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

by Fritjof Capra

  The challenge of presenting a consistent portrait of Leonardo da Vinci is further complicated by the fact that he was very secretive about his personal thoughts and feelings. In the thousands of pages of manuscripts that have come down to us, there is barely a trace of Leonardo’s emotional life. There are very few affectionate references to anyone, family or friends, and hardly any clues to his feelings about the people and events of his time. While he was a master at expressing subtle emotions in his paintings, it seems that Leonardo kept his own innermost feelings to himself.

  This secrecy also extends to his sexuality. It is widely assumed that Leonardo was gay, but there is no definite proof of his homosexuality. Art historians have pointed to various features of his drawings and writings that might indicate that he was attracted to men, and it has often been noted that there is no record of any woman in Leonardo’s life, while it was well known that he always seemed to be surrounded by strikingly beautiful young men.18 But even though there were many openly homosexual and successful Florentine artists in the Renaissance, Leonardo was as secretive about his sexuality as he was about other aspects of his personal life.

  Leonardo was equally secretive about his scientific work. Although he intended to eventually publish the results of his investigations, he kept them hidden away during his entire life, apparently out of fear that his ideas might be stolen.19 In Milan, he designed his studio so that the platform holding his work could be lowered through the floor to the story below, using a system of pulleys and counterweights, to hide it from inquisitive eyes whenever he was not working.20

  Much has been made in this context of the fact that Leonardo, who was left-handed, wrote all his notes in mirror writing, from right to left. In fact, he could write with both hands and in either direction. But, like many left-handed people, he probably found it more convenient and faster to write from right to left when he jotted down his personal notes. On the other hand, as Bramly points out, this extraordinary handwriting also suited very well his taste for secrecy.21

  The main reason Leonardo did not share his scientific knowledge with others, although he shared his knowledge of painting with fellow artists and disciples, was that he regarded it as his intellectual capital—the basis of his skills in engineering and stagecraft, which were the main sources of his regular income. He must have feared that sharing this body of knowledge would have diminished his chances of steady employment.

  Moreover, Leonardo did not see science as a collective enterprise the way we see it now. In the words of art historian and classicist Charles Hope, “He had…no real understanding of the way in which the growth of knowledge was a cumulative and collaborative process, as was so evidently the case with the major intellectual enterprise of his time, the recovery of the heritage of classical antiquity.”22 Leonardo had no formal education and was not able to read the scholarly books of the time in Latin, but he studied Italian translations whenever he could obtain them. He sought out scholars in various fields to borrow books and elicit information, but he did not share his own discoveries with them—neither in conversations, as far as we know, nor in correspondence or publications.

  This secrecy about his scientific work is the one significant respect in which Leonardo was not a scientist in the modern sense. If he had shared his discoveries and discussed them with the intellectuals of his time, his influence on the subsequent development of Western science might well have been as profound as his impact on the history of art. As it was, he had little influence on the scientists who came after him, because his scientific work was hidden during his lifetime and remained locked in his Notebooks long after his death. As the eminent Leonardo scholar Kenneth Keele reflected, “The intellectual loneliness of the artist-scientist Leonardo was not merely contemporary; it has lasted for centuries.”23

  SIGNS OF GENIUS

  Since Leonardo da Vinci is widely viewed as the archetype of a genius, it is interesting to ask ourselves what we mean by that term. On what grounds are we justified in calling Leonardo a genius, and how does he compare with other artists and scientists known as geniuses?

  During Leonardo’s time, the term “genius” did not have our modern meaning of a person endowed with extraordinary intellectual and creative powers.24 The Latin word genius originated in Roman religion, where it denoted the spirit of the gens, the family. It was understood as a guardian spirit, first associated with individuals and then also with peoples and places. The extraordinary achievements of artists or scientists were attributed to their genius, or attendant spirit. This meaning of genius was prevalent throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, the meaning of the word changed to its familiar modern meaning to denote these individuals themselves, as in the phrase “Newton was a genius.”

  Regardless of the term used, the fact that certain individuals possess exceptional and inexplicable creative powers beyond the reach of ordinary mortals was recognized throughout the ages. It was often associated with divine inspiration, especially in connection with poets. For example, in the twelfth century, the German abbess and mystic Hildegard von Bingen was famous throughout Europe as a naturalist, composer, visual artist, poet, and playwright. She herself, however, took no credit for the amazing range and depth of her talents but commented simply that she was “a feather on the breath of God.”25

  In the Italian Renaissance, the association of exceptional creative powers with divine inspiration was expressed in a very direct way by bestowing on those individuals the epithet divino. Among the Renaissance masters, Leonardo as well as his younger contemporaries Raphael and Michelangelo were acclaimed as divine.

  Since the development of modern psychology, neuroscience, and genetic research, there has been a lively discussion about the origins, mental characteristics, and genetic makeup of geniuses. However, numerous studies of well-known historical figures have shown a bewildering diversity of hereditary, psychological, and cultural factors, defying all attempts to establish some common pattern.26 While Mozart was a famous child prodigy, Einstein was a late bloomer. Newton attended a prestigious university, whereas Leonardo was essentially self-taught. Goethe’s parents were well educated and of high social standing, but Shakespeare’s seem to have been relatively undistinguished; and the list goes on.

  In spite of this wide range of backgrounds, psychologists have been able to identify a set of mental attributes that seem to be distinctive signs of genius, in addition to exceptional talent in a particular field.27 All these were characteristic of Leonardo to a very high degree.

  The first is an intense curiosity and great enthusiasm for discovery and understanding. This was indeed an outstanding quality of Leonardo, whom Kenneth Clark called “the most relentlessly curious man in history.”28 Another striking sign of genius is an extraordinary capacity for intense concentration over long periods of time. Isaac Newton apparently was able to hold a mathematical problem in his mind for weeks until it surrendered to his mental powers. When asked how he made his remarkable discoveries, Newton is reported to have replied, “I keep the subject constantly before me and wait until the first dawnings open little by little into the full light.”29 Leonardo seems to have worked in a very similar way, and most of the time not only on one but on several problems simultaneously.

  We have a vivid testimony of Leonardo’s exceptional powers of concentration from his contemporary Matteo Bandello, who described how as a boy he watched the artist paint The Last Supper. He would see the master arrive early in the morning, Bandello tells us, climb up onto the scaffolding, and immediately start to work:

  He sometimes stayed there from dawn to sundown, never putting down his brush, forgetting to eat and drink, painting without pause. He would also sometimes remain two, three, or four days without touching his brush, although he spent several hours a day standing in front of the work, arms folded, examining and criticizing the figures to himself. I also saw him, driven by some sudden urge, at midday, when the sun was at its height, leaving the Corte V
ecchia, where he was working on his marvelous clay horse, to come straight to Santa Maria delle Grazie, without seeking shade, and clamber up onto the scaffolding, pick up a brush, put in one or two strokes, and then go away again.30

  Closely associated with the powers of intense concentration that are characteristic of geniuses seems to be their ability to memorize large amounts of information in the form of a coherent whole, a single gestalt. Newton kept mathematical proofs he had derived for months in his mind before eventually writing them down and publishing them. Goethe is said to have entertained his fellow passengers on long coach journeys by reciting his novels to them, word for word, before committing them to paper. And then there is the famous story of Mozart, who as a child wrote out a note-perfect score of Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere, a complex chant for a five-part choir, after hearing it only once.

  Leonardo would follow people with striking facial features for hours, memorize their appearance, and then draw them when he was back in his studio, reportedly with complete accuracy. The Milanese painter and writer Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo tells the story of how Leonardo once wished to paint some peasants laughing:

  He chose certain men whom he thought appropriate for his purpose, and, after getting acquainted with them, arranged a feast for them with some of his friends. Sitting close to them he then proceeded to tell the maddest and most ridiculous tales imaginable, making them, who were unaware of his intentions, laugh uproariously. Whereupon he observed all their gestures very attentively and those ridiculous things they were doing, and impressed them on his mind; and after they had left, he retired to his room and there made a perfect drawing which moved those who looked at it to laughter, as if they had been moved by Leonardo’s stories at the feast.31

  In subsequent chapters I shall recount the chronology of Leonardo’s life, following its trajectory from Vinci, the little hamlet, to Florence, the thriving center of Renaissance art, to the Sforza court in Milan, to the papal court in Rome, and to his final home in the Loire valley in the palace of the king of France. However, the documentations of this rich and fascinating life contain hardly any clues to the sources of Leonardo’s genius. Indeed, as classicist Penelope Murray observes in the introduction to her anthology Genius: The History of an Idea:

  There remains something fundamentally inexplicable about the nature of such prodigious powers. We attribute the extraordinary quality of, for example, Shakespeare’s poetry, Mozart’s music and Leonardo’s paintings to the genius of their creators because we recognize that such works are not simply the product of learning, technique, or sheer hard work. Of course we can trace sources and influences…but no amount of analysis has yet been able to explain the capacities of those rare and gifted individuals who can produce creative work of lasting quality and value.32

  In view of the persistent failure of scientists to shed light on the origins of genius, it would seem that, after all, Vasari’s explanation may still be the best: “Occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvelously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace, and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired, and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human art.”

  TWO

  The Universal Man

  The intellectual climate of the Renaissance was decisively shaped by the philosophical and literary movement of humanism, which made the capabilities of the human individual its central concern. This was a fundamental shift from the medieval dogma of understanding human nature from a religious point of view. The Renaissance of fered a more secular outlook, with heightened focus on the individual human intellect. The new spirit of humanism expressed itself through a strong emphasis on classical studies, which exposed scholars and artists to a great diversity of Greek and Roman philosophical ideas that encouraged individual critical thought and prepared the ground for the gradual emergence of a rational, scientific frame of mind.

  In Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance, the humanists’ enthusiastic embrace of discovery and learning gave rise to a new human ideal—l’uomo universale, the infinitely versatile “universal” man, educated in all branches of knowledge and capable of producing innovations in many of them. This ideal became so firmly associated with the Renaissance that later historians have commonly referred to it as the ideal of the “Renaissance man.” In the Florentine society of the fifteenth century, not only artists and philosophers but also merchants and statesmen strove to become “universal.” They became learned in Latin and Greek, conversant with the works of Aristotle, and familiar with classical treatises on natural history, geography, architecture, and engineering.1

  The Florentine humanists were inspired by several individuals in their midst who seemed to perfectly embody the ideal of the uomo universale. One of the first and most famous was Leon Battista Alberti, born half a century before Leonardo, to whom he seems the perfect precursor.2 Alberti, like Leonardo, was said to be blessed with exceptional beauty and great physical strength, and he was also a skilled horseman and gifted musician. Moreover, he was a celebrated architect and accomplished painter, wrote beautiful Latin prose, studied both civil and canonical law as well as physics and mathematics, and was the author of several pioneering treatises on the visual arts. As a young man, Leonardo was fascinated by Alberti: He read him avidly, commented on his writings, and emulated him in his own life and work.

  In his later years, Leonardo, of course, surpassed Alberti in both the breadth and depth of his work. The difference between Leonardo and the other “universal men” of the Italian Renaissance was not only that he went much farther than anyone else in his inquiries, asking questions nobody had asked before, but that he transcended the disciplinary boundaries of his time. He did so by recognizing patterns that interconnected forms and processes in different domains and by integrating his discoveries into a unified vision of the world.

  Indeed, it seems that this is how Leonardo himself understood the meaning of universale. His famous statement, “Facile cosa è farsi universale”—“It is easy to become universal”—has often been interpreted to mean that infinite versatility was easy to acquire. When we read his assertion within the context in which it was made, however, an entirely different meaning becomes apparent. While discussing the proportions of the body, Leonardo wrote in his Treatise on Painting,

  For a man who knows how, it is easy to become universal, since all land animals resemble each other in the parts of their body, that is, muscles, nerves, and bones, and differ only in length and size.3

  For Leonardo, in other words, being universal meant to recognize similarities in living forms that interconnect different facets of nature—in this case, anatomical structures of different animals. The recognition that nature’s living forms exhibit such fundamental patterns was a key insight of the school of Romantic biology in the eighteenth century. These patterns were called Urtypen (“archetypes”) in Germany, and in England Charles Darwin acknowledged that this concept played a central role in his early conception of evolution.4 In the twentieth century, anthropologist and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson expressed the same idea in the succinct phrase “the pattern which connects.”5

  Thus, Leonardo da Vinci was the first in a lineage of scientists who focused on the patterns interconnecting the basic structures and processes of living systems. Today, this approach to science is called “systemic thinking.” This, in my eyes, is the essence of what Leonardo meant by farsi universale. Freely translating his statement into modern scientific language, I would rephrase it this way: “For someone who can perceive interconnecting patterns, it is easy to be a systemic thinker.”

  LEONARDO’S SYNTHESIS

  Leonardo’s synthesis of art and science becomes easier to grasp when we realize that in his time, these terms were not used in the sense in which we understand them today. To his contemporaries, arte meant skill (in the sense we still use today when we speak of “the art of medicine,” or “the art of management”), while sc
ientia meant knowledge, or theory. Leonardo insisted again and again that the “art,” or skill, of painting must be supported by the painter’s “science,” or sound knowledge of living forms, by his intellectual understanding of their intrinsic nature and underlying principles.

  He also emphasized that this understanding was a continual intellectual process—discorso mentale—and that painting itself, therefore, deserved to be considered an intellectual endeavor.6 “The scientific and true principles of painting,” he wrote in the Trattato,” are understood by the mind alone without manual operations. This is the theory of painting, which resides in the mind that conceives it.”7 This conception of painting sets Leonardo apart from other Renaissance theorists. He saw it as his mission to elevate his art from the rank of a mere craft to an intellectual discipline on a par with the seven traditional liberal arts. (In the Middle Ages, the seven branches of learning known as the liberal arts were the “trivium” of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, whose study led to the Bachelor of Arts degree, plus the “quadrivium” of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, which led to the Master of Arts.)

  The third element in Leonardo’s synthesis, in addition to arte (skill) and scientia (knowledge), is fantasia, the artist’s creative imagination. In the Renaissance, confidence in the capabilities of the human individual had become so strong that a new conception of the artist as creator had emerged. Indeed, the Italian humanists were so bold as to compare artistic creations to the creations of God. This comparison was first applied to the creativity of poets, and was then extended, especially by Leonardo, to the painter’s creative power: