Special Section

Leonardo Celebrates
Leonardo da Vinci
David Carrier, Guest Editor

In celebration of Leonardo journal’s 40th anniversary, we will be publishing

throughout 2008 essays related to Leonardo da Vinci and his concerns regard-
ing the relationship between art and science. We are pleased to present the first
installment of this special section in the current issue.
CELEBRATING LEONARDO DA VINCI

INTRODUCTION

Leonardo Iand Leonardo da Vinci

NTRODUCTION

L eonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is a natural namesake for Leonardo, a journal

devoted to exploring the relationships between art and science. Many visual artists have
taken a casual interest in science. They have been interested in anatomy, color theory and
perspective, those practical techniques for the working artist. Leonardo, however, is the only
major painter who devoted serious prolonged attention to studies dealing with science and
technology. He was interested in anatomy, hydraulics and optics and designed many very
original inventions. These scientific concerns influenced both his paintings and his abortive
sculptural projects.
That Leonardo had such varied interests means that no single scholar today is com-
petent to evaluate him. “An apology may be needed,” Ernst Gombrich wrote in his study
of Leonardo’s account of fluid mechanics, “from an art historian proposing to approach a
subject, however tentatively, that extends far into the history of science” [1]. Art historians
such as Gombrich and Martin Kemp, who has published a book about Leonardo, hesitate
to judge his scientific materials, while historians of science and technology are not really
qualified to judge his art.
Leonardo has always had a mystique. His younger High Renaissance peers Michelangelo
and Raphael also were very great artists; but Leonardo aspired to be something more: a uni-
versal genius. Thus it is not surprising that such varied commentators as Giorgio Vasari, Wal-
ter Pater, Sigmund Freud and Kenneth Clark have succumbed to his charm. Like many
modern scholars, Vasari was fascinated by Leonardo’s scientific interests:
He was continually making models and designs to show men how to move mountains with ease . . . and by means
of levers, windlasses, and screws, he showed the way to raise and draw great weights . . . and of these ideas and
labours many drawings may be seen . . . I myself have seen not a few [2].

No other artist described by Vasari combined such diverse interests. As Pater tells the story,
when Leonardo
plunged . . . into the study of nature . . . he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants and crystals, the lines
traced by the stars as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences which exist between the different orders
of living things, through which, to eyes opened, they interpret each other [3].

Leonardo, he suggests, was a kind of magician. Freud also, in his wonderfully inventive
although not entirely reliable reconstruction of Leonardo’s emotional life, speaks of how
constantly following the lead given by the requirements of his painting he was . . . driven to investigate the
painter’s subjects, animals and plants, and the proportions of the human body. . . . He discovered the general
laws of mechanics and divined the history of the stratification and fossilization in the Arno Valley. . . . His inves-
tigations extended to practically every branch of natural science [4].

Freud traces Leonardo’s interest in both art and science to a rich fantasy life. Clark, finally,
concludes his book on Leonardo with a richly suggestive description of the painter’s scien-
tific interests.
He learns the vast power of natural forces and he pursues science as a means by which these forces can be
harnessed for human advantage . . . his studies of hydrodynamics suggest a power of water beyond human con-
trol; his studies of geology show that the earth has undergone cataclysmic upheavals . . . his studies of embryol-
ogy point to a central problem of creation apparently insoluble by science [5].

Everyone knows Leonardo’s name and has heard of his most famous painting, the Mona
Lisa. Leonardo was famous, also, for his inability to complete his projects. For a long-lived,
much appreciated artist, he finished a surprisingly small number of works of art. His Last

36 LEONARDO, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 36–38, 2008 ©2008 ISAST

 CELEBRATING LEONARDO DA VINCI
Supper in Milan was a wreck soon after his death because he experimented with the fresco
technique. As for his gigantic statue of a rearing horse, the Milan Trivulzio Monument, the
models were destroyed and we know of it only by some sketches. His Battle of Anghiari,
painted in rivalry with Michelangelo in the Council Hall in Florence, survives only in some
copies by Rubens and other artists—the original painting has disappeared entirely. A num-
ber of Leonardo’s visual conceptions survive only in copies by pupils. Even the Mona Lisa,
a commissioned portrait, was never delivered finished to its subject. The posthumous evalua-
tion of every Renaissance artist depends to some extent upon fickle fate—many great paint-
ings and sculptures were damaged, destroyed or lost. However, in his art, as in his scientific
investigations, Leonardo started more than he was able to complete. One senses that he him-
self was more interested in the conception than in the completion of works of art. For that
reason, he attracts many present-day artists.
In Leonardo’s time, long
One senses that he himself was before Galileo and Isaac
Newton, the ideal of an
more interested in the conception experimental science was
not yet established. He is not
than in the completion of works really the ancestor of such
scientists, for his drawings of
of art. For that reason, he attracts natural processes did not
many present-day artists. contribute to the develop-
ment of physics. In astron-
omy, he was concerned with
the appearances of heavenly bodies, not the observations of Copernicus and his successors,
which created present-day scientific astronomy [6].
Furthermore, although Leonardo sometimes spoke skeptically about the claims of Scrip-
ture, his interest in fossils and the Deluge did not actually prepare the way for modern geol-
ogy and Darwin’s theory of natural selection. As for his flying machines, they were not
genuine precursors of the airplanes of the Wright Brothers. Because he lacked suitable
technologies, these machines could not have gotten off the ground. His fascination with
military technology now seems more ominous, but here too there is a great gap between
his claims and his accomplishments. These inventions did not revolutionize warfare.
Leonardo’s goal as scientist, to understand the world visually, proved to be essentially un-
workable. Leonardo lacked the knowledge of mathematics and the interest in experimenta-
tion needed for real science. As for his anatomy, it was boldly original but played little role in
the scientific study of the human body, which created modern medicine. In the 17th century,
a number of scholars, Tomasso Campanella and Athanasius Kircher for example, developed
extremely ambitious but totally flawed attempts to understand the natural order of things.
These men were not precursors of modern scientists but late-medieval natural mystics who
thought that they could deduce the structure of the world by observation. Leonardo has
much more in common with these failed scientists than he does with Copernicus, Galileo
and Newton. “He was almost exclusively concerned with the questions of the bodies’ physical
appearance rather than with making measured observations of their behavior” [7]. Nor did
Leonardo have any connection to those inventors who developed the steam engine and the
apparatus of industrial culture.
No one can entirely transcend his own time, for the starting point for every artist and
scientist depends upon that person’s precursors. Thus it would be unfair to complain about
the limits of Leonardo’s scientific investigations or his technical apparatus. In his day, the
experimental study of nature had not yet developed. He was a great artist who also took a
genuine interest in the natural sciences. However, because the myths about Leonardo are
so powerful, it is important to adopt a realistic view of his accomplishments. His paintings
remain extremely suggestive, but there is no good reason to think that his accomplishments
as a visual artist were supported by sound scientific theories. Leonardo’s art is great, but his
studies of science and technology are of interest only to intellectual historians.

Introduction: Leonardo and Leonardo da Vinci 37

CELEBRATING LEONARDO DA VINCI
This story deserves revisiting because it reveals much about the relationship of art and sci-
ence in ways that concern Leonardo. In our culture, science and its associated technologies
have enormous prestige. We communicate via e-mail, gain information from the Web and
know a great deal about the structures of the micro- and macrocosm, much of which infor-
mation was unavailable a few
No one can entirely transcend his decades ago. Science and
technology advance dramati-
own time, for the starting point for cally, and so naturally our
artists are concerned to
every artist and scientist depends make use of these new dis-
coveries. They would hope
upon that person’s precursors. that visual art, too, could be
equally successful. It is not
clear, however, that these hopes are justified. When the history of the late-20th-century West-
ern culture is written, Bill Gates will surely play a major role; but will any of our visual artists
be equally important? That question is hard to answer. Just as, in Leonardo’s time, painters
were involved with the optics of perspective, so do artists today make use of the many novel
computer technologies. The paintings of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and other figures
depend upon perspective. It is not yet clear, in my opinion, whether any of the novel cre-
ations of present-day visual artists are of equivalent interest.
One reason that Leonardo da Vinci deserves attention is that his art and scientific investi-
gations are intrinsically fascinating. His drawings and paintings attract our attention, and spe-
cialist scholars are interested in his studies of experimentation and technology. Another
reason that he deserves attention in Leonardo is that we are interested in how his fascination
with the relationship of art and science can contribute to our present understanding. When
Frank Malina named this publication 40 years ago, he thus anticipated our present concerns.
DAVID CARRIER
Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art
E-mail: <david.carrier@cwru.edu>

References
1. Ernst Gombrich, “The Form of Movement in Water and Art,” in Ernst Gombrich, The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of the Re-
naissance (London: Phaidon, 1976) p. 39.

2. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Gaston du C. de Vere, trans. (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)
Vol. I, p. 627.

3. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1980) p. 81.

4. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, Alan Tyson, trans. (New York: Norton, 1964) p. 26.

5. Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1967) p. 160.

6. Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981) p. 324.

7. Kemp [6] p. 324; see also Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven, CT, and
London, U.K.: Yale Univ. Press, 1990).

38 Introduction: Leonardo and Leonardo da Vinci