Leonardo da Vinci: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Painters Book 1) by Hourly History

Author:Hourly History [History, Hourly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hourly History
Published: 2016-11-13T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Scientific Studies and Anatomy

“Weight, force and casual impulse, together with resistance, are the four external powers in which all the visible actions of mortals have their being and their end.”

—Leonardo da Vinci

“A good painter has two chief objects to paint—man, and the intention of his soul,” so wrote Leonardo da Vinci. He went on to say that the former was easy, but the latter was hard to do because it involved gestures, expressions, and movements which were difficult to capture on canvas.

To make his paintings and portraits come more fully alive, Leonardo began keeping notes on all manner of anatomy and scientific studies. Renaissance humanism did not recognize any differences between sciences and the arts; they were all one and the same. No one would have looked at Leonardo’s engineering and science sketches and thought they were unnecessary or adding little value to their discoveries. Everything that is found in Leonardo’s notebooks can be found in his paintings, too.

When it came to seriously studying the human body, Leonardo began looking into anatomy. He dissected human and animal bodies during the 1480s. There are drawings he made of the human heart, vascular system, sex organs, bones and muscular compositions, and a fetus in utero, which are some of the first drawings on human record.

Over the years, Leonardo kept notes and drawings that amounted to over 13,000 pages. Everything he observed he would write about; his daily life was filled with observations about the natural world. Being left-handed, Leonardo wrote in mirror-image. Most of his notes were written in this way. Most likely, he did this to keep ink from running all over his hand, as being left-handed and normally writing from left to right, his hand would smear the page. Writing in reverse would prevent this.

Because Leonardo saw no divide between science and art, he viewed them with the same importance. He believed that by studying science, this would make him a better artist.

Leonardo believed that sight was the most significant sense of all and that one’s eyes were the most important. He stressed how vital it was to follow saper vedere or “knowing how to see.” Through daily observations, one would accumulate all the knowledge one would need.

True to his word, da Vinci also studied botany, zoology, geology, physics, hydraulics, and aeronautics, the latter being remarkable as this was an age where there were no airplanes or running engines. He never left his house without a notebook or paper and pen with him. Leonardo made lists for everything—even something as commonplace as a grocery list was included. Other notes were about people who owed him money, and other designs for winged shoes, the kind that could walk on water.

He didn’t leave anything out. There are sketches for future paintings, studies of faces and emotions, animals, babies, plant species, dissections, rock formations, whirlpools, flying machines, and architecture. Whenever something came along, he would sketch it or make notes about it, then file it in one of four notebooks that he kept.

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