da Vinci Leonardo; Leonardo - Learning from Leonardo : decoding the notebooks of a genius

LEARNING FROM LEONARDO

Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius

Fritjof Capra

Learning from Leonardo

Copyright 2013 by Fritjof Capra

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First Edition
Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-60994-989-1
PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-60994-990-7
IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-60994-991-4

2013-1

Produced by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services.

Copyediting: Nancy Evans. Design: Yvonne Tsang. Index: Andrew Joron.

Jacket images: Wing Horacio Villalobos/epa/Corbis; Ms. B, folio 88v (detail).

Endsheets: Codex Leicester, folios 35v and 2r (detail).

Frontispiece: Profile of an old man (detail). Windsor Collection, Landscapes, Plants, and
Water Studies, folio 48r.

Facing: Botanical specimen from Star of Bethlehem, c. 1508 (detail, see ).

Page vi: Studies of flexions of the spine in the movements of horses, cats, and dragons, c.
1508 (detail, see ).

To my brother Bernt
who has shared my fascination
with the genius of Leonardo da Vinci
from the very beginning

In his classic Lives of the Artists, the Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari said of Leonardo da Vinci:

His name became so famous that not only was he esteemed during his lifetime but his reputation endured and became even greater after his death.

Indeed, during the Renaissance Leonardo was renowned as an artist, engineer, and inventor throughout Italy, France, and other European countries. In the centuries after his death, his fame spread around the world, and it continues undiminished to this day.

I have been fascinated by the genius of Leonardo da Vinci for several decades and have spent the last ten years studying his scientific writings in facsimile editions of his famous Notebooks. My first book about him, The Science of Leonardo, published in 2007, is an introduction to his life and personality, his scientific method, and his synthesis of art and science. In this second book I go a step further, presenting an in-depth discussion of the main branches of Leonardos scientific work from the perspective of twenty-first-century sciencehis fluid dynamics, geology, botany, mechanics, science of flight, and anatomy. Most of his astonishing discoveries and achievements in these fields are virtually unknown to the general public.

Leonardo da Vinci was what we would call, in todays scientific parlance, a systemic thinker. Understanding a phenomenon, for him, meant connecting it with other phenomena through a similarity of patterns. He usually worked on several projects in parallel, and when his understanding advanced in one area he would revise his ideas in related areas accordingly.

Thus, to appreciate the full extent of his genius, one needs to be aware of the evolution of his thinking in several parallel but interconnected disciplines. This has been my approach to absorbing and understanding Leonardos scientific thought. Having explored and contributed to the systems view of life that has emerged in science in the last thirty years, and having written several books about it, I found it very natural to analyze and interpret Leonardos science from that perspective. Indeed, I believe that the ever-present emphasis on relationships, patterns, qualities, and transformations in his writings, drawings, and paintingsthe tell-tale sign of systemic thinkingwas what initially attracted me to his work and kept me utterly fascinated for so many years.

What emerged from my explorations of all the branches of Leonardos science and of his demonstrations (as he called them) in his drawings, paintings, and writings was the realization that, at the most fundamental level, Leonardo always sought to understand the nature of life. His science is a science of living forms, and his art served this persistent quest for lifes inner secrets. In order to paint natures living forms, Leonardo felt he needed a scientific understanding of their intrinsic nature and underlying principles; in order to analyze the results of his observations, he needed his artistic ability to depict them. I believe that this intersection of needs is the very essence of his synthesis of science and art.

Leonardo thought of himself not only as an artist and natural philosopher (as scientists were called in his time), but also as an inventor. In his view, an inventor was someone who created an artifact or work of art by assembling various elements into a new configuration that did not appear in nature. This definition comes very close to our modern notion of a designer, which did not exist in the Renaissance. Indeed, I have come to believe that the wide-ranging activities of Leonardo da Vinci, the archetypal Renaissance man, are best examined within the three categories of art, science, and design. In all three dimensions he uses living nature as his mentor and model. In fact, as I delved into the Notebooks, I discovered not only Leonardo the systemic thinker but also, to my great surprise, Leonardo the ecologist and ecodesigner.

The persistent endeavor to put life at the very center of his art, science, and design, and the recognition that all natural phenomena are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent, are important lessons we can learn from Leonardo today. Thus, Leonardos synthesis is not only intellectually fascinating but also extremely relevant to our time, as I shall argue in the Coda of this book.