LdV was illegitimate, gay, left-handed, a bit of a heretic, and a misfit. Fortunately, he lived in Florence, Italy, which in the late 1400s was a very tolerant and wealthy city. As a boy, he had no formal education but received instruction at home in reading, writing, Latin, geometry and mathematics, although spending most of his childhood outdoors. Because of his lack of formal schooling, many of his contemporaries overlooked or ignored his scientific contributions. From childhood everyone recognized his astounding powers of observation; his unusual talent for making connections between unique areas of interest; a skeptical mind with a readiness to challenge dogma and contemporary beliefs; and a preternal ability to imagine the future. Today, we know him as the epitome of the creative Renaissance man. We consider him a painter and artist, an engineer, architect, scientist, inventor, cartographer, anatomist, botanist and writer. His active imagination conceptualized the tank, the helicopter, the flying machine, the parachute, and the self-powered vehicle. He was a “man ahead of his time” and many of his visionary inventions became real only centuries later.
Walter Isaacson, author of “Leonardo da Vinci,” describes the following about his unique subject: “Leonardo spent many pages in his notebook dissecting the human face to figure out every muscle and nerve that touched the lips. On one of those pages you see a faint sketch at the top of the beginning of the smile of the Mona Lisa. Leonardo kept that painting from 1503, when he started it, to his deathbed in 1519, trying to get every aspect exactly right in layer after layer. During that period, he dissected the human eye on cadavers and was able to understand that the center of the retina sees detail, but the edges see shadows and shapes better. If you look directly at the Mona Lisa smile, the corners of the lips turn downward slightly, but shadows and light make it seem like it’s turning upwards. As you move your eyes across her face, the smile flickers on and off.”
Much of this reality is mixed with mythology. For in life, Leonardo da Vinci created an endless succession of untested contraptions, unpublished studies and unfinished artworks. His uncontested genius rests on several foundations. Foremost, everything interested him. Curiosity was his defining trait. As an engineer, he foresaw more than most about how the design of machines informed by the mathematical laws of physics are better than those relying on practice. He was the first to design separate interchangeable components deployed in a variety of devices. And no-one drew machines with more attention to detail and reality. His insatiable curiosity about nature drove his efforts to devise flying machines. He didn’t seek to imitate flying birds, but to apply the principles of bird flight to endow man with the ability to fly on his own. His genius lay in his mastery of engineering principles, design, and natural law.
From iconic paintings, such as the “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper,” designs for flying machines, and ground-breaking studies on optics and perspective, Leonardo da Vinci fused science and art. He created works that have become part of our human story. He is the ultimate expression of an unencumbered, original mind.