Leonardo Da Vinci
The Quintessential Renaissance Man
By Jeff Boulter
When most people think of an artist or a mathematician, they’re usually thinking of two completely different people. Although an intense focus into one singular subject often produces a strong knowledge and mastery of the field, to be a mathematician does not necessarily counteract being an artist. During the height of the Italian Renaissance in the the mid 1400s, one brilliant man stood out among the greats. That man is of course none other than Leonardo da Vinci, who taught us that art and math are both tools we can use to help us understand the world we live in.
Leonardo Da Vinci is the quintessential Renaissance Man, the ancient standard upon which we hold modern excellence to. His sketch books are filled with beautifully detailed renderings of flying machines not yet invented, anatomical drawings that no one had dared study, and sketches of future works of art that were drawn in perspective, revolutionary for his time. To be a Renaissance man during a time of such an enlightening meant you were a man of many talents, which da Vinci proved to be.
Da Vinci believed that,
“…people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
During the mid 1400s, the fields of math and science were making discoveries that went against a lot of the Christian teachings at that time. Some of da Vinci’s contemporaries were even called heretics and punished by the law for going against the established faith. All of this was not enough to stop da Vinci from learning more about the world around him. With the desire to perfect his art and his curiosity of science, da Vinci would sneak into catacombs to dissect corpses in order to learn about the human anatomy. One of his more famous sketches of these studies is that of a human fetus, still in the mother’s womb.
During the beginning of the Renaissance female bodies were painted as male bodies and altered to look feminine. Since most artists were men, they knew about the male anatomy and through models, but were not allowed to study the female anatomy like artists do today; It was not considered proper. If you look, for example, at da Vinci’s contemporary Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, you will notice that his female characters share the same physical attributes as the male ones with some small alterations. Da Vinci realized that men and women are built with different proportions and characteristics and he wanted to study them so he could depict this in his works.
Da Vinci not only studied how the world really was, he even studied how the human eye perceived the world to be. Before da Vinci, artists paintings were flat and two dimensional in color and perspective. By realizing how humans focus on one image at a time da Vinci was able to create a painting style called sfumato. It was a shading technique that created a more realistic vision of how the our eye sees the edges of an object. In one of his most famous works, “The Mona Lisa”, or “La Joconde” as the rest of the world knows her by, you can see a soft shade on the features of her face and country hill background that’s shaded to look as if it’s far in the distance. Although we may now overlook these details, for his time, da Vinci’s works were something completely new and innovative.
Taking a closer look at another one of da Vinci’s famous works, “The Last Supper”, you can see more of his love of math and art. Although da Vinci’s work is not the only depiction of this biblical event, it is the most remembered. “The Last Supper” is filled with mathematical precision from the vanishing point that is purposely right behind Jesus’s head to the amount of windows, and even the waves and curves that are created by the movements of the figures when read side to side. Could it be that his focus on creating such a happy marriage between art and math in this work is what makes it so hard to forget?
If you read the other article I wrote about Albert Einstein, you may see a comparison in the two and could consider him a more modern version of da Vinci in his own right.
“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” -A. Einstein
Da Vinci showed that art was a way to show others how an individual perceives the universe, while mathematics was the way everyone could understand it. Albert Einstein truly understood math and reached beyond mathematics into the world of art for conceptual ideas.
Da Vinci was a brilliant man, but during his lifetime many looked at his thirst for knowledge and new ideas as strange and out of place. To be truly great you must remain true to yourself and never stop in the quest for knowledge and the improvement of yourself and mankind.
