People from all over the world are currently coming to London to see paintings by the world famous Renaissance artist Leonardo Da Vinci. The exhibition at the National Gallery has been sold out for months. But Leonardo did much more than just paint. He embodied the Renaissance ideal of the 'homo universalis'; a scientific all-rounder.
It was only at a later age that Leonardo Da Vinci became intensively involved in science. He was not a scientist in the modern sense, inventing theories and conducting experiments. Leonardo tried to understand nature by observing it closely and making detailed drawings of what he saw. We know a number of wonderful examples of this from his work in the field of botany and zoology.
Detailed plants
Leonardo da Vinci made countless descriptions and drawings of plants in his sketchbooks. As an artist and based on his personal interest in nature, he wanted to record how plants and trees are put together, how exactly they grow, and what characteristics they differ from each other. Da Vinci did that in such detail that you could almost call it a scientific study.
For example, he thought about the thickness of the branches of a tree in relation to the trunk. According to Da Vinci, the total thickness of all the branches that grew in a year was equal to the thickness of the trunk of the tree. He also came up with the idea that low branches on a tree grow better than high branches because juices that have to feed the branches from the bottom end up more easily in the bottom of the tree than in the top. In addition, he saw that leaves always face the sky with their tops, and he discovered patterns in the way leaves are attached to the stem of a plant.
Da Vinci's knowledge of plants can be found in two of his famous paintings. In the artwork 'The Annunciation', the angel Gabriel holds a lily worked out in detail, which symbolizes Mary's virginity. In the painting 'Virgin on the Rocks' Mary is visible with Jesus, John and the Archangel Uriel. The landscape around them is full of beautifully elaborate plants and flowers. The details are so clear that a botanist could tell from the artwork which species are involved.
In Search of the Soul
In an equally accurate way, Da Vinci proceeded with his research into the anatomy of the human body. Moreover, he did so for a special reason.
Leonardo dreamed of impossible flying machines. But his true fascination lay with perhaps the most intricate and mysterious of all machines:the human body. Da Vinci was very interested in the internal structures of our bodies and their functions. And by studying anatomy, he eventually hoped to find what makes us humans alive:the soul.
Da Vinci based himself on empirical research:he tried to understand a phenomenon by drawing and describing it, relying only on his own perception. So to master the human anatomy, there was only one thing to do:to dissect. And for that he must have had a strong stomach. There were no freezers for preserving corpses in the sixteenth century, so the stench of decomposing bodies must have been unbearable.
His ingenuity allowed Da Vinci to make very detailed drawings. For example, he sketched the skull from different angles after filling the brain with hot wax to reveal the brain cavities. He also tied strings to skeletons, like a marionette, to understand movement. His notebooks are beautiful, but at the same time grotesque. The pages are filled with skinned body parts and unborn fetuses. In his drawings he also compared the anatomical structures of humans with those of pigs, oxen, birds, frogs and horses.
But the soul never found Da Vinci. He also failed to publish his anatomy book during his lifetime; that didn't happen until 1632. But his understanding of anatomy meant a lot for medicine. His sketches were then included in books on medicine, so that the doctors of that time had accurate drawings of the human body.
Human mistakes
He also had some brilliant insights in the field of mathematics, although occasionally mistakes crept in.
In one of his notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci wrote:"The science of painting begins with the point, then comes the line, third is the plane, and number four is the body in its covering of planes." That is plain language; that Da Vinci understood (space) geometry is obvious. Yet he too was only human, and people sometimes make mistakes. So is Da Vinci. Of his mathematical contributions is his drawing of a rhombic cuboctahedron (a convex polyhedron with 26 faces of which 8 regular triangles and 18 squares, 24 vertices and 48 edges) with pyramids on the sides one of the best known.
For centuries this drawing was seen as a strong example of drawing, until the Dutch mathematician and artist Rinus Roelofs discovered last year that this drawing contains an error. Is that bad ? “No,” says Rinus Roelofs. Da Vinci was without a doubt a genius, and perhaps the greatest genius of all time. But he was also a person who had to think and reason, and who sometimes made a mistake. And that just makes him an even greater genius.”
Earth, sun and moon
Through sharp observations of the celestial bodies, Da Vinci already had insight into how the light from the sun (via the earth) fell on the moon.
Leonardo da Vinci's most important astronomical contribution can be found in his so-called Leicester Codex. A collection of 18 folded papers full of notes and sketches of (among other things) astronomical observations made by Da Vinci.
He lived at a time when astronomy was still in its infancy. For example, the telescope hadn't been invented yet, and the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe was still widespread. Da Vinci himself believed the latter, but this incorrect assumption did not prevent him from making particularly sharp observations of, for example, the moon. Da Vinci was especially fascinated by the way in which this celestial body is illuminated.
Leonardo was convinced that the moon itself does not emit light, but that the light of the sun reflects back to the earth. This idea was not new, but it ran counter to popular belief. What Da Vinci discovered, however, was that the Earth itself also shines light on the moon. This can be seen inside the 'sickle' of the new moon. Especially just after sunset, the light of the entire moon is visible. That's because light from the sun through the Earth dimly illuminates the dark side of the moon. Da Vinci was the first to notice and write this down.
Another point of Da Vinci was that the surface of the moon cannot be smooth, like a mirror. If that were the case, the light from the sun would be focused on a small area. Da Vinci therefore explained the fact that the moon is visible everywhere on Earth with a rough lunar surface. He was right, but in filling in what that surface would be made of, Da Vinci went wrong. He wrote that the moon would be completely covered with water. For those who want to see the notes for themselves:The codex is in the hands of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who occasionally has it exhibited.
Shells, high in the mountains
Perhaps the most interesting ideas of Leonardo can be found in the field of geology. At a time when the Bible taught that the Earth was no older than 4,000 years and God created our Earth with fossils and all, Da Vinci followed his own mindset.
Growing up in Northern Italy is surrounded by stones and fossils. No wonder, then, that Da Vinci also asked himself fundamental questions in geological terms. And in this case too, his statements from five centuries ago were remarkably similar to current insights.
For example, how did fossilized shells and sea creatures end up in the high mountains? It was perhaps the most nagging question Da Vinci struggled with as far as geology is concerned. "Our witnesses are objects, made in salt water and found in the high mountains far from the sea..." wrote Da Vinci. “We have to assume that these places were once the coast.” It was a controversial position.
The general idea at the time was that the shells had either landed on the mountaintops by the Flood or had been created as part of the mountains by De Schepper. The Flood might indeed have played a role, Da Vinci thought, but how could the shells have ended up in only some layers? Why weren't they scattered all over the mountains?
He had little respect for people who took the other option:'Some fools think that the Natural or Celestial forces created these shells in the mountains,' he wrote about this, 'as if we had not also found bones of fish, which nevertheless take time to grow, and as if we can't count the life months and years of these cockles and shells in their shells."
Da Vinci himself couldn't really explain how the ocean floor got to the high altitude. Only that water had been involved seemed obvious to him. After all, the entire globe was filled with water, he was convinced. And nobody had ever heard of colliding plates.
What Da Vinci did understand was that rivers could stir up the riverbed, carrying the sediment with them and depositing it further down the road. He recognized that mountains were made up of layers of rock, which had apparently been deposited during successive floods of rivers, and thus must be of different ages. The bottom layer is the oldest. That is one of the current basic principles on which geology is based, but was by no means trivial at the time.
His father Piero taught him basic knowledge of Latin, mathematics and geometry. When Leonardo was fourteen he was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, who was known as "one of the best teachers of Florence". Di Cione not only taught him drawing and painting, but also taught him techniques such as paint making, metalworking, woodcarving and leatherworking.
Around 1480 - Leonardo was by then long mature and an accomplished artist - he had his first contact with the influential Medici family. The Medicis were a very wealthy banker family, who de facto ruled the city of Florence for long periods in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Lorenzo de Medici, a cunning political fox who wanted to secure his power over the Italian peninsula, sent Leonardo ("a very talented musician") to the Duke of Milan in 1482. From 1482 to 1499 Leonardo stayed in Milan. He made some of his most famous paintings there, such as the mural The Last Supper and the Virgin on the Rocks.
In 1502, Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI and an important military strategist. Leonardo drew very detailed topographical maps for Borgia. Increasingly involved in military and political affairs, he lived alternately in Rome, Milan and Florence during the last phase of his life.
In 1515, King Francis I of France conquered the Duchy of Milan and Leonardo entered the service of the French court. The last years of his life he lived in the castle Clos Lucé, where he died in 1519.