- Get hold of a skull. Nutmeg.
- Observe the holes in the substance of the brain, where there are more or less of them.
- Describe the tongue of the woodpecker and jaw of a crocodile.
- Give measurement of the dead using his finger [as a unit].
- Get your books on anatomy bound. Boots, stockings, comb, towel, shirts, shoelaces, penknife, pens, a skin for the chest, gloves, wrapping paper, charcoal.
This to-do list belonged to Leonardo da Vinci, written perhaps before a journey da Vinci took to the medical school of the university of Pavia where he intended to dissect corpses.
One of these items, “describe the tongue of a woodpecker”, is a narrative motif for Walter Isaacson’s formidable book, Leonardo da Vinci, to describe da Vinci’s endless curiosity and passion for wonder.
Isaacson’s biography of da Vinci is based on the surviving thousands of notebook pages written by the famous painter. Anatomical drawings, architectural concepts, shopping items, these lists are full of beautiful examples: sketch Milan, observe the goose’s foot (to study its movement), inflate the lungs of a pig to watch how they increase (both in width and length or only in width).
How often do we pause to think about a woodpecker’s tongue or a goose’s foot? Or, if we were an artist and wanted to understand how facial muscles work to paint a certain smile, would we dissect corpses with our own hands to check if the muscles that move the lips are the same that can raise the nostrils of the nose?
Because for da Vinci, there was never a clear and straight line between his ongoing projects. He could be studying engineering, switching to geology, intertwining with water flow, the rise of smoke, or describing human dental elements.
For a project, da Vinci would sketch ideas about protecting ports such as Venice by equipping underwater defenders with diving suits, breathing gear, masks, goggles, and wineskin airbags (scuba diving gear). For another project, he would deliver unusual weapons to one of his employers, Cesare Borgia: accurate and detailed maps that looked like satellite maps. This type of weapon is now critical in today’s warfare. In the words of Machiavelli, the famous diplomat also in Borgia’s pay, soldiers delivered lightning strikes based on da Vinci’s maps, and Borgia would be able
to install himself in someone else’s house before anyone else noticed it.
Walter Isaacson – Leonardo da Vinci
Da Vinci also took an interest in perpetual motion. In his notebooks, he wrote, “for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction”, which is Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Newton was born 200 years after da Vinci.
Ever the polymath, da Vinci explored the realms of cardiology through his dissections.
Leonardo’s greatest discovery in all of his anatomical works was his discovery of the way the aortic valve works, a triumph that was confirmed only in modern times.
It took 450 years for anatomists to realize that Leonardo[‘s work on aortic valves] was correct. This was confirmed at Oxford in the 1960s.
Walter Isaacson – Leonardo da Vinci
Many of Leonardo’s conclusions, such as the description of how the arterial valves close and open – letting blood flow around the heart – holds true today, but is not widely known.
“Even cardiologists get this wrong now,” Mr Wells says.
Only with the use of MRI technology has knowledge of this subject been revisited.
A BBC article, What Leonardo taught us about the heart
However, having such a wide array of broad interests meant da Vinci often switched focus during a project, which led to unfinished or overdue work.
For example, Pope Leo X commissioned a picture from da Vinci and learnt that the painter started the project by experimenting with formulas for the varnish to coat the painting. Exasperated, the pope famously declared, “Alas, this man will never get anything done, for he is thinking about the end before he begins.”
A famous example of an unfinished project is da Vinci’s task to create the largest equestrian statue in the world. He approached this assignment from various vantage points: he dissected horses to write a treatise on horse anatomy, designed cleaner stables or invented new systems for feeding horses. After twelve years of disparate efforts, the statue’s construction was halted as the seventy tonnes of bronze that were supposed to cast the monument were requisitioned for defending cannons. Centuries later, different sculptures were built worldwide based on da Vinci’s sketches.
Had he been a student at the outset of the twenty-first first century, he [da Vinci] may have been put on a pharmaceutical regimen to alleviate his mood swings and attention-deficit disorder.
Walter Isaacson – Leonardo da Vinci
The Notebooks
Da Vinci had an immense willingness to question. When he wanted to understand something, be it the shape of a woodpecker’s tongue or perpetual motion, da Vinci would observe its object of interest extremely carefully, jot down his ideas in notebooks and figure out a solution.
As talking to a friend, da Vinci wrote in his notebooks:
If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.
Da Vinci’s notebooks are a testament to his obsessive curiosity. The art historian Kenneth Clark called da Vinci “the most relentlessly curious man in history, and the philosopher Karl Jaspers called da Vinci’s varied interests “superhuman effort to specialize in everything”.
The artist never published his notes, and only about 7000 surviving fragmentary pages were found. These represent only a quarter to a fifth, perhaps even less, of da Vinci’s total writing output.
No wonder da Vinci acknowledged the Herculean task of categorizing, editing, transcribing, and publishing his notes.
This will be a collection without order, made up of many sheets which I have copied here, hoping afterwards to arrange them in order in their proper places according to the subjects of which they treat.
Codex Arundel, where da Vinci transcribed some of his earlier notes
Maybe da Vinci wanted to keep some of his notes unpublished.
Why is it that I do not describe my method for remaining underwater and how long I can remain there without coming up for air? I do not wish to publish this because of the evil nature of men, who might use it for murder on the sea bed.
da Vinci’s reasoning to keep his plans about scuba diving gear secret
What we do know is the enormous loss of unpublished scientific discoveries that da Vinci produced centuries ahead of his time. Imagine the leap in science if the scientific community acknowledged Newton’s laws of motion as da Vinci’s laws of motion. Imagine that Newton would have started with two centuries of research on these hypothetical da Vinci’s laws of motion. Or the countless preventable deaths caused by cardiac issues for the last 450 years that passed until da Vinci’s cardiovascular sketches were proven correctly.
With hindsight they [da Vinci’s cardiovascular sketches] may have had the potential to revolutionise surgery.
In the 16th century, for example, there was no treatment for cardiac disease, or many other diseases, and surgeons occupied a low status in society. If people survived surgery, it was more by luck than judgement.
Heart surgery has of course transformed in the past century, but Leonardo’s insights could have made a huge difference if they had been made public earlier.
A BBC article, What Leonardo taught us about the heart
So we can see how Kenneth Keele, cardiologist, medical historian and writer on the anatomical drawings of da Vinci, sharply commented that da Vinci had “a unique artistic and scientific mind“, but as the remaining notes weren’t published and are nowadays part of private collections, “Leonardo’s whole activity in art and science may well be considered as the epitome of greatness in failure.”
Fetus in the Womb / Study on the Flight of Birds / War machine – Giant Crossbow
Image Credit: Wikipedia (link 1, link 2)
Mona Lisa
In 1503, da Vinci started to paint the portrait of a silk merchant’s wife named Lisa, and he continued his work by adding thin layers and tiny strokes of paint until he died in 1517. This painting would become da Vinci’s masterpiece, known as Mona Lisa.
By introducing the sfumato technique (etymologically derived from the Italian word for “smoke”) with its hazy outlines, da Vinci blurred the sharp boundaries of straight lines traditionally used to depict three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface.
Your shadows and lights should be blended without lines or borders in the manner of smoke losing itself in the air.
Mona Lisa is the triumph of da Vinci’s labour on painting techniques (undercoat, pigments, sfumato, etc.), anatomy (by performing up to 30 human dissections, he made notes on the work of facial muscles – “One will always find as many muscles as there are positions of the lips and many more that serve to undo these positions.”) and optics. Da Vinci is credited with discovering the line-of-sight, where we direct our visual focus. He distinguished between foveal vision (central vision for noticing details) and peripheral vision (adapted for broad scenes and large objects).
If we were told, “keep your eye on the ball”, we would use foveal vision to absorb the most detailed image of the ball and ignore the peripheral vision. Returning to Mona Lisa, focus on her lips intently, and she doesn’t appear to be smiling (foveal vision). But, switch to peripheral vision by looking away from her lips, and she smiles.
Thus, Isaacson calls da Vinci “a pioneer of virtual reality”.
Regarding Mona Lisa’s lack of eyebrows, there are a few theories. One theory that seems to be more plausible is that, regrettably, the eyebrows were perhaps accidentally removed during the restorations of the portrait.
There is a surviving copy of Mona Lisa, painted in da Vinci’s workshop of Leonardo at the same time as the Louvre version, and nowadays part of the permanent collection of Museo del Prado in Madrid. After a thorough restoration in 2012, the Prado Mona Lisa gives us a glimpse of how the original Mona Lisa painting would have looked centuries ago.
Prado Mona Lisa Before Restauration
Prado Mona Lisa After Restauration
Most of us would know da Vinci as the painter of the Mona Lisa. But he was a Renaissance artist-scientist through and through, interested in ideal proportions (the Vitruvian Man), designing engineering feats, creating sets for theatrical plays or festivals (and to inspire wonder and awe in the participants, he also sketched the world’s first self-propelled vehicle and robotic knights, which NASA would later use as an inspiration for designing its robots), developing painting techniques, creating new methods for the visual display of information (anatomical sketches like this one, detailed maps), becoming a dentistry and chemical embalming pioneer, designing parachutes, helicopters, armoured tanks and who knows what else his lost or undiscovered notes might hold.
He did that with almost no formal schooling in Latin or Greek. Da Vinci would call himself omo sanza lettere or an illiterate man, and he would try to do exercises in Latin grammar even later in his life. Maybe this lack of schooling was a blessing in disguise because he was not troubled by challenging dogmatic scientific principles.
The function of the human eye, … was described by a large number of authors in a certain way. But I found it to be completely different.
da Vinci in one of his notebooks
However, da Vinci pursued too many interests and, as a result, he abandoned projects, most notably the paintings of Adoration of the Magi, the Battle of Anghiari, or Saint Jerome in the Wilderness. And he never got to publish his notes, which potentially contributed to some anguish thoughts in his later years:
Tell me if anything was ever done . . . Tell me . . . Tell me.
There is no perfect gift without great suffering. Our glories and our triumphs pass away.
Why is the sky blue? How does the dragonfly move its wings? Describe the tongue of a woodpecker (it acts as a cushion against concussions). To paint portraits, was it necessary to dissect cadavers to see how facial muscles work? Absolutely not, but that made da Vinci be da Vinci.
And perhaps the most excellent message we can take from da Vinci’s life is maintaining a child-like wonder sense and noticing the unseen as we were to check Mona Lisa’s smile (close and afar).
His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.
Walter Isaacson – Leonardo da Vinci