Renaissance Book Review: Ivor B.

Renaissance book review: Ivor B. Hart, The World of Leonardo da Vinci: Man of Science, Engineer and Dreamer of Flight, (New York, 1962) The Renaissance was an era of scientific humanism, in contrast to the Medieval and scholastic era that immediately preceded it. Men, and when culture and society permitted, some women, its intellectual life who embodied the ideal of complete learning and eschewed older ideals of religion and theology as the only sources of true human understanding.

At least, this is the common conception of the era, still dearly held in the popular cultural imagination to this day. This common conception is validated and expanded upon in Ivor B. Hart's The World of Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci, according to Ivor B. Hart's text, was a Man of Science, Engineer, and Dreamer of Flight, who embodied the Renaissance ideal because of his scientific as well as his artistic passions.

Leonardo's most famous artistic work, the "Mona Lisa," is a secular face of a mysterious, unknown, and aristocratic woman. Even the artist's "Last Supper" shows a very human Jesus, rather than a divine embodiment of beauty or faith. Leonardo's sketches of strapped-on wings for the figures human beings are not angelic in their depiction, but show man-made constructions upon men's arms and backs. His notebooks indicate that these modes of flight were inspired by studying birds for extended periods of time, rather than studying the Bible's angelic figures.

However, despite the ideal of the Renaissance of the 'totally literate' human being, Hart also admits Leonardo's equally impressive contribution to science is a modern rediscovery. His scientific observations of birds were preserved in a vast quantity of notes. But these notes, as well has his anatomical observations of the human frame, became known in the 19th century, and not even very widely known amongst scholars until the 20th century. Leonardo did not publish or otherwise distribute the contents of his notebooks.

Most scholars believe that Leonardo wanted to publish his notebooks and make his observations public knowledge. But even this is disputed, because of the coded and backwards way that Leonardo recorded his observations. It could be this was merely a way to make writing with a quill pen swifter for the left-handed artist, or fear that his potentially heretical autopsies and speculations about the human form could endanger his social position by the still powerful Catholic Church hiearchy, a source of patronage for all artists.

Leonardo's careers, as an artist and a scientist, Hart makes quite clear, became fused rather than existed as parallel entities. While Leonardo worked for Duke Lodovico Sforza in as court artist, Leonardo applied his growing knowledge of mechanics to his duties as a civil and military engineer at the duke's estate. During this period of his life the artist took up an interest in growing and diversifying scientific fields, encompassing anatomy, biology, mathematics, and physics in his personal catalogue of interests.

This was even though he received no immediate remuneration, in terms of money or benefits, from developing such interests. Leonardo's notebooks of this period of his life reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of his time. Ivor Hart makes it clear that Leonardo was far more than a great artist: he had one of the best scientific minds of his time.

Perhaps Leonardo's great talent was in observing -- he made careful, painstaking observations of the natural world, such as birds in flight. Such careful observations of the natural world are critical, of course, to the eye of a great artist. But Leonardo's eye enabled him to carry out research of precision as well as beauty, in science as well as art. Perhaps the real paradox is how separate art and science have become in the modern construction of the disciplines.

Leonardo studied light in the living, breathing life of the world to better hone his use of light and shade in his painting. This gave rise to the shadowy effect later known as Leonardo-esque in the "Mona Lisa" and can be seen in his drawings as well. Leonardo left 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and science and were just beginning to excite scholars and historians of the science of the period, in 1964, when Hart wrote his book upon this then little-explored aspect of Leonardo's life and career.

In conclusion, Ivor Hart suggests that Leonardo's views and drawings of human flight were most transgressing in their nature, of past church ideology and medieval thought. Through the.