Introduction: Leonardo and Leonardo da Vinci

In celebration of Leonardo journal's 40th anniversary, we will be publishing throughout 2008 essays related to Leonardo da Vinci and his concerns regarding the relationship between art and science. We are pleased to present the first installment of this special section in the current issue.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is a natural namesake for Leonardo, a journal devoted to exploring the relationships between art and science. Many visual artists have taken a casual interest in science. They have been interested in anatomy, color theory and perspective, those practical techniques for the working artist. Leonardo, however, is the only major painter who devoted serious prolonged attention to studies dealing with science and technology. He was interested in anatomy, hydraulics and optics and designed many very original inventions. These scientific concerns influenced both his paintings and his abortive sculptural projects.

That Leonardo had such varied interests means that no single scholar today is competent to evaluate him. "An apology may be needed," Ernst Gombrich wrote in his study of Leonardo's account of fluid mechanics, "from an art historian proposing to approach a subject, however tentatively, that extends far into the history of science" [1]. Art historians such as Gombrich and Martin Kemp, who has published a book about Leonardo, hesitate to judge his scientific materials, while historians of science and technology are not really qualified to judge his art.

Leonardo has always had a mystique. His younger High Renaissance peers Michelangelo and Raphael also were very great artists; but Leonardo aspired to be something more: a universal genius. Thus it is not surprising that such varied commentators as Giorgio Vasari, Walter Pater, Sigmund Freud and Kenneth Clark have succumbed to his charm. Like many modern scholars, Vasari was fascinated by Leonardo's scientific interests:

He was continually making models and designs to show men how to move mountains with ease . . . and by means of levers, windlasses, and screws, he showed the way to raise and draw great weights . . . and of these ideas and labours many drawings may be seen . . . I myself have seen not a few [2].

No other artist described by Vasari combined such diverse interests. As Pater tells the story, when Leonardo

plunged . . . into the study of nature . . . he brooded over the hidden virtues of plants and crystals, the lines traced by the stars as they moved in the sky, over the correspondences which exist between the different orders of living things, through which, to eyes opened, they interpret each other [3].

Leonardo, he suggests, was a kind of magician. Freud also, in his wonderfully inventive although not entirely reliable reconstruction of Leonardo's emotional life, speaks of how

constantly following the lead given by the requirements of his painting he was . . . driven to investigate the painter's subjects, animals and plants, and the proportions of the human body. . . . He discovered the general laws of mechanics and divined the history of the stratification and fossilization in the Arno Valley. . . . His investigations extended to practically every branch of natural science [4].

Freud traces Leonardo's interest in both art and science to a rich fantasy life. Clark, finally, concludes his book on Leonardo with a richly suggestive description of the painter's scientific interests.

He learns the vast power of natural forces and he pursues science as a means by which these forces can be harnessed for human advantage . . . his studies of hydrodynamics suggest a power of water beyond human control; his studies of geology show that the earth has undergone cataclysmic upheavals . . . his studies of embryology point to a central problem of creation apparently insoluble by science [5].

Everyone knows Leonardo's name and has heard of his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. Leonardo was famous, also, for his inability to complete his projects. For a long-lived, much appreciated artist, he finished a surprisingly small number of works of art. His Last Supper in Milan was a wreck soon after his death because he experimented with the fresco technique. As for his gigantic statue of a rearing horse, the Milan Trivulzio Monument, the models were destroyed and we know...