  When Leonardo died his notebooks began their separate journeys into obscurity. They traveled to different lands and became parts of widely disparate collections. It has only been within the last fifty years that efforts were made to bring them all together between the covers of one volume—a dream that Leonardo himself entertained but never realized. As the manuscripts and drawings were brought to light, translated and published, the extraordinary scope of Leonardo’s scientific explorations was revealed. Mathematician, anatomist, botanist, astronomer and geologist form only part of the long list of his accomplishments and give the clue to the man who considered all the natural world within his province of study. Because of the universality of Leonardo’s scientific thought he has been frequently mentioned as the forerunner of such men as Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, James Watt, Francis Bacon and William Harvey. Although Leonardo cannot be credited with the actual discoveries that these men made, his methods of investigation pointed the way down the paths that they would follow. The key to Leonardo’s methods lies in a quotation from his notes on vision. He wrote of vision as saper vedere—“to know how to see”—and he referred to the eye as “the window of the soul.” Again and again, he stressed the importance of observation and personal experience. Although he himself was well read, he emphasized that “science comes by observation not by authority.” His supreme talent for drawing underlines his credo and is inseparable from his science. What he saw in the natural world about him needed investigating. The results of these investigations were transformed into drawings as the most certain method for passing this knowledge along to others. The best example of this attitude is represented by his anatomical studies. To merely draw the living figure in front of him was not sufficient—it was imperative to know what he was drawing. He turned to the dissecting room and after intensive study produced some of the finest anatomical drawings in the world—and among the easiest for others to understand. What Walter Pater wrote of the Renaissance—“in many things great rather by what it designed or aspired to than by what it actually achieved”—could be a summation of Leonardo’s own lifetime of effort in science. He labored to bring mankind from the morass of medieval superstitions onto the firm ground of natural facts. With an insatiable curiosity Leonardo attempted the impossible task of encompassing all knowledge. Thus he established his right to immortality—for it was an attempt that shone like a beacon in a world dark with ignorance. |
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