Leonardo Da Vinci* Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE - “So Many Things Unknown!”

  CHAPTER TWO - The Outsider

  CHAPTER THREE - “The Desire to Know Is Natural”

  CHAPTER FOUR - “Nothing but Full Privies”

  CHAPTER FIVE - “Lying on a Feather Mattress”

  CHAPTER SIX - “The Universe Stands Open”

  CHAPTER SEVEN - Citizen of the World

  CHAPTER EIGHT - The Fabulous Notebooks

  CHAPTER NINE - The Fabulous Notebooks, Part 2

  CHAPTER TEN - “I Have Wasted My Hours”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - “I Will Continue”

  CHAPTER TWELVE - What Happened Next?

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Leonardo’s Notebook

  At the time Leonardo’s mules were schlepping the notebooks around Italy, the pages were valuable only to their author. Today they are among the most precious things on the planet. The notebooks, the core obsession of Leonardo’s life, are what place him among the giants of science, not specific discoveries he made or new inventions he created.

  So what are they, exactly?

  We call them “notebooks,” but they are not bound like a typical notebook. Mostly they are loose sheets of paper casually gathered together and wrapped with different fabrics. Some pages are large. Others are only two or three inches square; these must be from the tiny blank notebooks he always kept tied to his belt.

  Leonardo went out of his way to make the notebooks difficult for any other person to read—tremendously out of his way. The main roadblock is his famous mirror-image script. His tiny writing goes backward, reading from right to left. The drawings aren’t backward, just the words.

  What was he thinking?

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2005

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2008

  Text copyright © Kathleen Krull, 2005

  Illustrations copyright © Boris Kulikov, 2005

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Krull, Kathleen.

  Giants of science : Leonardo da Vinci / by Kathleen Krull ; illustrated by Boris Kulikov.

  p. cm.—(Giants of science)

  Europe, 1452 : so many things unknown!—The outsider—The desire to know is natural—Nothing

  but full toilets—Lying on a feather mattress—The universe stands open—Miserable mortals, open

  your eyes!—The fabulous notebooks—The notebooks, part 2—I want to work miracles!—I will

  continue—What happened next?—Leonardo’s notebooks and where they are now.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09869-1

  1. Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452-1519—Juvenile literature. 2. Scientists—Italy—Biography—Juvenile

  literature. 3. Science, Renaissance—Juvenile literature. 4. Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452-1519—

  Influence—Juvenile literature. 5. Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452-1519—Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.—

  Juvenile literature.

  I. Kulikov, Boris, 1966- II. Title. III. Giants of science (Viking Press)

  Q143.L5 K’.2—dc22 2005007244

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume

  any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Jane O’ Connor—K. K.

  Acknowledgments

  For help with research, the author thanks

  Robert Burnham and Patricia Laughlin,

  Patricia Daniels, Dr. Lawrence M. Principe,

  Susan Cohen, Gary Brewer, Dr. Helen Foster James

  and Bob James, Sheila Cole, Janet Pascal, Gery Greer,

  and Bob Ruddick.

  INTRODUCTION

  “If I have seen further [than other people] it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

  —Isaac Newton, 1675

  WHERE DO SCIENTISTS’ brilliant ideas and discoveries come from?

  Well, nobody lives in a vacuum, and ideas don’t come out of nowhere. Even Isaac Newton (a giant of science if ever there was one) depended on what great thinkers before him had figured out in order to “see further,” to make discoveries of his own.

  People hear the name Leonardo da Vinci, and they think “artistic genius of the Renaissance.” And sure, he created the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, two of the world’s most famous paintings.

  Yet for thirty years—the whole last half of his life—he spent most of his time doing research in fields ranging from astronomy to anatomy, zoology to geology, and botany to paleontology.

  “Scientist” wasn’t even a word Leonardo would have known—people didn’t start using the term until the early nineteenth century. (He might have called himself a natural philosopher—someone who wants to make sense of the natural world.) But he would have known the Latin word scientia, which means “knowledge”—knowledge that explains the universe and the principles that make it work. Leonardo was very interested in scientia.

  Yet, in books about scientists, Leonardo isn’t always included. Perhaps that’s because, in the history of science, Leonardo is like a bridge. He stands right between the medieval view of the world and the modern view based on observation and experimentation. He looks backward to a time when nature seemed illogical, magical. He looks ahead to a time when nature is viewed as operating by rules and laws that can be discovered.

  Leonardo did indeed “see further” than anyone of his era. But whose “shoulders” did he stand on? And, in turn, did his work, his discoveries, inspire other scientists?

  CHAPTER ONE

  “So Many Things Unknown!”

  EUROPE IN THE Middle Ages—first of all, there were no books. No printed books, that is. Just manuscripts in Latin, tediously copied by hand for the rich. Peasants had never seen one. Most people couldn’t read or write anyway.

  There were no bathrooms. Hardly anyone knew what soap or underwear was. The poor ate with their fingers; utensils were for the rich. Most adults had no more than a few teeth in their heads.

  Almost half of all children died before they were a year old. Women, on average, could expect to live only until age twenty-four. That’s because so many didn’t survive childbirth.

  In the countryside, the poorest peasants lived in extreme poverty and filth, ten to twenty people to a damp hut. They slept on the f
loor, their farm animals—as well as rats—beside them. After a bad harvest, when a famine would sweep through, people starved to death.

  In cities, streets served as toilets, and piles of excrement were left to mold until the next rain. Every few decades came a mysterious plague called the Black Death for the hideous black blisters it inflicted. The epidemic of 1348, which killed one out of every three people in Europe, was ascribed by many doctors to the rare placement in the sky of three planets.

  Doctors varied wildly in training, and progress in medicine was sluggish. There were physicians with degrees from famous universities. Still, the books they studied had been written more than a thousand years earlier. Other “doctors” had little or no schooling; barbers sometimes performed surgery. And if a limb had to be amputated, pouring boiling oil onto the wound was the method used to stop bleeding. A urine flask was the universal symbol for physicians; they spent more time examining urine than anything else.

  Doctors knew how to set broken bones. But the surefire cure for nosebleed? Pig manure.

  Ten green lizards, cooked slowly in olive oil, were believed to heal an open wound. One medicine was made from earthworms washed in wine and donkey’s urine; another called for a horn of a unicorn. Gout, a painful swelling of the joints, was treated by placing a sapphire ring on a certain finger of the patient. Blood-sucking leeches, applied when the planets were in alignment, could fix many ailments. More common was simply slicing open the skin, trying not to sever an artery, to allow the release of “bad” blood.

  People’s lives were short and violent. The rate of accidental death was high; the murder rate was twice as high. Many rulers were tyrants—some homicidal. Wars were common. No country, or even city, was stable. Women were viewed as vain—the devil’s decoy. And if they stood out in any suspicious way, they might be tried for witchcraft—and burned.

  The all-powerful Catholic Church was a beacon of light and learning in Europe in the Middle Ages. But non-believers were often brutally persecuted.

  In ancient Greece and Rome, in China, and in Arab countries, scientists had discovered much about astronomy, medicine, mathematics, and more. Islamic scholars translated the work of ancient Greek scientists into Arabic, keeping their discoveries alive, adding their own ideas to them. But in Europe, much of this body of knowledge was lost for a long time—centuries in fact.

  “Sciences” in medieval times did include astronomy and mathematics, but it was still an age when people believed in magic. So “pseudosciences” were taught as well—the study of angels; physiognomy, the link between a person’s character and what he or she looks like; astrology, the belief that the planets influence human behavior; and alchemy, the “study” of how to make gold out of other metals.

  Learned men argued whether or not angels supplied the force that kept the planets in motion. And they counted only seven planets—of which Earth was not one. Instead, Earth occupied the center of the universe, with other astronomical bodies like the sun revolving around it.

  But a great wave was splashing across Europe, changing how people thought in some very fundamental ways. The result was a new confidence in human achievement, what was possible to do in one’s lifetime here on Earth. This led to an explosion of new information and exchange of new ideas. All this coincided with a wonderful rediscovery of the ancient knowledge that had been lost.

  Atop the wave of change was Leonardo da Vinci. He was born at the right time in the right place: in 1452 and in Italy. Because by then, it was officially the Renaissance, a glowing burst of fireworks in art, architecture, literature, and science. And nowhere was the Renaissance spirit brighter than in Florence, Italy.

  As Leonardo grew up, he looked around him. He had an amazing flair for looking, like no one else in history before him.

  “So many things unknown!” he wrote one day. But he wanted—and was determined—to find answers for himself. His method was to start questioning everything. His method was scientific.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Outsider

  THE YEAR WAS 1452. The place was the hilltop town of Vinci, in Tuscany, Italy. Towns don’t get much smaller. Vinci was a sleepy village of about fifty small buildings.

  Piero da Vinci, at twenty-six years old, was an up-and-coming notary. That was his family trade—recording and certifying legal documents. Success made the family respectable middle-class landowners. Piero was so ambitious that he already had eleven convents as steady clients. His work kept him mostly in Florence, only a day’s journey by horseback. The independent city-state of Florence was the opposite of Vinci—a teeming intellectual and artistic center in northern Italy.

  Piero seems to have been a player, a man-about-town. One of his relationships was with Caterina, a local peasant woman. Marriage was never the goal; we don’t even know her last name. But she had a baby: Leonardo. Being born illegitimate would set up roadblocks for Leonardo all his life.

  Children with unwed parents were common enough. The nobility and peasantry took them in stride, but for people in the middle class, people like Piero, these children were bastards—embarrassing, even hated. To be illegitimate was like having a bright red tattoo on your forehead—you were an affront to morality, a mistake better off erased.

  A few months after his son was born, Piero married someone else—a fifteen-year-old girl. In all, Leonardo was going to have four stepmothers to deal with, plus at least fifteen half brothers and sisters.

  So he was born an outsider. Even as a baby he had no clear home. No one knows where he spent his first few years. He probably lived with Caterina for at least a year and a half so that she could nurse him. A few years later, she married and moved to another village. Without Leonardo. After this, every time he saw her, on religious holidays, she would be nursing a new baby—she had five more children.

  When he was four, a powerful storm bombarded the area around Vinci, with flooding, fierce winds, and immense destruction. “Against the fury [of water], no man can prevail,” Leonardo later wrote. “An act of God” was how most people explained such a storm, but Leonardo came to think otherwise. He developed a lifelong interest in storms and water, which he saw as natural forces. For the rest of his life, he was obsessed with the study of water—how it behaved, and especially how it might be controlled.

  By age five Leonardo was living with his grand-parents. His grandmother was sixty-four, his grandfather almost eighty-five. Truly ancient!

  From what is known, Leonardo’s sounds like the loneliest of childhoods. Children in the 1400s were not coddled or entertained. They were thought of as miniature adults. The only one to show interest in Leonardo was his uncle, Francesco. Sixteen years older than his nephew, he farmed the family’s land. He coaxed it into producing olives, wheat, and grapes.

  Francesco was a bit of a scientist-farmer, brim ming with practical knowledge, always experimenting with different crops. Leonardo spent many hours helping his uncle with farm chores and taking long walks in the hills. The boy observed all creatures with equal fascination, even the lizards and worms in the vineyard. He learned the names of plants and herbs and all about variations in weather. Francesco loved nature and seemed to pass this on to his nephew.

  The area around Vinci is one of the most gorgeous spots in the world—both then and now. Streams and waterfalls intersect fairy-tale forests and faraway mountains with castles perched on top. Fields of glowing wheat melt into groves of silvery olive trees. Rolling hills in every shade of green, all dotted with the red-tiled roofs of farmhouses, are bathed in misty light that shimmers and glows.

  There are stories that young Leonardo carried a drawing pad with him at all times—that he drew constantly and sculpted models out of clay. Most people had little access to pencils or expensive paper, but he had them in his house because of the family’s business. It was said that he collected everything—flowers, leaves, pieces of wood, animals.

  The natural world was Leonardo’s first laboratory. In the hills around Vinci, he spent hours o
bserving—the movement of birds’ wings in flight, how a frog’s legs allowed it to leap so far, water running in a river—which in turn led to a greater understanding of the forces of nature and to a fascination with sciences like biology, botany, and geology.

  His formal schooling was minimal. His grandpar ents might have hired private teachers or had him taught by the parish priest. He learned basic math using Roman numerals and an abacus, and how to read and write in Italian, the everyday tongue of the people. It didn’t occur to anyone to teach him Latin, the international language of scholars.

  Leonardo was four when a major breakthrough in communication occurred. For the first time, a book was printed, following Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in 1456. The first printed book in Europe was, of course, a Bible. And soon, books—all kinds of books—were easily available.

  Did Leonardo have any books as a child? None of his own, certainly. His family might have owned one or two. As a member of a Christian family, young Leonardo would have heard Bible readings and seen paintings in the local church. All his life, the more he learned about the workings of the world, the more respect he had for the mind of God. “The Creator does not make anything superfluous or defective,” he marveled.

  Still, he could be critical of church practices and didn’t become a regular churchgoer, following his beliefs in his own way instead. He seldom spoke about religion or miracles: “I do not attempt to write or give information of those things . . . which cannot be proved by an instance of nature.”

  Because of his illegitimacy, he was not allowed to attend one of the famous universities in Italy. No one seemed to expect anything respectable of this boy. No one bothered to try to correct his left-handedness, at a time when this trait was forcibly discouraged and even considered evil by some.