Again, Leonardo was the inheritor of an existing tradition and again he was not unique in his techniques. From the early fifteenth century a new approach to nature developed when university scholars became interested in improving traditional technologies and crafts. Scholarly disciplines like mathematics became recognised for their contribution to design.

Designs, in their turn, had to be shown to work; they had to be tested against reality and modified through experimental trials. This process developed into a cornerstone of the Western scientific method. In Leonardo’s passion for applied geometry and in his commitment to systematic observation, experience, and even experiment, we may recognise the early beginnings of our method of discovering how the physical world works.

So how should we perceive him and evaluate his influence? Firstly, Leonardo was very much a product of his time, sharing with his contemporaries both medieval traditions and Renaissance developments. He competed with them for available patronage and, like them, found the direction and content of his work shaped by the demands of whoever was paying. He and they were affected by a gradual change in status, as the medieval concept of the ‘craftsman’ was replaced by the Renaissance concept of the ‘artist’, a free intellectual worker.

Secondly, it was widely recognised that he transcended his time - but to a lesser degree than might have been expected. The general opinion of contemporaries was that Leonardo had a prodigious talent but was too restless and curious to properly fulfil his potential. At the court of Ludovico, the Duke of Milan, he had been given a title, ‘the Florentine Apelles’, reserved for the greatest painters. In 1507 he became the centre of an international diplomatic incident, whilst the French monarch and the Florentine government sorted out who had the priority of claim on his time and talents! He was regarded as something of a wonder. However, he was notoriously reluctant to undertake, or indeed complete, commissions.

The overwhelming theme of Leonardo’s life is that of brilliant work planned but too rarely executed. He was an especially gifted practitioner of a larger range of disciplines than was usual in Renaissance Italy and we may regard him as the ‘first among equals’. Therefore we should judge him by the degree to which he developed the customs and practices of his age.

For example, he can be called a true innovator, who observed and recorded the natural world with a new accuracy. He also produced portraits informed by an unequalled knowledge of human physiology and psychology. He was the originator of works of art that have become iconic, such as The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. The modest body of work he left us has fascinated and engaged artistic movements such as Symbolists, Dadaists, and Pop artists. On the face of it there also seems to be a link between modern science and Leonardo’s methods of investigating the natural world. This might lend support to our tendency to treat Leonardo as a modern person displaced in time, were it not for a final irony. Although he was born at the beginning of the first great communications revolution, printing, Leonardo never published his ideas more widely. All those questions, conclusions, speculations, and innovations remained hidden in his numerous notebooks and never contributed to the advance of the scientific method, nor prompted the development of technology! We may sense a connection with him but nothing of his work has directly helped to foster that link. Perhaps that is because his real scientific legacy to us is the commitment he brought to trying to understand nature, in order to control it and utilise it in structures and mechanisms. That may be the real bond that extends across the centuries.

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