Leonardo’s Notebook

« Renaissance Man | Home | Leonardo Final Years »

By peace | September 27, 2010

Leonardo and Science -Study of Human Body

Leonardo wrote backwards, from right to left across the page. When looked at in a mirror, it can be read from left to right, as normal. He was left-handed, so it was easier to write from right to left. His notebooks contain ideas for hundreds of different inventions. Perhaps his flying machines are the most amazing. To discover the secret of flight, Leonardo studied the wings of birds. This helped him come up with ideas for wings that a person could flap. They were made from wood and linen. He also had an idea for an ‘aerial screw’. This screw would spin round and round, lifting off from the ground. The screw worked in the same way a helicopter does today.

To Leonardo, the world was full of mysteries. For example, he found seashells high up in the mountains. He wondered how they had got there. He knew that most people believed the shells had been washed there by the flood described in the Bible. Leonardo dared to question this belief. He came up with an answer of his own. He said the seabed had been pushed up to make the mountains, taking the seashells with it.

Leonardo wanted to understand how the human body worked. He cut up dead bodies to find out. He made drawings of bones, muscles, and vital organs. Many of his notebook drawings show shapes and sizes of body parts. They include arms, legs and noses. Leonardo asked questions and found out lots of facts. This is how a scientist works.

Leonardo wrote this in one of his notebooks: Of noses there are 10 types – straight, crooked, bent, jutting above or below the midpoint, hawk noses, regular, flat, round and pointed.

While he was in Milan, Leonardo began to write in notebooks. He filled 20000 pages. He sketched ideas for inventions, from stone-firing catapults (weapons) to flapping wings. There is even a drawing of a man using floats to walk on water! Some pages are filled with drawings of faces and body parts. Other pages show designs for bridges and buildings. Many of Leonardo’s drawings were rough sketches, but others were carefully drawn and detailed.

He constantly asked questions about the world around him. He wrote in his notebooks about what he had found. He studied the flight of birds. This helped him with his ideas for flying machines. Leonardo studied streams, rivers and the sea. From this came ideas for a water-powered saw. Leonardo was so interested in water that he used 64 different words to describe it.

Leonardo’s flying machine, battle tank, submarine, and self-propelled cart (similar to a motor car) existed in his mind. They were also sketches in his notebooks. He may have built models to test his ideas. We do not know if he actually built any of his machines.

Leonardo’s notebooks went to Francesco Melzi, who took them home to Italy. He tried to organize the thousands of pages of notes and drawings. With the help of 2 assistants, he selected and copied out all Leonardo’s writings on art. Yet for some unknown reason, the resulting Treatise on Painting was not published until 1651.

After Melzi’s death, in 1570, the notebooks were given to his son Orazio, a lawyer, who did not value them at all. He stored them in his attic and then began selling them or even giving them away. Soon they were scattered all over Europe. Some collectors cut them up and pasted them into albums. At least a third of the sheets were lost. Perhaps someone used the priceless pages to line a drawer.

So for 300 years, the public knew Leonardo only as an artist. His lifetime of scientific research and his marvelous inventions bore no fruit because his notebooks remained in the hands of collectors, and few other people know about them before 1800. It is frustrating to imagine how the development of science and technology might have been advanced if only his work had been published. In just 2 examples: Leonardo worked out the first law of motion before Newton, and 100 years before the first telescope was built, while making a study of optics, he wrote a note to himself to “make glasses to see the moon large.”

There is still a chance that some of the lost sheets will eventually turn up, as happened in 1965. To everyone’s joy and surprise, a collection of notebook pages was found tucked away in the stacks of the National Library in Madrid. How tantalizing it is to think that 6000 pages of Leonardo’s notes might be still out there, waiting to reveal their secrets.

Share and Enjoy: