Leonardo Da Vinci as a pioneer in science Essay Example For Students

Leonardo Da Vinci as a pioneer in science Essay It were  easier for the mature intellect to recover that belief in fairy-tales which is the privilege and joy of childhood, than for any of us to return to a point of view which enlightened men have long since left behind. If our imagination be keen and our sympathy quick, we can perhaps understand what it was that our forerunners believed, but we shall never feel towards it as they felt. There are no dryads in the woods, no naiads in the streams, for us ; the rudely hewn block of wood is no fetish to which we bow ; the story of griffin or vampire does not affright ; the naà ¯ve mediaeval miracle wrought by some pious relic has no power to confirm our faith : in these things we detect at the most an allegory or a hallucination. The race makes certain advances, as a traveller journeys through a strange country by night, without being able to map out its course. Not only are the gates of birth and death wrapped in the mists of lethe, but so too are the thresholds of progress. Only i n the realm of reason, and of morals derived from reason, do all men walk as equals and contemporaries. The mirage of fancy, the fog of superstition, vanish as the sun of reason prevails ; once men regarded them as permanent realities ; now we know that they were evanescent ; herein lies the difference between us and our ancestors,—a difference absolute and unalterable. As we are more learned so are we more sophisticated than our fathers. We hesitate to say of any truth â€Å"This is final,† because finality implies a world bound in adamantine unchangeableness, whereas we perceive that ours is a fluent and unfolding world. This perception, which is coming to be the common property of cultivated  men, even of those who strive most earnestly against it, distinguishes the Modern from the Middle Age. To us, all things are in process of development; to the mediaeval, all things—religion, science, gov- vernment—were fixed. The earth itself was to him the centre of the universe, a fixed point round which the planets, sun, and stars revolved; his religion, formulated long before according to supernatural dictation, might be neither amended, nor put in question. Philosophy was not the exploration of the infinite by finite man, but the exercise of his mind along a clearly defined path which always curved back to the starting-point. Scie nce was a mixture of halftruths and absurdities: the dictum of Aristotle, Ptolemy, or Galen being accepted as infallible, even when plainly contradicted by the experience of every day. Government, in theory at least, was a rigid scheme foreordained from the beginning. I am not concerned to point out what benefit the race derived from that age of formulas ; benefits there were, if only in the knowledge gained that the soul cannot prosper in bondage ; my purpose is to call fresh attention to the contrast between that age and our own, in order that we may measure the magnitude of the achievement of such men as Leonardo da Vinci who broke away from mediaevalism, and who, though surrounded by conditions utterly un- like ours, nevertheless belongs in spirit to our time rather than to his own. That spirit was the spirit of inquiry, the modern spirit; the mediaeval did not inquire, he took for granted. Not only in all those considerations which haunt serious minds—the nature of God, im- mortality, conscience—did he accept without demur the statements handed down to him, but also in purely physical affairs was he un- critical. Read the manual of the medical school of Salerno, and see how hearsay and superstition took the place of observation in the treatment of the simplest form of disease. Read Brunetto Latini’s â€Å"Natural History† and see what fantasies were spread concerning the animal kingdom. One example will illustrate the general attitude of mediaevals towards demonstrating facts : There was an old fable that salamanders can live in the hottest flame. A modern would have put a salamander in the fire and watched the effect; the mediaeval, on the contrary, never thought of applying so simple a  test,—he believed the fable, and gravely repeated it. His habitual attitude was one of credulity. We need not wonder at this. Inquiry presupposes ignorance, a worthy desire to clear away doubts. We do not dispute over the multiplication-table. But to the mediaeval the ultimate mysteries of human destiny were wholly removed from the pale of inquiry; he might not understand the strange scheme of the incarnation, of vicarious atonement, of the resurrection, but he believed it, and believing, he ceased to inquire. He did not doubt the reality of heaven or of purgatory: he was more certain of the existence of hell than of the countries beyond his native mountains. This certainty could not but discourage investigation into the primal mysteries. Moreover, his creed tended to make him despise the material world in which he lived. The Christianity which he professed was a composite of Hebrew, Persian, and pagan beliefs, which had been fitted together at different times. That they were mutually contra- dictory did not trouble him, because he gave a proof of his faith when he believed impossible doctrines ; that they conflicted with the simple, authentic teaching of Christ did not trouble him, because that teaching came to him after councils, doctors, and a hundred popes had stamped their several interpretations upon it. Among the strange doctrines which had wound itself round early Christianity was the Manichaean doctrine that matter is the product of an evil principle, a Devil, who wars perpetually against God, the creator of spirit. This being accepted as true, the part of the devout mediaeval was plain : he strove to eschew the material world as the Devil’s kingdom. This world included, of course, his own body, which he mortified to the glory of God and the discomfiture of Satan. To have allowed his attention to wander to the processes of nature and to have examined into their causes would have been unholy and perilous : unholy, because in so doing he would have given to the works of God’s adversary interest which he ought to consecrate to God alone ; perilous, because the Devil had cunningly sown the world of matter with lures to ensnare the souls of men. And after all what could it profit him to learn all possible knowledge concerning the material world? In God’s world, in heaven, which  he hoped to enter after a brief exile here below, such knowledge would be irrelevant, useless, impious. His body, therefore, was not merely an inert clog to salvation, it was the active ally of the Fiend, who spread before every one of the bodily senses attractions to entice the soul away from the contemplation of God. Pleasure became synonymous with sin ; beauty was the mask of temptation. Only by a strenuous asceticism, a mortification of the senses, and a starving of all mundane desires, could the mediaeval devotee cheat the Devil. What Was the Renaissance Like EssayWhat we do know, however, is that in the fifteenth century a few men began to scrutinise nature, very tentatively at first, and with no premonition of the results which such scrutiny would reach. Foremost among them was Leonardo da Vinci. Other investigators of that century, Copernicus the most conspicuous, have ranked higher than he in the annals of science; but none, as I hope to show, equalled him in scientific endowment. He was disenthralled from mediaeval preconceptions, for he possessed a temperament so purged of theories that in approaching a new fact his sole aim was to discover the true nature of that fact, unbiassed by what others had found in it. His curiosity was insatiable ; his methods were observation and experiment; his advance was from the known to the unknown, whereas the mediaeval, as we have seen, took the unknown for granted, and ceased to inquire. That Leonardo’s achievements  in science and invention should never ha ve had due recognition, is to be attributed in part to their great range—the world remembers longer him who travels farthest in a single direction, than him who travels .far in many; and in part to an accident which buried them for three centuries. Even now we have but an imperfect record of them. Not as a candidate for belated fame—Leonardo’s fame is secure—but as a pioneer of the modern spirit, and as a favorite whom Nature took into her confidence, let us consider him here. The important facts in Leonardo da Vinci’s life can be briefly told. The natural son of a Florentine notary, he was born at the castle of Vinci, on the Arno, between Florence and Pisa, in 1452. Vasari relates stories of his youthful precocity, which often aston- ished his instructors, and of his fondness for music. Being admit- ted early into the studio of Verrocchio, he learned not only painting and sculpture, but also the goldsmith’s art, which, we may remark, had an influence not easily to be computed in giving to the Florentine School of Painting that precision, that loyalty to the line, which distinguish it from the Venetian School. How the young Leonardo painted into one of his masters pictures an angel far beyond Verrocchio’s skill, and how he drew a Gorgon’s head so life-like that it frightened persons who came upon it unawares, need not here be repeated. In 1472 he was already an independent artist, and during the next eight or nine years he worke d in Florence, but to what purpose we can only guess, as almost all the fruits of this period have been lost. In 1480 he addressed a remarkable letter to Lodovico Sforza, tyrant of Milan, asking for employment and laying chief stress on his ability as a military engineer. The letter brought him an invitation to go to Milan, where he was engaged in mechanical and engineering enterprises, in the direction of ducal festivities, and in the construction of a colossal monument to Francesco Sforza, Lodovico’s father. The fresco, â€Å"The Last Supper,† is one of the few remaining authentic works of Leonardo’s brush during his long residence in Lombardy, and no one now can say that a single patch of color in that ruined masterpiece was laid on by him. Indeed, fate, which showered upon Leonardo innumerable gifts, seems to have de- creed that posterity should know his genius by hearsay only, so perversely has fate allowed his works to be lost or mutilated. That colossal statue of Sforza was not yet completed when Louis XII. invaded the Milanese and put an end to the sculptorâ€⠄¢s work there; the great fresco has suffered irreparably from neglect, violence, and restoration; and of the half-score paintings which remain scarcely one gives us a hint of the beauty of its original coloring. In 1500 Leonardo visited Venice and Florence. Two years later he was appointed engineer by Caesar Borgia, who was engaged in a military expedition against those States south of the Po that had not already submitted to his tyranny. During this summer we have glimpses of Leonardo at Urbino, Pesaro, Rimini, Cesena, and Cesenatico, along the Adriatic; at Siena, Chiusi, and Orvieto in the Centre; and at Piombino near the Tuscan Sea. In the following spring he settled at Florence and painted â€Å"The Battle of Anghiari on one wall of the council hall of the Palace of the Signory, while on another wall his young rival, Michael Angelo, painted avast group of â€Å" Soldiers Bathing.† Not a trace of either fresco survives. But Leonardo, never at his ease in Florence, returned to Milan in 1506. Thenceforward, until 1515, he seldom stayed long in anyplace ; till Francis I. came into Italy and induced him to go back to France, where he was assigned a residence at the Chateau Cloux, nea r Am- boise on the Loire, 1516. There he died May 2, 1519, and was buried in the Royal Chapel at Amboise. In person, as in mind, Leonardo lacked no gifts. He excelled in dancing, in fencing, in horsemanship, in lute-playing. Well known anecdotes, chiefly drawn from Vasari’s precious and inex- haustible quarry, illustrate alike his unusual physical strength and his wonderful dexterity. He was genial in temper and kind in heart, and he possessed the rare combination of humor and wit. His interest in man and in nature was many-sided and unflagging; nothing being too vast or too minute for his attentive curiosity. He had the patient inquisitiveness of the specialist who pores over details; he had also the generalising faculty of the philosopher who deduces laws and discovers wider relations. His attitude towards life was, in a word, thoroughly modern and scientific. As little as possible did the past, with its traditions and dogmas, hamper him : to search  out all things, to experiment and verify, to let his own eyes test and reason be the judge—this was Leonardo’s met hod. Leonardo Da Vinci inventions Part Two