Ideas

Knowing how to see (saper vedere)

His science began with looking. He tried to understand a thing by describing and drawing it in the utmost detail. He did not lean on theory or Latin authorities. He set the eye above every other sense as the way to grasp the works of nature.

The eye, which is called the window of the soul

Notebooks, on painting (Richter translation)

Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci · Project Gutenberg: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Jean Paul Richter

Curiosity and experience

His notebooks are full of errands for the mind. Ask a master of hydraulics how to mend a lock. Observe the goose’s foot. Describe the tongue of the woodpecker. He trusted experience over received opinion. Walter Isaacson built his biography around this restless curiosity.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err

Notebooks (Richter translation)

The Guardian: review of Isaacson (16 December 2017) · Project Gutenberg: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Jean Paul Richter · Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci (Isaacson book)

Art and science as one

Renaissance humanism saw no wall between the arts and the sciences. His notes fuse painting with natural philosophy. The Vitruvian Man joins artistic vision to a study of proportion. Isaacson argues that his dissections of muscles made the Mona Lisa’s smile possible.

justly ranked among the all-time iconic images of Western civilization

Carmen C. Bambach on the Vitruvian Man

Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci · Wikipedia: Vitruvian Man · The Guardian: review of Isaacson (16 December 2017)

Sfumato

Sfumato means smoked off. He softened every edge so that light passes into shadow with no visible line. It grew from his study of optics and human vision. A 2010 study of his Louvre paintings found glazes only 1 to 2 micrometres thick.

without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke

Leonardo on sfumato

Wikipedia: Sfumato · Musée du Louvre: The Salle des États and the Mona Lisa · Wikipedia: Mona Lisa

Analogy in nature

He read the body and the earth as mirrors of each other. Bones were like rocks. Blood was like the tides. He wrote that hair moves like water. The Guardian’s reviewer saw him link the curve of waves to a curl of hair.

By the ancients man has been called the world in miniature

Notebooks, the treatise on water (Richter translation)

Project Gutenberg: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Jean Paul Richter · Wikipedia: Salvator Mundi (Leonardo) · The Guardian: review of Isaacson (16 December 2017)

Anatomy as the key to the body

He dissected human bodies in Florence, Milan and Rome as well as cows, birds, bears and frogs. He worked out how heart valves control the flow of blood. He made wax casts of the brain’s ventricles. None of it was published in his lifetime. In 2005 a British surgeon used his drawing of the mitral valve to improve heart repairs.

Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci · Wikipedia: Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci · BBC News (28 September 2005)

Machines and the dream of flight

He drew pumps, cranks, cannon and a mechanical knight. His exploded views were an early form of the modern technical drawing. In about 1505 he wrote a short codex on how birds fly and how a machine might. He stated laws of sliding friction in 1493 and judged perpetual motion impossible.

Wikipedia: Codex on the Flight of Birds · Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum: Codex on the Flight of Birds · Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci

The unfinished work

Fewer than 25 major works survive and several are unfinished. He abandoned altarpieces and a great mural. His bronze horse never got its bronze. He kept the Mona Lisa with him for years. One reviewer of Isaacson called him an easily distracted obsessive who too often walked away near completion.

Tell me if anything was ever done.

Notebooks (Richter translation)

Wikipedia: Leonardo da Vinci · The Observer: review of Isaacson (23 October 2017) · Project Gutenberg: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Jean Paul Richter

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