In a broad sense these studies were all related because Leonardo understood the natural world as a single system in which the various parts were analogous one to the other. For Leonardo, writing and drawing-observation, careful recordation and visual representation constituted a method for investigating the natural world. His studies and investigations probably were little appreciated by most of his contemporaries. His writings and drawings were not published in his lifetime. They remained private notebooks, written backwards in mirror script, seen by only a few. Leonardo lived in the first age of print. However, the technologies of print at that time could not encompass the numerous intricate drawings that intersperse the pages of his notes.

The legacy of Leonardo would be great even if it were based solely on his luminous and beautiful paintings. Yet the image of Leonardo as a universal genius derives as much from his voluminous notebooks as from his paintings. Leonardo lived before the age of the professional “scientist,” a term invented in the nineteenth century, and before the new experimental methodologies developed in the seventeenth century “scientific revolution.” Yet his practices of minute observation, visual representation, and description eventually became key elements in the methodology of the modern scientific enterprise. However, it cannot be claimed that Leonardo’s own work had a direct influence on the development of that methodology, a complicated historical process that occurred in the centuries after his death.

Nevertheless Leonardo’s empirical approaches to the study of nature encompassed some of the key elements of what would become modern science. In our own age of specialized scientific disciplines, his investigation of the whole of nature is no longer possible for a single individual. Perhaps admiration for Leonardo in the present day derives in part from our own culture’s high regard for inventiveness; from the links of our own science to his methods of investigation; and finally, from a nostalgia for a time when one individual seemingly could investigate the whole of the natural world.

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Content last updated: 20/04/2003

About our expert

Pamela O. Long is a historian of medieval and Renaissance science and technology who has taught at Barnard College, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University. Her articles have appeared in Technology and Culture, Isis, History and Technology and elsewhere. Her recent books include Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (2001); and Technology, Society, and Culture in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, 1300-1600 (2001).

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