{"id":120,"date":"2008-05-20T19:30:11","date_gmt":"2008-05-20T07:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2008\/05\/leonardos_life\/"},"modified":"2008-05-20T19:30:11","modified_gmt":"2008-05-20T07:30:11","slug":"leonardos-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2008\/05\/leonardos-life\/","title":{"rendered":"leonardo&#8217;s life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font>Another in the occasional series of &#039;what I&#039;m reading&#039;. This time it&#039;s a modern biography of Leonardo da Vinci: <em>The Science of Leonardo<\/em>, by Fritjof Capra (2007). It&#039;s a beautiful book, from the cover, to the sepia-toned type, to the writing itself. And the author does a beautiful job of making &#039;the great genius of the Renaissance&#039; come alive.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><font>Leonardo da Vinci was an amazing man. Capra does an excellent job in fleshing out both his character and the times he lived in. Like a lot of people, I guess I knew him as the man who painted the <em>Mona Lisa<\/em> and <em>The Last Supper<\/em>, with a lot of drawing and inventing (including proposals for submarines and flying machines) on the side &#8211; he produced prolific diagrams of everything that came to mind. (He produced around 20,000 (!) pages of notes, drawings, and commentary, of which about 50% was lost in the centuries after his death. You have to wonder how much more he knew and did, that we&#039;ll never know about.) And he did that backwards (mirror) writing. <\/font><\/p>\n<p><font>But Capra describes a man who was much more complex than this: architect, town planner, military engineer, cartographer, anatomist, self-taught scholar and mathematician (as an illegitimate son of a nobleman, his schooling was pretty limited). And &#8211; a scientist, who used scientific methodology to describe and understand and explain the world around him. In describing how he approached a particular question, Leonardo wrote: <em>First I shall do some experiments before I proceed further, because my intention is to cite experience first and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way. And this is the true rule by which those who speculate about the effects of nature must proceed <\/em>(cited in Capra, 2007)<em>.<\/em>&nbsp;I think I have another scientific hero \ud83d\ude42<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font>And I recommend the book &#8211; it works so well on many levels: history, biography, science book&#8230;truly, well worth a read.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another in the occasional series of &#039;what I&#039;m reading&#039;. This time it&#039;s a modern biography of Leonardo da Vinci: The Science of Leonardo, by Fritjof Capra (2007). 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