The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Figure P-1: Leonardo’s Self-Portrait, c. 1512, Biblioteca Reale, Turin

  Introduction: An Interpreter of Nature

  PART ONE LEONARDO, THE MAN

  ONE Infinite Grace

  TWO The Universal Man

  THREE The Florentine

  FOUR A Well-Employed Life

  PART TWO LEONARDO, THE SCIENTIST

  FIVE Science in the Renaissance

  SIX Science Born of Experience

  SEVEN Geometry Done with Motion

  EIGHT Pyramids of Light

  NINE The Eye, the Senses, and the Soul

  EPILOGUE: “Read me, O reader, if in my words you find delight”

  Appendix: Leonardo’s Geometry of Transformations

  Notes

  Leonardo’s Notebooks: Facsimiles and Transcriptions

  Bibliography

  Also by Fritjof Capra

  Copyright

  To Elizabeth and Juliette

  First I shall do some experiments before I proceed farther, because my intention is to cite experience first and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way. And this is the true rule by which those who speculate about the effects of nature must proceed.

  —LEONARDO DA VINCI, C. 1513

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I began my research for this book, I entered a field that was completely foreign to me, and I am grateful to many friends and colleagues for helping me orient myself in the world of Leonardo scholarship.

  I am especially grateful

  to my wife, Elizabeth Hawk, for helping me identify the leading contemporary scholars, research institutions, and special libraries;

  to Claire Farago for clarifying many basic questions about Leonardo’s language and about the scholarly editions of his Notebooks, and especially for introducing me to the Elmer Belt Library at the University of California, Los Angeles;

  to Carlo Pedretti for valuable conversations and correspondence about the history and dating of Leonardo’s drawings and texts;

  to Domenico Laurenza for his encouragement and support, for illuminating discussions and correspondence about various aspects of Leonardo’s science, and for valuable help in translating certain passages from the original manuscripts;

  to Linda Warren, Head Librarian of the Elmer Belt Library, and to Monica Taddei, Head Librarian of the Biblioteca Leonardiana in Vinci, for giving me unrestricted access to their collections of the complete facsimile editions of Leonardo’s manuscripts, and for their generous help with bibliographical research;

  to Eduardo Kickhöfel for valuable research assistance at the Biblioteca Leonardiana, and for many interesting discussions of Leonardo’s science;

  to Franco Bulletti at Giunti Editore in Florence for a fascinating discussion of the production process of their facsimile editions of Leonardo’s manuscripts;

  to Clara Vitulo, curator at the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, for arranging a special viewing of Leonardo’s self-portrait, the Codex on the Flight of Birds, and other original drawings in the library’s collection;

  to Rowan Watson, Head of Documentary Materials at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for showing me the Codices Forster in the collection of the National Art Library, and for an interesting discussion of their history;

  and to Françoise Viatte, Director of the Department of Graphic Arts at the Louvre, for her encouragement and for helpful discussions and correspondence about Leonardo’s works in the Louvre’s collection.

  During my research and writing, I discussed various areas of contemporary science and technology and their relevance to Leonardo’s work with colleagues and friends. I am especially indebted

  to Pier Luigi Luisi for inspiring conversations during the very early stages of the project, and for his warm hospitality in Zurich and Rome;

  to Ugo Piomelli for numerous enlightening discussions of Leonardo’s fluid dynamics;

  to Ann Pizzorusso for informative correspondence about the history of geology;

  to Brian Goodwin for illuminating discussions of morphogenesis in botany;

  to Ralph Abraham for a critical reading of the chapter on Leonardo’s mathematics;

  to George Lakoff for many inspiring conversations about contemporary cognitive science;

  and to Magdalena Corvin, Amory Lovins, and Oscar Motomura for stimulating discussions on the nature of design.

  I am also very grateful to Satish Kumar for giving me the opportunity to teach a course on Leonardo’s Science of Quality at Schumacher College in England during the spring of 2006, and to the participants in the course for many critical questions and helpful suggestions.

  I wish to thank my literary agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson, for their encouragement and valuable advice.

  I am deeply grateful to my brother, Bernt Capra, for reading the entire manuscript and for his enthusiastic support and numerous helpful suggestions. I am also very grateful to Ernest Callenbach, Amelia Barili, and to my daughter, Juliette Capra, for reading portions of the manuscript and offering many critical comments.

  I am indebted to my assistant, Trena Cleland, for her careful and sensitive editing of the first draft of the manuscript, and for keeping my home office on an even keel while I was concentrating on my writing.

  I am grateful to my editor Roger Scholl at Doubleday for his support and advice, and for his superb editing of the text.

  Last but not least, I wish to express my deep gratitude to my wife, Elizabeth, for countless discussions on Renaissance art, for helping me select the book’s illustrations, and for her patience and enthusiastic support during many months of strenuous work.

  PHOTOGRAPHIC ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Royal Collection © 2007, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (Figs. I-1, 2-1, 2-2, 3-1, 4-1, 4-2, 4-5, 5-1, 6-1, 6-2, 6-3, 6-4, 7-2, 7-3, 7-7, 8-2, 9-1, 9-4, E-1)

  Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Paris, France (Figs. 2-5, 6-6, 6-7, 7-1, 7-4, 8-5, 8-6, 8-7, 9-2)

  Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY, Louvre, Paris, France (Figs. 1-2, 2-4, 4-3)

  Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milano (Figs. 2-3, 8-1, 8-3)

  Biblioteca Reale, Torino, with permission from Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali (Figs. P-1, 4-4, E-2)

  Laboratorio Fotográfico, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid (Figs. 6-5 left, 7-6)

  Polo Museale Fiorentino (Figs. 1-1, 3-2)

  V& A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London (Fig. 7-5)

  The British Library Board (Fig. 8-4)

  Klassik Stiftung Weimar (Fig. 9-3)

  Archivio Fotografico IMSS Firenze, Fotografia de Eurofoto (Fig. 6-5 right)

  Archivio Fotografico IMSS Firenze, Fotografia di Simon Hazelgrove (Fig. 6-8)

  Museo d’Arte Antica, Castello Sforzesco, Milano (Fig. 2-6)

  PREFACE

  Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest master painter and genius of the Renaissance, has been the subject of hundreds of scholarly and popular books. His enormous oeuvre, said to include over 100,000 drawings and over 6,000 pages of notes, and the extreme diversity of his interests have attracted countless scholars from a wide range of academic and artistic disciplines.

  However, there are surprisingly few books about Leonardo’s science, even though he left voluminous notebooks full of detailed descri
ptions of his experiments, magnificent drawings, and long analyses of his findings. Moreover, most authors who have discussed Leonardo’s scientific work have looked at it through Newtonian lenses, and I believe this has often prevented them from understanding its essential nature.

  Leonardo intended to eventually present the results of his scientific research as a coherent, integrated body of knowledge. He never managed to do so, because throughout his life he always felt more compelled to expand, refine, and document his investigations than to organize them in a systematic way. Hence, in the centuries since his death, scholars studying his celebrated Notebooks have tended to see them as disorganized and chaotic. In Leonardo’s mind, however, his science was not disorganized at all. It gave him a coherent, unifying picture of natural phenomena—but a picture that is radically different from that of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton.

  Only now, five centuries later, as the limits of Newtonian science are becoming all too apparent and the mechanistic Cartesian worldview is giving way to a holistic and ecological view not unlike Leonardo’s, can we begin to appreciate the full power of his science and its great relevance for our modern era.

  My intent is to present a coherent account of the scientific method and achievements of the great genius of the Renaissance and evaluate them from the perspective of today’s scientific thought. Studying Leonardo from this perspective will not only allow us to recognize his science as a solid body of knowledge. It will also show why it cannot be understood without his art, nor his art without the science.

  As a scientist and author, I depart in this book from my usual work. At the same time, however, it has been a deeply satisfying book to write, as I have been fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific work for over three decades. When I began my career as a writer in the early 1970s, my plan was to write a popular book about particle physics. I completed the first three chapters of the manuscript, then abandoned the project to write The Tao of Physics, into which I incorporated most of the material from the early manuscript. My original manuscript began with a brief history of modern Western science, and opened with the beautiful statement by Leonardo da Vinci on the empirical basis of science that now serves as the epigraph for this book.

  Since paying tribute to Leonardo as the first modern scientist (long before Galileo, Bacon, and Newton) in my early manuscript, I have retained my fascination with his scientific work, and over the years have referred to it several times in my writings, without, however, studying his extensive Notebooks in any detail. The impetus to do so came in the mid-1990s, when I saw a large exhibition of Leonardo’s drawings at The Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace in London. As I gazed at those magnificent drawings juxtaposing, often on the same page, architecture and human anatomy, turbulent water and turbulent air, water vortices, the flow of human hair and the growth patterns of grasses, I realized that Leonardo’s systematic studies of living and nonliving forms amounted to a science of quality and wholeness that was fundamentally different from the mechanistic science of Galileo and Newton. At the core of his investigations, it seemed to me, was a persistent exploration of patterns, interconnecting phenomena from a vast range of fields.

  Having explored the modern counterparts to Leonardo’s approach, known today as complexity theory and systems theory, in several of my previous books, I felt that it was time for me to study Leonardo’s Notebooks in earnest and evaluate his scientific thought from the perspective of the most recent advances in modern science.

  Although Leonardo left us, in the words of the eminent Renaissance scholar Kenneth Clark, “one of the most voluminous and complete records of a mind at work that has come down to us,” his Notebooks give us hardly any clues to the author’s character and personality.1 Leonardo, in his paintings as well as in his life, seemed to cultivate a certain sense of mystery. Because of this aura of mystery and because of his extraordinary talents, Leonardo da Vinci became a legendary figure even during his lifetime, and his legend has been amplified in different variations in the centuries after his death.

  Throughout history, he personified the age of the Renaissance, yet each era “reinvented” Leonardo according to the zeitgeist of the time. To quote Kenneth Clark again, “Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.”2 It is therefore inevitable that in the following pages I have also had to reinvent Leonardo. The image that emerges from my account is, in contemporary scientific terms, one of Leonardo as a systemic thinker, ecologist, and complexity theorist; a scientist and artist with a deep reverence for all life, and as a man with a strong desire to work for the benefit of humanity.

  The powerful intuition I had in that London exhibit, that the Leonardo I describe above is indeed “the Leonardo of our time,” was confirmed by my subsequent research and exploration of the Notebooks. As art historian Martin Kemp wrote in the catalog of an earlier exhibit of Leonardo’s drawings in the Hayward Gallery in London:

  It seems to me that there is a core to [Leonardo’s] achievement, however imperfectly transmitted and received by different generations, that remains intuitively accessible. What has been sensed is that his artistic productions are more than art—that they are part of a vision embracing a profound sense of the interrelatedness of things. The full complexity of life in the context of the world is somehow implied when he characterises any of its constituent parts…. I believe that his vision of the totality of the world as a kind of single organism does speak to us with particular relevance today, now that our technological potential has become so awesome.3

  Kemp’s portrait of the Leonardo of that exhibit, characterized so eloquently in the passage above, mirrors my own. It is this Leonardo who will emerge from my exploration of his unique synthesis of science and art.

  Fritjof Capra

  Berkeley, December 2006

  Figure P-1: Leonardo’s Self-Portrait, c. 1512, Biblioteca Reale, Turin

  INTRODUCTION

  An Interpreter of Nature

  In Western intellectual history, the Renaissance—a period stretching from the beginning of the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth century—marks the period of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world. In the 1460s, when the young Leonardo da Vinci received his training as painter, sculptor, and engineer in Florence, the worldview of his contemporaries was still entangled in medieval thinking. Science in the modern sense, as a systematic empirical method for gaining knowledge about the natural world, did not exist. Knowledge about natural phenomena, some accurate and some inaccurate, had been handed down by Aristotle and other philosophers of antiquity, and was fused with Christian doctrine by the Scholastic theologians who presented it as the officially authorized creed. The authorities condemned scientific experiments as subversive, seeing any attack on Aristotle’s science as an attack on the Church.

  Leonardo da Vinci broke with this tradition. One hundred years before Galileo and Bacon, he single-handedly developed a new empirical approach to science, involving the systematic observation of nature, logical reasoning, and some mathematical formulations—the main characteristics of what is known today as the scientific method. He fully realized that he was breaking new ground. He humbly called himself omo sanza lettere (“an unlettered man”), but with some irony and with pride in his new method, seeing himself as an “interpreter between nature and humans.” Wherever he turned there were new discoveries to be made, and his scientific creativity, combining passionate intellectual curiosity with great patience and experimental ingenuity, was the main driving force throughout his life.

  For forty years, Leonardo collected his thoughts and observations in his celebrated Notebooks, together with descriptions of hundreds of experiments, drafts of letters, architectural and technological designs, and reminders to himself about future research and writing. Almost every page in these Notebooks is crowded with text and magnificent drawings. It is believed that the entire collection ran to 13,000 pages when Leonardo died without having sorted them, as he had intended. O
ver the subsequent centuries almost half of the original collection was lost, but over 6,000 pages have been preserved and translated from the original Italian. These manuscripts are now widely dispersed among libraries, museums, and private collections, some in large compilations known as codices, others as torn pages and isolated folios, and a few still as notebooks in their original bound forms.1

  THE SCIENCE OF PAINTING

  Leonardo was gifted with exceptional powers of observation and visual memory. He was able to draw the complex swirls of turbulent water or the swift movements of a bird with a precision that would not be reached again until the invention of serial photography. He was well aware of the extraordinary talent he possessed. In fact, he considered the eye as his principal instrument as both a painter and a scientist. “The eye, which is said to be the window of the soul,” he wrote, “is the principal means whereby sensory awareness can most abundantly and magnificently contemplate the infinite works of nature.”2

  Leonardo’s approach to scientific knowledge was visual. It was the approach of a painter. “Painting,” he declares, “embraces within itself all the forms of nature.”3 This statement, in fact, is the key to understanding Leonardo’s science. He asserts repeatedly, especially in his early manuscripts, that painting involves the study of natural forms, and he emphasizes the intimate connection between the artistic representation of those forms and the intellectual understanding of their intrinsic nature and underlying principles. For example, in the collection of his notes on painting, known as Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting), he writes:

  The science of painting extends to all the colors of the surfaces of bodies, and to the shapes of the bodies enclosed by those surfaces…. [Painting] with philosophic and subtle speculation considers all the qualities of forms…. Truly this is science, the legitimate daughter of nature, because painting is born of nature.4