Leonardo, Dimmi of a World in Flux (44)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) asks nature: tell me! How does water flow?
Leonardo wants to understand flow. Doesn’t his hair look like a river? So, he wants to understand himself. On going back, artists have now become great keepers of existential savvy. What they tell is truthful, anticipating science.
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For some time now, on our way back in Big History, we won’t meet any scientists anymore in the West as the cutting-edge people. Now it is artists for a while, until even they dry up and it’s only religious, political, and military leaders. But then the science founders will appear briefly again, around time calibration in ancient Greek Alexandria, leaving us perplexed why they didn’t prevail stronger. Why could logical thought not carry the day longer? It was a titanic fight with myth that was lost, often cruelly such as with the flailing of the Alexandrian female mathematician scientist Hypatia in 450 by a Christian mob. And it was lost largely also in such surviving cultural centers as Constantinople, some exceptional critical thinkers like John Philoponus notwithstanding. Who will ever explain this to me?
Leonardo is a notebook
Today we meet Leonardo, a far seer like the later Galileo, and a consummate observer, though intuitive and not quantitative. He is more of a notebook, an artist’s one, but his notes prepare for the one’s of science proper. And so, he holds a place in the beelines that connect our savvy to our origins, probably an exploding black hole. In fact, he has some intriguing things to say about the color black and how light fights with it and creates color.
We see in Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) somebody who went away from glorifying saintly beauty, focusing on and depicting the whirls of water like ever so many examples of braided hair, the furies of its flow, or with similar almost scientific attention to the flow of air. In fact, he proceeds on the maxims of the scholastic tradition by dividing and subdividing. He depicts water freely flowing or through an orifice or around a peg. He wants to publish 15 books on water but doesn’t get to it. The titles would be concerned with the nature of depth, with subterranean rivers, with the repairing of rivers etc. Leonardo cannot come up with a more systematic research line because his time doesn’t offer one. He also has Neoplatonic sympathies in seeing unity in macro and microcosm. As an example, he calls rivers the blood of the world. I love him, alone for this saying.
Leonardo wants to be told; he wants to know. When trying out a new pen, Leonardo was scrawling the phrase “dimmi”, tell me. The dimmi doodles appear ubiquitously in the margins of his notebooks. They occupied the man; they have an intensity as though he was asking them about a lover. They are repeated like say in a later period Bach would accost his God with his repeated urgent instrument calls that sound to me like “gimmi”, give me life and love, Lord, gimmi.
Those dimmi notes speak of an urgent curiosity about the natural world. Dimmi was his question. Dimmi! “Describe what sneezing is, what yawning is, the falling sickness, spasm?” Dimmi: how does one smile? (He had searched for the origin of the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile by dissecting lip muscles and drawing them, alternately, with skin on and skin off). Dimmi: tell me of the flow of smiles, of the movement of water, dimmi of the world.
Old man and water studies
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Early life and later boasting
Leonardo was born near Florence as the illegitimate child of a notary and a household servant. As such, one of the few professional avenues open to him was to be apprenticed to an artist, in his case Andrea del Verrocchio (meaning that he had no formal schooling). Leonardo’s art is a product of the science of his day, of its quest for knowledge, even as it was yet wanting in many respects. Like many before him, he apparently knew of Alhacen’s Book on Optics and put its savvy to work. The “Book of Optics” had collected available knowledge of the field at the time: Galen’s study of the eye, Euclid’s and Ptolemy’s treatises on geometry. What this tradition had theorized, Leonardo put into practice.
Leonardo attempted to synthesize with it, questing the basic principles, the fundamental laws of all nature. “Write of swimming under water,” he pronounced, “and you will have the flight of birds through the air.” His artistic and scientific interests were merging. Leonardo could apply what he learned about shadow and light in drawings and painting. He mused about the interplay of the eye and mind in perception. This is the idea of the “dual Leonardo”, the artist turned scientist. This is the idea that came to us with compliments of Sigmund Freud.
Leonardo’ painting output was one of the least prolific of his era. There are perhaps 15 paintings for the 40 years, and much of the work, including the “Mona Lisa”, is left unfinished. Instead, an almost manic turn to graphic art occupies him. His notebooks run to 16 000 pages. Of course, they are not science in our sense, although they prepare for it in their questing nature. So, maybe dual nature is something of a stretch even as the artist became a prophet of what was yet to come. Let us remember Freud though, by his unforgettable mentioning that Leonardo may have been excessively cuddled by his mother.
Leonardo with his eye for opportunities applied to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, in the early 1480s (without mirror script). His is something like the first resume, he being its inventor. The style may be somewhat outdated with his entry: “Most Illustrious Lord, I shall endeavor, without prejudice to anyone else, to explain myself to your Excellency.” After some more of this he goes on: “I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.” The future creator of The Last Supper applies here for the job of an Entry-Level War-maker. His letter boasts of his prowess as a military engineer with only a little hint of the artistic: “Should the need arise, I will make cannon, mortar and light ordnance of very beautiful and functional design that are quite out of the ordinary.” This is how he saw himself primarily: as an engineer. His abilities as a painter come at the letter’s end in a throwaway line. There is an essence of the man: to kill with very beautiful ordnance. It is ironic that he didn’t succeed with any practical inventions other than in their new and artistically fetching 3D representation.
As a military engineer he observed that the path of a mortar bomb did not follow the postulated Aristotelian two straight lines: an inclined ascent followed by a vertical drop. What Aristotle had asserted was for him a philosophical necessity within movement. Yet, it did not gibe with what could be seen with one’s own naked eyes. As a result of people realizing this a healthy skepticism began to emerge.
Leonardo was also an entertainer. People loved his company, as he was funny. He was spontaneous and sang and accompanied himself on musical instruments. He appears not to have been a concentrator, given to be a bit flighty. Some say it shows in his work.
Great and late work
His Mona Lisa, estimated as the most expensive painting of any at roughly a billion dollars, searches for somebody who can make her smile. And who knows, perhaps it’s you? Visit her and see.
Beside this, Leonardo became instantly recognizable through his drawings such as Vitruvian Man, showcasing the proportions of the human body. It is perhaps something of a cheat, with one circle intimating both the reach of arms and legs, but it radiates esthetically (with stretched up hands the length is about 2m and with horizontal hands the breadth of man is 1.4m, but stretched out legs would get near 2m, even as I couldn’t do it. Even if I could, it wouldn’t correct the cheat). Leonardo dissects corpses and draws them in unforgettable ways. By the end of his life Leonardo claimed to have performed 30 human dissections, with the subjects usually executed criminals. Today da Vinci lends his name to a computer assisted surgery machine. Initially termed "Lenny" for the young Leonardo, it was ready for testing in 1997. The more advanced, models were named "Leonardo", or "Mona". I don’t quite know which one I lost my prostate to.
Vitruvian man is so memorable, perhaps because of the geometric cheat.
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Same cheat for a dog, exemplifying our deep connectedness. We have to cheat to look optimal.
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As copies of Leonardo’s notes became disseminated, such as the astonishing 12-volume Codex Atlanticus, his contraptions also became famous. These included ideas that would only become a reality hundreds of years later, such as flying machines. Amongst his earliest work are sketches of the lifting devices used in the hoisting of the huge, gilded copper ball that sits on top of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. He probably even made the shining metal wonder. Surprisingly Leonardo wrote his diaries in the mirror image of normal script but why remains a mystery.
By the late 1480s, Leonardo’s aim increasingly turned to understanding how nature works in the sense of looking at a fundamental set of mathematical laws. Many of his ideas for machines were rooted in nature. His flying machines changed over time as he began to look at the way birds fly. We call this approach now biomimicry. He tested the wings for his flying machines to optimize uplift. In a collection known as the Codex Leicester (owned by Bill Gates) he had tanks constructed to explore various aspects of fluid dynamics.
We admire Leonardo’s fine lines and distinctions. It is all the more surprising that his main contribution to painting is sfumato, a fog type technique. Through applying layer over layer of successively thinner paint he blended the figures into the background. You practically don’t see brush strokes anymore, only miraculous halos. This technique represents actually the opposite of fine lines or their derivative in science’s acuity.
An interesting aside pertains to Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi painting that in 2018 sold for 450 million dollars. It contains a central enigmatic glass sphere. A similar one is found in a painting by Pintoriccio, "Madonna col bambino" dated 1475, around a generation before Leonardo’s. My friend Klaus Yvon pointed out that the background is undistorted, indicating the glass sphere’s hollowness. This testifies to considerable glass blowing know how (it is a time of enormous reach: Andrea Mantegna’s Madonna della Vittoria, completed in 1496 has an Australian cockatoo in it, probably coming to him via the silk road). We see here a beginning of techniques eventually guiding to evacuated tubes that in turn was to prompt the discovery of radiation such as x-rays or electrons around 1900 and we know how that led to the elucidation of DNA. Remember, this is what launched our beelines backwards.
Leonardo was full of technological ideas and capable of representing them graphically. Although he was not overly successful with finding funding for them, we see in him somebody in a transitional period to increased technology funding. Earlier rulers gave money to priests or poets, hoping they would legitimize their rule. There was no expectation for them to discover, say new weapons. This has changed during the last five centuries in a dramatic way and with equally dramatic consequences. We would never have been able to engineer microorganisms or fine tune electricity without such investments. What irony that our funding for fighting weaponry led us to fight cancer.
Quotes
The constant observer has much to tell us. About accomplishment he notes: “It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” “One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.” “You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself...the height of a man's success is gauged by his self-mastery, the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. ...And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.”
The artist observes: “The artist sees what others only catch a glimpse of.” “An average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance, and talks without thinking.” “The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.” “A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.”
Here are observations of somebody conceiving of flight, if in his mind only: “When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
The poet in him states: “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” “A poet knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
The great understander speaks of the joy of doing so: “The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.” “Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood.” “Learning never exhausts the mind.” “The knowledge of all things is possible.”
And here is the philosopher speaking: “God sells us all things at the price of labor.” “I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die.” “Time stays long enough for those who use it.” “He who thinks little errs much…” “Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.” “Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.” “Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.” “I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.”
His connectedness with the world he praises thus: “I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.” (In fact, he bought caged animals just to set them free). “Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
The original Renaissance man
Da Vinci is the original Renaissance man, versed in a multitude of fields and possessed by an unquenchable curiosity. He is nailing down the caprice of water to predominant flow patterns. While he didn’t quite make it into the annals of fundamental science, his genius welcomed science in its applied forms and phenomena description. He is an example of the splendidly self-educated artisan of his time that was needed to eventually supply the genius for science proper in the Zilsel sense.
In sheer endless attempts, Leonardo studies nature, designs machinery, invents weapons and fortifications and seeks the secret of flight. Yet to me, the greatest of these visual investigations are his anatomical drawings. They are miracles of observant or applied science. There is an especially moving work in his depiction of a fetus in the womb. It is as though the unborn baby is in a capsule bound for the stars, as it one day may well be. Leonardo’s character reflects a hallmark of the coming science acceleration. Surely, he could be an emblem for this birthing moment such as with the fetus, or Old Man with Water Studies, 1513.
Fetus
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Leonardo would be flabbergasted with our present-day understanding of Big History. That we hail from the laws of energy flux and its constant transformations, possibly in an oscillatory way. That we are manifestations of changes from simplicity, of something like a black hole crystal, to emerging flowing complexity in a world of cooling energy, after something of a cataclysm. That we are frost flowers on windowpanes, forming and dissolving. That we are born of beelines, sprouting from the material and spiritual seeds of earlier ages. And Leonardo would revel in the idea that we see him now as one of the remarkable flowers on this winding beeline road to the understandings of science, which he vaguely anticipated.
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