Instant Genius - Why is Leonardo Da Vinci’s scientific legacy so often overlooked? – Martin Clayton

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

It’s been 500 years since the death of Leonardo Da Vinci, and he’s remembered mainly for his great works of art, like The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But he was also a scientist, working across disciplines like anatomy, engineering, and architecture. Sadly, his scientific research was never published and his engineering ambitions went largely unrealised. However, through his sketches and drawings we can see his anatomical discoveries, his plans for machines, and his investigations into the world around him. We can see what was occupying his mind, allowing us to piece together clues about the mysteries he aspired to solve. So to mark the anniversary of his death, 200 of those drawings will go on display at the Queen’s Gallery next to Buckingham palace in the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing. In this episode, we talked to Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings for Royal Collection Trust at Windsor Castle, about Da Vinci’s lasting scientific legacy. We ask him about the work he was doing, how he influenced the scientific disciplines he experimented with, and what we should remember him for. He speaks to BBC Science Focus editorial assistant Helen Glenny in this week’s episode of the Science Focus Podcast. If you like what you hear, then please rate, review, and share with anybody you think might enjoy our podcast. You can also subscribe and leave us a review on your favourite podcast apps. Also, if there is anybody you’d like us to speak to, or a topic you want us to cover, then let us know on Twitter at @sciencefocus. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Remembering Professor Stephen Hawking The mindset behind the Moon landing – Richard Wiseman Belka and Strelka: Russia’s canine cosmonauts – Vix Southgate Identifying Jack the Ripper: old clues, new science This is how to invent everything – Ryan North Is religion compatible with science? – John Lennox Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Image: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name audio.com to learn more. Leonardo saw science as a creative subject. And just as today science isn't about just repeating what somebody else has said accurately. That might be what they teach you in school. But really science is about creativity. an insight and invention and seeing things that nobody else has seen before. And Leonardo is maybe the most creative figure in the field of science in that respect. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team.

With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com. We'll look out for us in your app store. Welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Lipscomb Southwell, the production editor of BBC Science Focus magazine. It's been 500 years since the death of Leonardo da Vinci, and he's remembered mainly for his great works of art, like The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But he was also a scientist, working across disciplines like anatomy, engineering and architecture. Sadly, his scientific research was never published, and his engineering ambitions went largely unrealised. However, through his sketches and drawings, we can see his anatomical discoveries, his plans for machines, and his investigations into the world around him.

We can see what was occupying his mind, allowing us to piece together clues about the mysteries he aspired to solve. So to mark the anniversary of his death, 200 of those drawings will go on display at the Queen's Gallery next to Buckingham Palace. In this episode, we talked to Martin Clayton, head of prints and drawings for Royal Collection Trust at Windsor Castle, about Da Vinci's lasting scientific legacy. We ask him about the work he was doing, how he influenced the scientific disciplines experimented with, and what we should remember him for. Here's Helen Gleney,

editor-assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine, talking to Martin Clayton. Okay, so Martin May the 2nd is the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death. Can you tell me a bit about what you're doing to mark that anniversary and what your role was in that? Well, I'm head of prints and drawings at Royal Collection Trust,

and in the Royal Collection we are fortunate enough to have by far the most important group of Leonardo's drawings to survive. It's more than 500 sheets that have been together as a group since Leonardo's death all those years ago. And because these works can't be on permanent display, because light damages paper, and so we have to keep them in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle for most of the time,

we're celebrating this anniversary by organising 14 exhibitions of Leonardo's drawings around the United Kingdom. This spring we've had 12 simultaneous exhibitions, each of 12 drawings at museums and galleries across the UK. In the summer we're having an exhibition 200 drawings by Leonardo at the Queen's Gallery next to Buckingham Palace, and this coming winter 80 drawings at the Queen's Gallery in Edinburgh, the Palace of Holyrood House. So this will be the most accessible exhibition of Leonardo's drawings ever to be held. We're hoping that maybe three-quarters of a million people will attend one of these exhibitions. And it gives people across the United Kingdom an opportunity to see Leonardo drawings in the flesh in a way that they may be never done before. Fantastic.

And can you contextualize for us the importance of these drawings? We all know about the big masterpieces like the last supper. the Mona Lisa, but why are these drawings so interesting? Well, drawing really was central to Leonardo's work. Painting was just one aspect of his activity, and although it's the paintings that survive today, even if there are only about 20 of them, he was also a sculptor and an architect and an engineer

and a scientist who investigated very many fields. But none of his sculpture survives, none of his architecture was maybe even executed. His engineering seems mostly to have been designs, rather than work somewhere actually executed and none of his science ever reached a conclusion in that he was happy with his state of research and was ready to publish that in illustrated treatise

which is what he intended. But through the drawings we get to know all these different fields of activity. We can see in his drawings not just the preparations for his paintings but also the preliminary works for his sculpture and architecture and so we can understand what he was working towards with that. very many engineering drawings which put him in the context of Renaissance engineering more generally

and all his very detailed scientific investigations exist in thousands of pages of notes and drawings and we can reconstruct Leonardo's life and work with a great degree of detail and understand the passage of his thought in a way that we really can't do for any other figure of the period. Great and so he was known as both Anada

and a scientist. And at the moment, those are sort of considered very separate disciplines. Can you explain a bit about how each one of those influenced the other? Well, Leonardo wouldn't really have seen art and science as distinct areas of activity. Fairly early on in his career, he trained as a painter, and he soon came to the conclusion that painting was essentially a scientific undertaking, that a painter should understand the physical structure of the universe, the laws within which the universe operated,

the visual effects that we can see, and that a painting should encapsulate all of those, and a painter should therefore have to understand how light and colour and perspective and proportion and anatomy and all these different fields worked, to be able to paint works that were, at some level, true to life, that were objective renderings of the universe. And so in his 30s, during the 1480s, he started to study all of these different fields that he felt an artist ought to be able to master.

And he came up with the idea of writing a treatise on painting, not on the practicalities of painting, not on how to grind colours and prepare panels and so on. But on the principles of painting, the theoretical background that a painter should understand. And that then spawned all these separate fields of activity that pretty rapidly were to become, independent fields of study themselves. And he came up with the idea of writing a treatise on anatomy, a treatise on light, a treatise on the movement of water and so on and so on. But all these studies of separate scientific fields nonetheless had a creative, you might even say, an aesthetic component.

And just as any scientist today, we'll talk to you about the harmony of scientific laws and how there's a beauty in mathematics and so on. that's exactly what Leonardo saw as well. He saw that the universe, all the creations of the universe, and all the creations of man were part of one great harmonious whole, and that to understand art and to understand science were essentially the same thing. And was that scientific approach to art? Was that something that he brought in to art that was new,

or was that characteristics of all artists at the time? Not of all artists. I mean, you will see earlier in the 15th century artists becoming increasingly interested in, perspective, for example, in proportion, in the mathematical principles of proportion and how that can create a harmonious painting. Artists, certainly in Florence, by the middle of the 15th century, were expected to know the rudiments of anatomy. They were expected to have seen public dissections so that they could understand how the limbs articulated, how the muscles looked both when they

were tensed and relaxed. How in principle an artist should be able to represent the universe. in a convincing manner. But Leonardo took all that much further, and he was studying these fields at the level of a contemporary scientist. Whereas other artists observed dissections, Leonardo carried out dissections himself, both of animals and of humans. He found it difficult to read the existing scientific literature, which was mostly in Latin, and he had very little Latin himself.

but he was working alongside academics in universities and courtly contexts who would have acted as his interlocutor to be able to understand where the existing knowledge was and he could then take that existing knowledge and develop it in his own way and that's where the excitement in Leonardo lies. And so if we're trying to put him into sort of a group of the great historical scientists we think of people like Galileo and even more recently people like Einstein. Where do you think he fits in terms of his contribution to science? Well, it's a really, it's a double-edged question because he is clearly, if you look at his works,

particularly in the fields of anatomy and color, for example, but certainly anatomy. He is one of the great Renaissance scientists. He is somebody who is making observations of a level of detail and, insight that no other anatomist of the period was doing. However, Leonardo found it very difficult either to draw general conclusions, to work from the specific to the particular, or to bring his work to a conclusion, to an end. And so he never published any of his scientific work. And this is crucial because in science, publishing is everything.

If you don't publish, if people don't know about your researches, you may as well not have bothered. And we have this almost contradiction, therefore, that whereas Leonardo made such great advances in the field of anatomy, because he didn't publish, he had virtually no observable impact on the field. And it's possible to write a history of human anatomy today that doesn't mention Leonardo's contribution in any way, because his drawings remained essentially unknown. At his death, he left his drawings to his favourite pupil, Francesco Melzi, who guarded them jealously, it let other people see them, but he made a little attempt to get the scientific work properly published. The anatomical drawings were known about, and early biographers, when

they talk about Leonardo's drawings, they always pick out the anatomical drawings for particular mention, and so people knew they were remarkable, but they really had no idea what the content of this was. And other anatomists, such as Vesalius working a generation later in northern Italy, had no knowledge of Leonardo's papers. And it's impossible, therefore, to identify anything that Leonardo discovered that passed into general circulation. And so while he was one of the greatest of Renaissance scientists, he had no impact on the field. And he is therefore a very contradictory figure. Do you have any clues as to what the kind of academic fraternity would have thought of him at the time, whether he was included in that at all? I think he had friends in

the field, but I don't think he would have been taken entirely seriously by a wider audience. First of all, they wouldn't have known about his work, but he was not, he didn't have a university education himself. He was illegitimate, and that prevented him from attending a university. He wasn't able to follow his father in the legal profession either. And he had no Latin. And there's a rather sort of defensive attitude, a bit of a chip on his shoulder that you find in a lot of what Leonardo writes about academic learning. He says that experience and mother nature or nature are much more valuable than any amount of book learning, that a picture, a drawing is worth far more than any amount of verbiage.

And that it's not essentially, it's not even necessary to have read the existing writings of the ancients or his contemporaries to understand the book of nature. But there is a sense in which that is a slightly defensive attitude. And it's clear that where he could find out information from his friends and contemporaries about what was written in the works of Aristotle and Plato and Pliny and Avicenna and Vittalo and many, many others, he would seize the opportunity. And although he says effectively a picture is worth a thousand words, as his scientific career develops, he draws less and writes more,

and he develops a very rich literary scientific style, and some of his late scientific studies are blocks of text with just much, marginal illustrations. And it's clear that he wants to put this in writing. He knows that that's a way to codify what he has drawn. And that a drawing alone cannot do that. He needs to find a way to explain this to a potential audience. Now, all this is very explanatory. It's not theoretical in the sense that he's drawing out big overarching theories. He tends to work in terms of specifics. And his work on water, for example, just lists example after example after example and he finds it very hard to move from that from the general, from the specific to the general and to arrive at something that we would call natural laws. And I think that's due in part to his lack of a university education, of a grounding in the classics, that he didn't really have a strong philosophical framework that would allow him to understand his researches in a more overarching fashion.

We're about to mark the 500th anniversary of his death. Do you think at the end of his life, what do you think he would have thought about his scientific contribution or his scientific career? I think there would have been a lot of frustration that he must have felt, which comes across quite strongly in some of the letters that he was drafting towards the end of his life, in a pessimistic turn to some of the works of art that he creates.

He makes a great series of deluge drawings and writings where he describes with almost relish, a huge storm that overwhelms the earth and sweeps everything away. And towards the end of his life, he pretty much abandons his scientific researches. There's a mysterious episode in Rome after he's moved there in 1513, where he's accused of something, we don't know what, in front of the Pope, some sacrilegious practices, who knows what,

and he's banned from further human dissection. And that really seems to take the wind out of his sails. And although for the next six years of his life until his death in 1519, he has all his anatomical papers with him, he makes no attempt, as far as we can tell, to put them into order, to structure them in such a way that they are able to be published. and pretty much the same is true of all of his scientific work. And these last five or six years of his life is marked by almost an abandonment of the scientific principles that he'd been working on so intensely

over the previous 20 or 30 years. He was nonetheless very keen to have his papers preserve for posterity and he makes sure in his will that his papers are passed on to his pupil Melsie and Melsie tries to put them in some sort of order So maybe it's the case that Leonardo wanted posterity to seize his papers to research them and to publish what he was in his lifetime unable to. But it was to be 400 years until that could happen. And by then, of course, by the late 19th century,

when people started to translate Leonardo's notes into English, for example, for the first time the notes become widely accessible. any power that those drawings and notes may have had to influence their field had pretty much gone you know science had moved on people had made those discoveries independently it's only really in the field of anatomy that there were some observations that Leonardo made that only in the 20th century in the field of cardiology for example did science manage to catch up and I think that's how Leonardo would have seen his field as his his research is sorry,

something that he knew he'd made great strides in, but he also knew that it had ultimately come to nothing because he'd not been able to disseminate any of it. Yeah, one of the paintings that is, one of the drawings that's going to be part of the exhibition has some anatomical drawings of a cow heart, is that right? Yes, that's right. And I think that illustrated really well

how far ahead of his time he was in terms of describing how the aortic valve works. just explain that example? Yes, he was mostly interested in the structure of the human body, in the bones and muscles, but he made two particular studies of embryology and of cardiology that stand out among his most striking researchers. And in the field of the heart in particular, he made maybe his greatest advances. He took a bovine heart, easier to access, easier to work with, cost larger than a human heart, and made a number of investigations to understand the structure and the functioning of the ventricles, the atria and the valves of the heart,

which is maybe the most clear-sighted of all of his investigations. First of all, he rejects any idea that the heart has any sort of spiritual or mystical qualities. He says the heart is a muscle. He's implying the heart is only a muscle. It doesn't have any other function. He knows that blood flows through the heart, but the way in which he investigates the heart leads him to the conclusion that the heart is a one-way system, if you like, that it takes in blood from the venous system

and pumps it out into the arterial system. And the functioning of the valves of the heart fascinates him and is aware that the shape of the chambers around the valves of the heart are of crucial importance. He understood that the heart was perfectly formed and that every detail of the heart had to have a function. So he makes a beautiful investigation in which he's a injects molten wax into the chambers of the bull's heart around the atrial valve, sorry, around the aortic valve. Let's the wax set, dissect it out, so he has a cast of the chambers around the aortic valve, makes a gypsum mould around the wax cast, melts out the wax, blows glass into the gypsum mole, and so he's then got a thin glass model of the chambers

around the aortic valve and he can pump water with a suspension of grass seeds through his little glass model and observe the fluid flow and he observes vortices, little circular eddies of blood

in the chamber beyond the aortic valve and he deduces that these circular eddies are responsible for opening out the leaflets of the valve and closing the valve

after each pump of the heart and this is this is an extraordinarily astute observation, and it was suggested again only in the early 20th century, confirmed only through computer modelling in the 1980s, and Leonardo understood exactly how the valves close. Now, having determined that the heart is a one-way system, Leonardo realized that this should very rapidly empty the venous system and fill the arterial system with blood. And how could this be so? Because there was no knowledge of circulation of the blood.

It was believed that the arterial and vener systems were essentially separate. The arterial system conveyed vital spirit, the life force from the heart. The vener system conveyed nutrition from the liver. And that all the pumping of the heart did was to squish blood in and out of the heart through friction generating heat. And that the innate heat of the body came from the heart. And Leonardo couldn't reconcile his observation of the heart being a one-way system with the traditional belief that the heart just pumped blood out and then sucked it back in again. And he fudged his results, therefore, his description of the functioning of the heart,

allowed a certain reflux of the blood, allowed a certain sweating across the intraventricular septum, and he believed, therefore, that the heart and the arterial and vener systems remained in equilibrium due to the bumping of the heart. Now, he knew that this didn't work. He knew that this was a fudge, but he couldn't reconcile these two fields of knowledge, his observed knowledge and traditional knowledge, and ultimately his cardiology collapsed,

and it wasn't to be another century until the work of William Harvey that the circulation of the blood was discovered. That's so fascinating. So it's now been 500 years since he died. Why should we still care about Leonardo da Vinci? We care about him as an artist because he's one of the most beautiful creative artists of all time. As a scientist, clearly we don't care about him because of what he discovered and how he can impact the present day.

In that sense, Leonardo has no impact upon what scientists are doing today in matters of detail. But I think he is a paradigm of what the sciences can and maybe even should be. And crucially for Leonardo, he saw all of creation, all of the universes interconnected. He believed that there were universal laws that applied right across creation. And by looking at one part of creation, he could understand other parts. And it's that fertility of observation, that willingness to step back from a subject and think about how different fields of scientific endeavour might be connected and how they might inform each other that I think is so relevant today.

Leonardo saw science as a creative subject. And just as today science isn't about just repeating what somebody else has said accurately. That might be what they teach you in school. But really science is about creativity and insight and invention and seeing things that nobody else has seen before. And Leonardo is maybe the most creative. figure in the field of science in that respect. He is somebody who saw no boundaries in the sciences,

no boundaries between science and the arts. And we can be inspired by Leonardo, I think, today. You know, you obviously know Leonardo da Vinci and all the information that we have about him very well. Can you think of anything that people would be surprised to know? I think people are most surprised to find that he was actually dissecting bodies himself. There's a general belief that the church banned dissection and that any dissection had to be carried out

at dead of night in secret and so on. Nothing could be further from the truth. Leonardo was an experimental anatomist. He conducted dissections himself in full view of the authorities with the intention of publishing an illustrated book and had he done so, this would have been the most important book

on anatomy ever published. We talk in anatomy about pre-versalian and post-fasalian periods now. the watershed being Vassalis's Fabrica of 1543 Had Leonardo published, he would have scooped Vassalia spire generation and he would have the status of the greatest anatomist ever. And I think not a lot of people know that. They think it was just research done towards his painting.

But had Leonardo not ever picked up a paintbrush, had he not done anything other than conducting his anatomical dissections, he would still be one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance. Yeah, so what stopped him from getting that published to just not complete the work in this life? He was never satisfied with the existing level of knowledge. He wanted to go deeper and deeper and always wanted to find out more and more. Okay, one last question. Do you have a favourite pop culture depiction of Leonardo da Vinci?

A pop culture depiction of Leonardo? Blimey. This was a question from my colleagues and I couldn't think of too many, but I think he was in The Simpsons at some point. Oh, he was, that's right. Oh, that's right. There's an episode of the regular show, I think it is, which my children love watching on Cartoon Network.

And they go back in time and visit Leonardo in his studio. And they've got many of the Windsor drawings pinned up around the studio in cartoon form. And it's actually really well done. I said, look, it's my drawings. I work with those drawings. No, they love watching that. Is there something that's made me a little bit more helpful than that? I suppose my favourite, I don't know whether this counts as pop culture.

The great cartoonist Ralph Stedman, who is one of the great graphic artists of the 20th and 21st centuries who worked with Huntress Thompson and so on. He did a book called I. Leonardo in 1983, which was his imagining of Leonardo's autobiography, illustrated with cartoons drawn by cartoons underrating them, with drawings done by Stedman himself. And as is often the case, because Stedman is an artist, he's able to get into the head of Leonardo

in a way that most art historians cannot. And he's one of the few people who's written what I think of is a convincing creative biography of Leonardo, but illustrated with his fantastically. fantastically conceived, cartoonish but actually deadly serious at the same time, drawing as sometimes in the style of Leonardo,

sometimes imagining of Leonardo perched on a hilltop about to take his first flight in his flying machine. And Stedman, to call it pop culture, yeah, I think he's underrating it, but he's a great figure of contemporary culture. And what he did with Leonardo, I think, will stand the test of time. That was Martin Clayton talking about Leonardo da Vinci's scientific legacy. Leonardo da Vinci, A Life in Drawing, is the largest collection of Leonardo's work in over 65 years, and it opens on May the 24th in the Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London.

Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. The May issue of BBC Science Focus is on sale now. In it, we marvel at the first ever photograph of a black hole and find out what we can learn from it. We look at new dementia research that's providing. hope for patients and talk to a psychiatrist who's keeping patients awake all night in a radical new treatment for depression. And as always, there's much, much more inside. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's

best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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