Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), artist-engineer and towering figure of the Italian Renaissance, was an illegitimate son. Therefore a university education, the only route to a profession, was not open to him. Fortunately, the occupation of artist, which involved a long apprenticeship, was considered perfectly acceptable. So Leonardo attended the village school and lived a country life.

It was not thought necessary to correct his natural ambidexterity and he was allowed to write and draw freely with both hands, to the great benefit of his visual and imaginative faculties. The family pottery, which produced majolica ware, gave him knowledge of design and industrial processes. He grew up on his grandfather’s lands surrounded by the corn mills, stills, oil presses, and pulleys that powered an agrarian economy. He had access to many fine works of art in Vinci churches and neighbouring Pistoia was one of the region’s great artistic centres in Tuscany.

Nowadays, Leonardo is often seen as a unique genius, a ‘man for all seasons’ who was utterly original in his own time and has proved an inspiration for every age since. His reputation rests, in the popular imagination, on two suppositions.

The first is that a fruitful juxtaposition between his own brilliance and the particular conditions of the Italian Renaissance allowed him to become an unrivalled expert across a wide range of disciplines.

The second is that he appears to be so modern in his ideas about science and engineering. This wide-spread view of Leonardo is a seductive one. There is, after all, compelling evidence of his unparalleled abilities in painting, drawing, and sculpture, in anatomical investigation involving dissection, and in the study of optics, perspective, and geometry. In pursuit of these investigations he used apparently modern methods, frequently acknowledging in his notebooks the importance of observation, experiment, and learning through practical effort.

His engineering plans included a parachute, a submarine, a diving suit, a tank, and various large-scale weapons. He was skilled in hydraulic engineering and military fortification, and there is evidence that he was also employed as an architect. In recent years, some of his most ambitious but unfulfilled plans have actually been brought to fruition: in particular the successful construction of the Galata Bridge, the Sforza Horse, and the flying machine all lend weight to the notion that Leonardo was really a modern man trapped hundreds of years before his natural time. Indeed, a fairly recent television programme about Leonardo advertised its subject as ‘the man who drew the twenty-first century’.

    next > Page 1 of 3