Leonardo da Vinci - Kathleen Krull [25]
Just as no one had valued Leonardo enough as a child to educate him, now no one valued his manuscripts enough to protect them. That tricky backward writing didn’t help, either.
Nor did any biographer bother to do research on Leonardo’s life until years after he had died. This explains why we have so few details about his life, especially his childhood—why there are so many maybes in this story.
Notebook pages were scattered in libraries and monasteries and private collections across Europe. One chunk ended up in Spain at the court of the king. In 1630, a sculptor named Pompeo Leoni decided he was up to the task of organizing Leonardo’s work. First he wanted to pull out all the lessons on how to draw, and separate them from pages on science. So what he did was cut and paste Leonardo’s pages to create two separate collections. Parts of both collections journeyed to Italy, then to France. Some science pages remained undiscovered until 1966, when they were found—accidentally—in Madrid.
Until 1883, when notebook extracts were finally published as a book, much of Leonardo’s scientific work was unknown to the public. The book, however, had the misleading title of The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci—as if no one knew quite what to make of the material. In fact, the word scientist had been coined in 1834 in part to explain thinkers like Leonardo. The first exhibitions of Leonardo’s scientific and technological work took place in the 1890s.
By the early twentieth century, people such as the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud were hailing Leonardo as “the first modern natural philosopher . . . to investigate the secrets of nature, relying entirely on his observation and his own judgment.”
Finally, official commissions were established to try to reconstruct the original arrangement of the manuscripts. Scholars sorted the notebook pages into ten books of what were called codices, now hungrily collected by museums. One codex, all about water, the only one in private hands, belongs to Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and fan of Leonardo.
Much was lost, probably forever, due to carelessness, fires, floods, and wars. It is estimated that about half of the notes have surfaced (so far).
After Leonardo, discoveries about the natural world picked up speed. Big names were about to be emblazoned: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton. Many historians mark 1543—twenty-four years after Leonardo’s death—as the start of the Scientific Revolution. The study of anatomy gradually became more respectable. Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish doctor, published On the Structure of the Human Body in 1543. For writing the first accurate book on anatomy, he is considered the father of modern medicine and biology.
That same year, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his earth-shaking book, On the Revolutions of Celestial Bodies. The sun, not the earth, is the center around which planets revolve, declared Copernicus. Modern astronomy was on its way.
A hundred years before English doctor William Harvey published his discovery of the circulation of the blood in 1628, Leonardo had been investigating the body as a system of tubes, ducts, and valves, understanding that the heart moves blood.
Two hundred years before English scientist Isaac Newton published his famous Three Laws of Motion in 1687—his explanation for the scheme of the universe—Leonardo was exploring the reasons why objects fall and move the way they do. In his studies on flight, he observed how air resistance works. Newton said, “Objects at rest tend to remain at rest.” Leonardo wrote, “Nothing moves, unless it is moved upon.”
As for why the sky is blue, Leonardo understood that particles in the air somehow interact with light waves. In 1871, the English Lord Rayleigh worked out the exact reasons and got all the credit for the discovery.
Scottish geologist Charles Lyell, in the mid-1800s, came to some of the same conclusions as Leonardo. Both of them theorized that Earth’s characteristics