Perhaps his most well-known invention is a flying machine, which is based on the physiology of a bat. These and other explorations into the mechanics of flight are found in da Vinci's Codex on the Flight of Birds, a study of avian aeronautics, which he began in Like many leaders of Renaissance humanism, da Vinci did not see a divide between science and art.
He viewed the two as intertwined disciplines rather than separate ones. He believed studying science made him a better artist. In and , da Vinci also briefly worked in Florence as a military engineer for Cesare Borgia, the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI and commander of the papal army.
He traveled outside of Florence to survey military construction projects and sketch city plans and topographical maps. To more accurately depict those gestures and movements, da Vinci began to study anatomy seriously and dissect human and animal bodies during the s. His drawings of a fetus in utero, the heart and vascular system, sex organs and other bone and muscular structures are some of the first on human record.
In addition to his anatomical investigations, da Vinci studied botany, geology, zoology, hydraulics, aeronautics and physics. He sketched his observations on loose sheets of papers and pads that he tucked inside his belt. Da Vinci placed the papers in notebooks and arranged them around four broad themes—painting, architecture, mechanics and human anatomy.
He filled dozens of notebooks with finely drawn illustrations and scientific observations. Ludovico Sforza also tasked da Vinci with sculpting a foot-tall bronze equestrian statue of his father and founder of the family dynasty, Francesco Sforza. With the help of apprentices and students in his workshop, da Vinci worked on the project on and off for more than a dozen years. Da Vinci sculpted a life-size clay model of the statue, but the project was put on hold when war with France required bronze to be used for casting cannons, not sculptures.
After French forces overran Milan in — and shot the clay model to pieces — da Vinci fled the city along with the duke and the Sforza family. After years of work and numerous sketches by da Vinci, Trivulzio decided to scale back the size of the statue, which was ultimately never finished. It was while he was making notes on the flight patterns of birds, and particularly the fork-tailed red kite, that he was reminded of an early experience, and wrote the only passage about his childhood in the notebooks.
Disregarded until Freud wrote a small book about it, in , the passage still commands attention. Isaacson is almost refreshing in his sweeping rejection not only of Freud but of any attempt to psychoanalyze a man who lived five hundred years ago although he occasionally bends his own rule.
Whether or not this is true—who can say? In fact, the preparatory drawing, used for both figures, is of a woman. Michelangelo elided gender in a comparably obsessive way: his heavily muscled female figures—the Libyan Sibyl on the Sistine Ceiling, Night in the Medici Chapel—were clearly modelled on men, as the drawings attest. Stranger still, there is a resemblance between this St. Evidently, his studio fed an appetite for more than Madonnas.
Playful caricature? Hermaphroditic pornography? Isaacson suggests both, but even a thick volume devoted to the drawing, edited by a leading Leonardo expert, Carlo Pedretti, fails to provide any answers. One story has it that the drawing was part of a secret cache of obscene Leonardo material held in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The works were allegedly stolen, in the nineteenth century, prompting not legal prosecution but relief. A bronze horse that he designed for Ludovico was so enormous that it proved impossible to cast; Ludovico finally dispatched the raw bronze to a neighboring state to be turned into cannons, in preparation for a threatened attack by the French.
Again, the scale was enormous—twenty-nine feet wide, fifteen feet tall—and Leonardo was in a predicament about technique. He liked to work slowly, to rethink, to add layer upon layer, none of which was possible with fresco, which dried quickly and bonded to the wall.
Experimenting, he concocted a mixture of oil and tempera, and, sometime around , he went to work. Leonardo was alive then, and would have known. They were more successful, however, with the painter. At the time, Machiavelli was an envoy for the Florentine Republic, negotiating to keep the infamous warlord Cesare Borgia from attacking the city.
He inspected fortresses, made maps, and designed weapons—he may also have acted as a spy for Florence—as Borgia conquered towns through central Italy in a trail of slaughter that rattled even Machiavelli. Leonardo lasted eight months in the job. Crowds flocked to see a new work on display; he turned aside commissions from the titled and the rich.
Michelangelo loathed Leonardo. But the animus was also personal. Michelangelo, then in his mid-twenties, was gruff, hardworking, ill-kempt, and, by his own account, celibate, because of what appears to have been his severely repressed and spiritualized homosexuality. At one point, he insulted Leonardo on the street, with a taunt about the bronze horse that had been left unfinished, reportedly leaving Leonardo standing red-faced. The witness to this incident found it worth noting that Leonardo, ever beautiful in his person, went around Florence in a rose-pink tunic, and it is irresistible to infer how irritating Michelangelo must have found the older artist, with his peacock clothes and his perfumed air, and with what now amounted to an entourage of swankily dressed assistants.
Leonardo seemed to delight in adding fuel to the fire. Some months before Michelangelo was commissioned to paint alongside Leonardo, in early , there was a meeting to view his nearly completed statue of David and to decide where in the city it would stand. Yet his objections prevailed. The genitals of the marble colossus were covered, and stayed that way for some forty years.
Instead of a battle scene, he depicted a whole troop of naked, twisting, posing, and extremely well-muscled men, who are caught bathing in a river just as the battle alarm sounds.
He was a great philosopher. Painted in oil on walnut in about , it depicts Jesus offering a benediction with his right hand while holding a crystalline orb that appears to represent the cosmos in his left.
Its current whereabouts are unknown. Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Richard Gunderman , Indiana University. Shady parentage Leonardo was born out of wedlock on April 15, This was followed by three years based in Rome. The fame of Da Vinci's surviving paintings has meant that he has been regarded primarily as an artist, but the thousands of surviving pages of his notebooks reveal the most eclectic and brilliant of minds.
He wrote and drew on subjects including geology, anatomy which he studied in order to paint the human form more accurately , flight, gravity and optics, often flitting from subject to subject on a single page, and writing in left-handed mirror script. He 'invented' the bicycle, airplane, helicopter, and parachute some years ahead of their time. If all this work had been published in an intelligible form, da Vinci's place as a pioneering scientist would have been beyond dispute.
Yet his true genius was not as a scientist or an artist, but as a combination of the two: an 'artist-engineer'.
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