Leonardo da Vinci: Scientific Revolutionary?

Leonardo da Vinci was not only the most influential painter and draftsman of the Renaissance, he defined science in an age in which it couldn't be properly conceived of or appreciated. His meticulous analysis and understanding of natural phenomena is paralleled only by the most cutting edge fields of 21st century modern science. So it begs the question- if Leonardo was as prolific a scientist as he was an artist, why was his artistic influence felt so strongly throughout the last 500 years while his science was not? The fascinating book The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra (author of The Tao of Physics) attempts to answer these questions.

Leonardo was a polymath, or what came to be known as a "Renaissance Man". In fact, his legacy defined the word- if you go to Wikipedia, his famous self portrait (pictured above) adorns the top of the page. Being a polymath is less an aspiration or a mode of operation- it's more like a psychological condition, bordering on obsession. But unlike many obsessions, instead of fixating on one specific thing, the affected mind goes in a million different directions at once, almost to a detriment (oil became Leonardo's preferred painting medium because it was the only medium that could stay wet long enough to tolerate all of his long-term noodling) Fortunately, Leonardo had wealthy and powerful clients during his career as a painter- religious, political, even the royal elite- who would provide him with money, workspace, and resources to freely pursue his varied passions. He had an entourage that followed him everywhere he went, and a constant team of assistants, so that he could maximize the breadth of his activities.

Leonardo's approach to knowledge in general was a classical Aristotilean, empirical style- an exhaustive examination and documentation of natural phenomena. His experimentation within the widely varied disciplines of painting, architecture, engineering, mathematics, and the various sciences are evident to us through the detailed and comprehensive 6000 surviving pages of his original Notebooks. Sadly, an estimated 7000 additional pages have been lost. In the Notebooks, he muses, sketches, and intuits the science, above and beyond the age of the Enlightenment, at least a hundred years before René Descartes, Sir Issac Newton, and their contemporaries had stepped foot on the planet.

Capra writes regarding Leonardo's tutoring of King François I of France:

"He never tired of hearing Leonardo explain to him the subtleties of his science of living forms- the complexities of turbulent water and air, the formation of rocks and the origin of fossils, the intricacies of human movement and the flight of birds, the nature of light and perspective, the canons of beauty and proportion, the pathways of the senses and the vital spirits that sustain our life, and the origin of human will and power in the seat of the soul." (Capra, p. 127)

Just in this small cross section we can clearly identify Leonardo's knowledge in fields we would call (respectively) Fluid and Aerodynamics, Geology, Paleontology, Biomechanics, Optics, Aesthetics, Anatomy and Psychology. Keep in mind all of these studies subsisted with only the simplest of technology, without the tools that were available when they were popularly developed. The analysis of Fluid Dynamics was especially difficult without advanced equipment, but it was of such acute interest to Leonardo that it yielded an abundance of pages in the Notebooks. It wasn't seriously pursued by the greater scientific community until the 19th century.


Leonardo is of course best known for his artistic endeavors, including several pioneering master paintings (The Last Supper, John The Baptist, and Mona Lisa), as well as the detailed drawings that can be found throughout his notebooks. He discovered that a more pleasing and striking image could be composed using harmonic proportion and perspective, rather than idealizing human and natural forms. So the endless hours he spent studying the underlying structure of these forms were inordinately beneficial to his artwork, whether they were rocks, streams of running water, or systems of muscles and organs throughout the human body. He felt if an artist didn't have a thorough enough understanding of natural forms, there was no way he could make a true and accurate rendering of them. Dedication to this principle set Leonardo apart from the other artists of his day, and galvanized (while it was actually a revival of ancient techniques) a revolution in the naturalism of painting. Many of the drawings in his Notebooks are still considered impressively accurate portrayals of human anatomy.


So why wasn't he received as successfully in the scientific community as he was in the art world? As Capra explains it, Leonardo never had a formal education, and though he did eventually teach himself Latin, the text in his Notebooks were written in common Italian, making him unable to garner much respect from many of the academic communities of the time. Additionally, his Notebooks weren't properly published until hundreds of years after his death. At that point, the modern scientific method as we know it had been established. The purely reductionist science that emerged from the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries analyzed organisms and natural phenomena by deferring their causes to the activities of lower level, component parts (molecules, atoms, particles, etc).

This was much different than Leonardo's methods, which were more holistic. Holistic examination to Leonardo was to observe a subject as it existed in context, emphasizing the connectedness of each part to its fellow component parts. Those collections would interact and form a system- a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. For example, it wouldn't make sense to analyze a single muscle in the upper arm of a human subject; you would have to see how it fit in context with all of the other muscles surrounding it, as well as the tendons that connected them to the bones of the elbow and shoulder and made the arm operational. His drawing Vitruvian Man celebrates the symmetry, proportion, and beauty of the human body as a whole.


Concurrently Leonardo was one of the first figures of history who believed that the types of natural phenomena seen everywhere on Earth extended throughout the cosmos, and that the planets outside the bounds of Earth were just as imperfect, noisy and complex as the nature that surrounded us. This stood in stark contrast to the widely accepted, even religiously mandated Aristotelian vision, which professed that the celestial bodies were constructed from the flawless, idealized, and mathematically perfect geometric forms of his teacher, Plato. Leonardo went further to postulate that the human body, the planet Earth, and the cosmos as a whole were macro/microcosms of each other, meaning that each was its own complex natural organism that reflected the other. Had Leonardo access to a powerful microscope at that point and observed the various discrete cellular systems within the human body, he might have gone further to recognize them as the next step down in his picture of reality. His vision offers not only a more expansive view of reductionist science, but goes further to exemplify nonlinear, fractal-like geometry in self-similar complex systems. This type of research didn't become popular until the late 20th century, a full 500 years after Leonardo had passed away. In fact, this division of his studies could also easily be compared to systems biology, complexity, and cognitive science- some of the most cutting-edge fields of research today.

Leonardo's scientific endeavors were a product of his own vigorous, private self-education. However, exercising his polymathic sensibilities, he was able to meld art and science together as one, and include scientific inquiry as a fundamental part of the art-making process. That way he was never forced into a situation where the scientific work had to be separately approved, funded, or even known about by anyone but his closest associates. Without economic, social, or religious interests directly tied to it, Leonardo seized the opportunity to explore interests for their own sake, rather than having to cater to the desires of any particular patron. Most research scientists today have to constantly deal with these obstacles and keep the interests of their funders (drug companies, national defense departments, academic institutions) in mind at all times as they perform their experiments.

Of course Leonardo had a relatively stable, well-paying career, with a solid base of political and religious clients who happily praised and generously supported his artistry, allowing him the time and flexibility to employ such a thorough methodology. He never had to worry about having food to eat or a place to live. But while few of us in the modern day can revel in the types of luxuries he enjoyed, we can still view, understand and appreciate the value of independent scientific research and studying the wonders of the natural world, on our own, for it's own sake, the discoveries themselves becoming their own rewards.

Imagine what our world could have been like had Leonardo's Notebooks been the cornerstone of the Enlightenment. How would the world be different? What if we all stopped whatever we were doing every day, just to watch the sunset? What if everyone learned a musical instrument, and set aside time to play every day, just for themselves? What if we all spoke ten languages? What if every city building had a rooftop garden, that the residents of the building personally cared for and took pride in? What if math class was absolutely fascinating, because we actually understood the context of it and how it fit into our daily lives instead of being presented with steady streams of abstract concepts? What if each and every one of us was in constant awe and wonder at the simple idea of being alive?

If we followed a path inspired by Leonardo the Scientist, the Naturalist, the Polymath, the Self-Educated, tireless Seeker of Knowledge- the Visionary- all of these things might be possible. If we could only view the natural world through his eyes, with as much appreciation and sense of awe as he had for the sheer complexity of it all... we certainly wouldn't ever have to think twice about saving it.