renaissance genius was born, Europe had roughly 30,000 printed books; by the time he reached middle age, it had an estimated 8 million. In a way, da Vinci's own library mirrored this explosion. When he left Florence for Milan, the savant's packing list didn't mention a single book. Months after arriving in Milan, he owned five. Shortly after the turn of the 16th century, he owned well over 100. Unfortunately, though da Vinci eventually owned quite a few books, he wrote few of them. He failed to complete many of the projects he started and worse, because he was paranoid about his ideas being stolen, he kept his copious notes to himself. After his death, many of his notebooks were lost, scattered, and pieced back together in haphazard fashion.

From The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord

Among his many scientific achievements were da Vinci's discoveries in anatomy. Besides artistic talent, he possessed the stomach to dissect. His animal dissections enabled him to produce impressive anatomical diagrams, yet he spent at least part of his life as a vegetarian, out of respect for our furry and feathered friends. Da Vinci's relationship with the animal world was complicated. The art historian Vasari related how da Vinci once converted a hapless lizard to a "monster," outfitting it with wings and horns made from parts of other reptiles. To complete the picture, he painted the poor thing with mercury.

Human dissections weren't common in da Vinci's day, but probably weren't illegal, either. Though his understanding of the respiratory system improved little upon medieval knowledge, and he clung to common misconceptions about the human brain, his studies of skeletal and muscle tissue, brain anatomy, and digestive and reproductive systems eventually advanced human anatomical understanding to a new level. Interestingly, he felt that the similar appearance of branching blood vessels, branching stems, and mingling tributaries weren't just coincidence; they actually were fundamentally the same. In that same spirit of unified microcosm/macrocosm, he investigated geology.

Around 1480, some Milanese peasants brought da Vinci a bag of fossil shells. For the next quarter of a century, he pondered the shells' meaning, and apparently visited the site where they had been collected. After years of study, he not only doubted that Noah's flood had carried the fossils to their present locations, he also questioned whether there had even been such a worldwide deluge. He also suspected a much older earth than what the Bible described.

As to those who say that shells existed for a long time and were born at a distance from the sea, from the nature of the place and of the cycles, which can influence a place to produce such creatures — to them it may be answered: such an influence could not place the animals all on one line, except those of the same sort and age; and not the old with the young, nor some with an operculum and others without their operculum, nor some broken and others whole, nor some filled with sea-sand and large and small fragments of other shells inside the whole shells which remained open; nor the claws of crabs without the rest of their bodies . . . And the deluge cannot have carried them there, because things that are heavier than water do not float on the water.

Da Vinci rejected the notion that fossils were just "sports of nature," understanding instead that they belonged to once-living organisms. He noted that fossil shells appeared in several different horizons in the mountains, meaning they could not have all been deposited in a single deluge, nor could slow-moving mollusks reach the mountains in the biblical flood's short duration. In studying the fossils, he noticed that they were full of borings — evidence of ancient behavior. In different rock layers, he detected worm burrows in ancient layers of mud. Da Vinci not only discerned ancient behavior, but also uncovered ancient environments.

Besides being a genius, da Vinci had another advantage: living in the Mediterranean. The fossil beds in this region were relatively young, similar in appearance to modern-day analogues, and in close proximity to them — three things that would facilitate comparison. The years of study that da Vinci devoted to studying the behavior of water also helped him elucidate how sediments are deposited.

The streams and rivers move different kinds of matter which are of varying degrees of gravity, and they are moved further from their position in proportion as they are lighter, and will remain nearer to the bottom in proportion as they are heavier, and will be carried a greater distance when driven by water of greater power. . . . When a river flows out from among mountains it deposits a great quantity of large stones in its gravelly bed, and these stones will retain some part of their angles and side; and as it proceeds on its course it carries with it lesser stones with angles more worn away, and so the large stones become smaller; and farther on it deposits first coarse and then fine gravel.

Unfortunately, because his notebooks were not published, da Vinci's insights on these processes had little influence on Renaissance science. Publication might have had a significant effect because, perhaps most interesting of all, da Vinci may have formulated a vague notion of evolution.

Nature, being inconstant and taking pleasure in creating and continually producing new forms, because she knows that her terrestrial materials are thereby augmented, is more ready and more swift in her creating than is time in his destruction.

For more information:
Leonardo: The First Scientist by Michael White
Leonardo: Art and Science edited by Claudio Pescio
Leonardo by Martin Kemp
Leonardo da Vinci by Sherwin B. Nuland
Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind by Charles Nicholl
The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra
Leonardo da Vinci: The Mind of the Renaissance by Alessandro Vezzosi
Leonardo by Frank Zöllner
Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
The Seashell on the Mountaintop by Alan Cutler
Amazing Rare Things by Attenborough, Owens, Clayton and Alexandratos
Math and the Mona Lisa by Bülent Atalay
"The Role of the Mediterranean Region in the Development of Sedimentary Geology: A Historical Overview" by Fischer and Garrison in Sedimentology January 2009
"Italy, the Cradle of Ichnology: The Legacy of Aldrovandi and Leonardo" by Andrea Baucon in Studi Trentini - Acta Geologica 2008
Galileo's Commandment edited by Edmund Blair Bolles
Merchants and Marvels edited by Smith and Findlen
The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord
Seen|Unseen by Martin Kemp