Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo the man
Leonardo (1452-1519) was born in Vinci, between Pisa and Florence. Because he was illegitimate, the son of a Florentine notary and a peasant woman, scholarly professions were denied him, but his artisan training inspired him to explore the visible world in every possible way.
At the age of 18 Leonardo began studying under painter and engineer Andrea del Verrochio whose pupils included Botticelli and Perugino. Leonardo showed exceptional skills and flourished.
The powerful Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza commissioned his expertise in 1482 and it was in his service that Leonardo created his masterpiece the Last Supper. It was painted directly on to a refectory wall in the Santa Maria delle Grazie, but dampness and the method used meant that it deteriorated quickly after completion.
However, his genius went far wider than art, to merge science and engineering, among other projects designing a hydraulic irrigation system. Paradoxically he often would start a project and leave it unfinished.
When the Duke Ludovico fell in 1500, Leonardo entered service as architect and engineer for the Duke of Romagna Cesaree Borgia. The iconic Mona Lisa was completed in 1504 and he is thought to have been involved with several sculptures, including a bronze statuette of horse and rider.
Leonardo drew his inspiration from nature, with the engineer's urge to understand how it worked: in the air, in the movement of plants, in the movement of water. The ultimate example of natural precision was the human body and the science of anatomy learned from dissecting corpses led Leonardo to the conclusion that the human body was actually a sophisticated machine.
Famously, Leonardo dreamt of enabling people to fly and wrote of being inspired by the touch of a bird while in his crib.
However, his belief that the body acted autonomously and was not controlled by divine intervention was considered heretical by the authorities. The idea that scientific observation rather than religious dogma should dictate our interpretation of the world was also considered blasphemous. His concern for his safety is perhaps evidenced by his habit of writing left-handed mirror writing
Although Leonardo often lacked the will to pin down the minutiae, he was nevertheless a Renaissance man par excellence. His wide-ranging knowledge still has huge relevance to today and beyond.
Style File
In his relentless observations of nature, Leonardo came to see what others would not for many more years. He noted, for example, that the 'sun does not move'. He also worked out that what the eye sees is not always what the mind perceives. Our minds adapt the images reaching our eyes so that they make sense. In order for an artist to create images that look alive he or she must anticipate how the mind of the viewer will perceive them.
It was this critical understanding of the world that enabled him to create such masterpieces, and in particular the Mona Lisa. It has become a cliché that her eyes seem to follow the viewer round the room and her expression seems to change with every glance, but why should that be? Leonardo realised that rather than attempt to trace every line of an image, the best way for a picture to appear to be alive is to leave something to the imagination of the spectator. He invented a technique that purposely left the lines between the different elements of a painting blurred, with one colour merging into another. This technique is called sfumato.
On the Mona Lisa, sfumato is used to startling effect. The parts of her face telling of her expression and mood – her eyes and corners of her mouth – are not clearly defined. In addition, the horizon is higher on the right of the face than the left so that the perspective, and with it her expression, appears to change depending on which side the picture is viewed.
The Mona Lisa is also an illustration of Leonardo's principle, again learned from nature, that 'perspective is nothing else than seeing a place behind a pane of glass, on the surface of which the objects behind the glass are to be drawn'. Renaissance artists were investigating how to draw three dimensional objects on a flat surface to give greater realism of depth and distance, and Leonardo's curiosity drove him to try to explain what he saw, devising mathematical rules to test his approach. If images viewed through the glass are traced on to the glass their relative sizes to each other can be copied. It was scientific understanding and perception such as this that set Leonardo apart both in his art and engineering works.
Land
To some extent Leonardo's inventiveness reflected his paymasters' ambitions. Since these were often to conquer territory, many of his machines were aimed at military uses, among them was a huge cannon, a contraption for storming walls and a scythed chariot.
With cannons the weapon of choice, Leonardo's giant crossbow is particularly intriguing. Why did Leonardo, a man famous for innovation, base his design on an ancient weapon of war? Leonardo knew that cannons had a habit of blowing up, destroying friend as well as foe. And they couldn't be relied upon for range or accuracy because of the problem of recoil. The crossbow was very efficient with every shot fired landing in roughly the same area.
Among Leonardo's other military designs was the armoured car. In his notes he describes covered chariots that cannot be assaulted, enabling the infantry to advance behind. The tortoise-shaped metal-reinforced vehicle would have been operated by eight men turning cranks, while other personnel inside would shoot and view the battle through slits.
These designs for war were, however, only part of Leonardo's output. His constant efforts to understand the world around him found expression in a diverse range of scientific and engineering aids. He answered heated arguments over the possibility of achieving perpetual motion with a series of drawings and writings of a wheel attached with weights which disproved the theory.
To a more practical end, Leonardo produced numerous designs for items of work equipment, such as cranes. He had come to understand the crucial importance of such technology in achieving innovative designs as an apprentice for Brunelleschi on the Dome of Florence Cathedral. Brunelleschi had to invent cranes, hoists and scaffolding to put the pieces into place. Leonardo produces drawings of pile drivers, rope-operated pulleys and a double-movement drilling machine to lift and remove earth.
More visionary were his designs for the ideal city. In the wake of Milan's 1484 plague, many buildings could not be re-used. His idea was to create a new unified urban landscape that would avoid many of the problems that helped fuel the spread of the plague. Buildings would, for example, be further apart, and to reduce the number of Milan's narrow, unhealthy streets, broad, airy porticoed palazzi were planned for high class citizens with tradesmen and animals using lower roads. A canal network was envisaged as a means of communication between the city and the nearby river.
Water
Aiming to conquer not just land and air movement, Leonardo's designs for use on water are no less ambitious. He briefly drew and described a way for man to walk on water by strapping two, very elongated floats to the feet. Two poles in the hands would provide balance. Another design shows a webbed glove designed for moving more smoothly in water. Resembling the feet of web-footed birds, these would have probably have been made in leather with five wooden ribs to stiffen them.
More down-to-earth practical uses included a fast-built bridge, a bilge pump and a sluice gate hatch as a way to improve on Milan's canal and weir system that had been built two centuries before Leonardo's arrival in the city. By means of this device, the flow of water in the weir could be reduced or increased, thereby balancing the pressure at the sides of the sluice gates and making it easier to open them.
Underwater activities did not escape his attentions, with his design for a deep-water diving suit. Although he was not the only person to look at ways for working underwater, for example for military actions against enemy ships, he was no doubt one of the most adventurous. His leather suit used cane hoses joined by leather to allow the diver to breathe, the upper ends of the breathing tubes held above the water by special floats. A leather bag provided a supply of air to the diver. Leonardo also designed a diving bell.
On a larger scale, a drawing, dated to between 1502 and 1503, illustrates a project for the construction of a single-span bridge over the Bosphorous. Leonardo seemed to have planned to submit this to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Bayazid II, who had sent ambassadors to Rome to hire a team of Italian engineers to replace the old boat bridge on the Golden Horn with a more stable and long-lasting structure.
Air
Leonardo's designs for the air range from a pyramid-shaped parachute fashioned from a linen curtain to a leaf-spring engine for a flying machine.
Many early designs for his audacious dream of flight are man-powered machines. His flapping wing machine was to be operated very fast by the combined action of human strength and dedicated mechanisms. The flyer, standing in an upright position, operates the two stirrups, which, in turn, power the wing structure via a rope and pulley system.
Later designs recognise that human strength alone would not make mankind fly and he drew more and more on his acute observations of nature and the flight of birds and bats. His articulated wing included traction and torsion mechanisms to faithfully reproduce the structure of a bird's wing. In his winged flying machines Leonardo also understood the principles of modern hang-gliders; the position of the pilot enabling them to balance the equipment by moving the lower part of the body. The outer edge of the wings can also be moved by the pilot through cables.
The sketch of the aerial screw has fascinated millions of people for hundreds of years, seen by some as the earliest design of a helicopter. One of Leonardo's first series of flying machines dated between 1483 and 1486, he envisages the 5-metre screw made of reed, wire and linen cloth, the pores of which have been closed with starch. He reasoned that as it turned it would rise in the air. Four people would operate the machine standing on the central platform and exerted pressure on the bars in front of them with their hands, so as to make the shaft turn.
In one note accompanying the design, Leonardo suggests making a paper version of a screw to be launched by a spring coiled around the base. It is thought that this is copied from the windmill game, a popular toy at the time which could be made to rise when spun with a string.
If an adequate driving force were applied, it is probable that Leonardo's machine might have spun in the air and risen off the ground.
Leonardo's Dream Machines was first screened on Channel 4 in February 2003.
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