Leonardo as Scientist
By F. SHERWOOD TAYLOR*
THE exhibition in the Diploma Galleries of the Royal Academy, celebrating the five-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, gives an opportunity to review his position as a man of science. The East Gallery is wholly devoted to his scientific work, and shows 144 drawings and a number of models reconstructing his mechanical inventions. His scientific notebooks amount to some 5,000 pages, so that what is there displayed is but a small part of his work, selected from that which most appeals to the eye; none the less it affords a true sample of his quality. Unfortunately the written works of Leonardo have always been difficult of access. The notebooks were not published until some seventy years ago; the facsimiles then produced, with a transcription of Leonardo's much-contracted Italian set down in mirror- writing, displayed to the world for the first time his scientific genius. These facsimiles are rare and very costly; and it is to be regretted that even today there exist in English no more than selections from his writings.
The background of Leonardo's science has come to be appreciated in recent years. The nineteenth-century picture of a great scientific genius springing up in a world of ignorance and superstition is false. The fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Italy and Germany are known to have been a period of scientific and technological activity. Industry was in a progressive state. Such books as the De Re Metallica, a treatise on mining by George Bauer (Agricola), show us the elaborate machinery used in that industry about 1550. We cannot doubt that much of this was in use a hundred years before, and that in many other trades admirable mechanical devices were in use that were not the subject of printed books. Leonardo thus had, no doubt, much opportunity to observe machinery in action.
Again, the spirit of the time was favourable to natural science. In the last half of the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth a remarkably high proportion of the books printed dealt with mathematics and the natural sciences. There was a feeling abroad that the knowledge of the secrets of nature was going to give man power over his surroundings. It is true that the methodology of natural science was relatively undeveloped; its boundaries were ill-defined, and indeed many authors, such as Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, made little distinction between natural science and natural magic, both the exploitation of supposed properties of things. It is not surprising, then, that a man of Leonardo's eminent mentality, growing up in such an age, should turn his attention to science; nor indeed is his an isolated instance of a scientific artist, for a number of Renaissance artists seem to have been interested by the science of the time.
But whether or no we should expect an interest in science from such a man, Leonardo da Vinci displays it in such ample measure that he is perhaps to be thought of as scientist rather than painter. His scientific researches took up far more of his life than his art, and indeed a high proportion of his draw- ings have in them something of science. Continually we find in them the curious observations of the ways of nature; thus it is not easy to say whether he studied anatomy for his drawings or made his drawings as studies of anatomy. The notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci cover almost the whole range of scientific enquiry as then known. The only scientific subject on which he seems to have been incurious was chemistry, perhaps repelled by the mysteries and symbols of the alchemists, or
* Dr. Sherwood Taylor is Director of the Science Museum at South Kensington.
feeling that a subject which did not admit of mechanical explanations was inaccessible to his particular method, the attempt to interpret nature in terms of mechanical structure.
Some of these subjects. such as geology, are but slightly represented in the Royal Academy's exhibition, because they have few interesting illustrations, and those we can principally study there are his anatomy, mechanics and military engineer- ing. Leonardo's studies in anatomy are not direected, as were those of his predecessors, to the study of medicine, but to the elucidation of the structure of the body. In part they are artistic anatomy designed to aid the drawing of the surface markings of the body, but they also go very considerably beyond this. He was much concerned with the reasons for the form of living men and animals, studying, for example, the manner in which the muscles produce and maintain the stand- ing posture; but equally he sought to investigate the internal organs with which the artist is unconcerned, hoping to dis- cover something of the inner workings of man. He started with the crude mediaeval anatomy derived from Galen and Avicenna. These gave him his ideas of what he would find in the human body; only slowly by many dissections did he discover their errors and that but incompletely. His drawings delight us by their beauty, and it is difficult to disregard this in considering their accuracy. It may be right to say that Leonardo's anatomy exceeded that of his predecessors as much as he himself was exceeded, half a century later, by Andreas Vesalius. Yet results are not all; we have to esteem in Leonardo likewise the intention to discover the truth and the ingenuity of the means he employed, such as the making of solid casts of cavities.
The field of mechanics and engineering, civil and military, Leonardo felt to be especially his own. Manuscripts figuring engines of war are not uncommon in Leonardo's time and earlier, but exceedingly little attention is known to have been given by the learned to the mechanic arts of peace. That Leonardo should have designed military engines is not surpris- ing; it is hard to judge, moreover, of the originality of his designs, though some such as the covered chariot "—or tank —and the vehicles mechanically whirling spiked clubs seem to bear the marks of his invention. In his designs for industrial machinery we seem to see, not merely a new interest for a man of genius, but evidence of practical and truly original invention. It is true that we no longer suppose that Leonardo invented all he drew. There is evidence that some of the machines figured in his notebooks were in use in his time or earlier; others leave us in doubt as to their originality, while others again are almost certainly his own invention. The lathe in which the work is rotated in one direction only, the rolling-mill, the needle- grinding machine, the mechanical excavator, mitred lock-gates, the clock-pendulum, the screw-cutting machine, the parachute, the helicopter, mirror-grinding machines, the hygrometer and anemometer, the self-centring chuck, the N-type girder bridge— all these are first mentioned in Leonardo's notebooks. In the century after his death several books of illustrations of machines appeared, but none of these compares in originality or practical usefulness with these inventions of Leonardo, most of which indeed were not reinvented until centuries had passed. Where then are we to place Leonardo da Vinci in the ranks of the scientists ? He was, obviously, an extremely able investigator, a keen observer and most capable recorder of facts; he had likewise a genius for devising workable con- trivances for carrying out mechanical processes. Yet he was not perhaps trying to do what the scientist does, to form a system of nature, available to all and to be added to by all. Leonardo's object was perhaps more that of the philosopher, the man who seeks principally to perfect his own vision of the world for his own satisfaction. He does not seem to have set himself the task of generalising his observations so as to form and verify scientific laws and theories. It is indeed a compli- ment to his genius that we expect him to have been so far ahead of his age as to do so. Never had so great a scientist so little influence. It seems that he meditated publication of books on flight-mechanics, the elements of machinery and the like, but, like Newton, he had little desire to impart his discoveries and continued to investi- gate rather than write. After his death his notebooks were forgotten until 1795, when Venturi wrote an essay on his work. We must look on him as a marvel, a man of the first rank in anatomy, mechanics, sculpture and the graphic arts, but we can accord him no place among those who built the fabric of the science of today.
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