By Leonardo Da Vinci

Even to speak the name of Leonardo da Vinci is to evoke the ideal of genius.  Da Vinci’s insatiable curiosity included virtually everything that could be known by men in his age.  We recognize him as a master engineer and inventor, an incredible draftsman and painter, a scientist with few peers, a musician as well as poet.  As a scholar, Leonardo was deeply interested in wisdom to be gleaned from classical writings, which, although forbidden by the Church as ‘pagan,’ were beginning to become available to humanists in Renaissance Italy.  Vitruvius was a Roman architect and scholar whose text De Architectura describes the remarkable symmetry and geometric relationships to be found in the human form.  Da Vinci’s famous sketch Vitruvian Man illustrates observations gleaned from his study and is the beginning of a thesis that the workings of the human body were analogous to the organization of  the universe.  He called this ‘cosmografia del minor mondo,’  a cosmography of the microcosm.  Elaborating , he wrote:

“For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of this two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom.  And just at the human body yields a circular outline so too a square figure may be found from it.”

Deeply convicted that this symmetry in the human body was to be found in the universe as a whole, da Vinci was confounded by the lack of scientific knowledge about the inner workings of the body.  At a time when it was considered sacriligious to ‘desecrate’ the body for anatomical study, he was so passionate in his quest to know more about our design that he risked death and excommunication by secretly doing medical dissection of corpses before they were buried.  Leonardo’s sketches were so detailed and accurate that they despite the modern miracle of CT scanning and other imaging technologies, medical textbooks still include some of his drawings.             

Driven by his deep need to know, and bolstered by a courageous belief that if Almighty God is the embodiment of Truth, then there was nothing to fear in the pursuit of deeper knowledge of His creation.

References:
Leonardo da Vinci Museum website
The Drawings of Leonardo website

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