Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael created the epitome of Renaissance art. Most of us know Leonardo’s artistic brilliance through his best-known paintings, the “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper,” yet Leonardo’s art is one tiny facet of his legendary genius.
Some may be surprised to learn that he spent many years as an engineer, most notably, around 17 years for the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza (who also commissioned Leonardo to create “The Last Supper”).
Leonardo made it his life’s mission to understand everything. “Reading the thousands of words in Leonardo’s note-books, one is absolutely worn out by this energy. He won’t take yes for an answer. He can’t leave anything alone—he worries [about] it, re-states it, answers imaginary antagonists,” wrote late art historian Kenneth Clark in his book “Civilisation.” Leonardo drew on his artistic talents to decipher the world around him, and left thousands of pages of notes and drawings, more than any other artist.
Nature, Leonardo’s Master
The nature of Leonardo’s genius was nature itself; it taught him mastery. He wrote that, “Human subtlety ... will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous.”He believed firsthand experience through one of the five senses, “as the mother of all certainty,” with wisdom being “the daughter of experience.” He pursued such wisdom; observing the natural world in all its minutiae, making copious notes and drawings of his findings. These discoveries permeated every facet of his work, as an artist, architect, and engineer, to name a few occupations.
According to the website Erenow, Leonardo was a systemic thinker, connecting one phenomena to another: “When he studied the proportions of the human body, he compared them to the proportions of buildings in Renaissance architecture. His investigations of muscles and bones led him to study and draw gears and levers, thus interlinking animal physiology and engineering. Patterns of turbulence in water led him to observe similar patterns in the flow of air; and from there he went on to explore the nature of sound, the theory of music, and the design of musical instruments.”
Professor S.J. Freedberg explains how Leonardo connected the laws of nature to painting, in his book “Painting in Italy 1500–1600.” Freedberg quotes Leonardo’s “A Treatise on Painting”: “The mind of the painter must transmute itself into the very mind of nature and be the interpreter between it and art, commenting with art the causes of its demonstrations as they are determined by its laws.”
Codex Atlanticus
As the largest collection of Leonardo’s writing and drawings, the “Codex Atlanticus” shows the extraordinary breadth of the master’s genius beyond his artistic talents. Between the late-16th and early-17th centuries, Italian sculptor Pompeo Leoni mounted Leonardo’s diagrams, drawings, and notes on 1,119 pages of cartography paper, compiling the codex. Leoni likely arranged the works aesthetically rather than systematically, according to Carolina Donzelli at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan (who hold the codex). So reading the codex from cover to cover may not make much sense.An online copy of the codex, however, classifies the works into five searchable categories: “Human Sciences.” “Tools and Machines,” “Physics and Natural Sciences,” “Geometry and Algebra,” and “Architecture and Applied Arts.”
Having analyzed Leonardo’s notebooks, along with the polymath’s frequent interpolations, the late art historian Kenneth Clark wrote in The New York Review that “at least two eminent Leonardists have gone mad, and several of the others have shown uncomfortable signs of nervous tension. He is too heavy and weighty for any scholar to bear.”
In the exhibition, visitors need not tax their minds over the works’ content but rather delight in the illustrations and inventions that have influenced modern science and technology. Among the works are detailed diagrams and calculations exploring mathematical principles applied to art and architecture; a detailed depiction of the central-eastern Mediterranean region, including coastlines, geographical features, and place names; a design for a cloth shearing machine to automate cutting cloth; studies for a revolving crane with an adjustable counterweight; a drawing for a digging machine, including a gearbox and a mechanical arm for scooping and removing earth or debris; studies on the behavior of river water; designs for underwater exploration; studies for a self-propelling cart with gears and mechanisms; and drawings for wing designs for flying machines.
“If any of the above-mentioned things seem impossible or impracticable to anyone,” Leonardo wrote in a 1482 letter to Sforza, “I am most readily disposed to demonstrate them in your park or in whatsoever place shall please.” How wonderful it would’ve been to witness one of Leonardo’s demonstrations. In his absence, Leonardo’s “Codex Atlanticus” drawings demonstrate his enduring ingenuity, born from his reverence of nature’s perfect creations, and his faith in making the impossible possible.
