The Real Da Vinci Code

While visiting my in-laws in Des Moines recently, we were told about an exhibition on Leonardo Da Vinci at the Science Center of Iowa.

You would not think that Des Moines would have much to offer when it comes to museums, but this exhibit was pretty decent. Snaking through the tour, we saw many models and mock-ups of inventions that Da Vinci came up with.

People don't realize that many inventors (what we might call scientists today) were in those times usually employed by royalty and usually valuable if they could add to the military advantage of their king. It's not clear to me how much of Leonardo's work was done as under patronage, but he had a lot of inventions that were for military use.

One thing that struck me was that most ideas cannot come from nowhere, they are usually an accumulation of previous ideas. I was surprised how many of da Vinci's ideas had earlier sources, as many were taken from earlier Greek philosophers. His strength was understanding the underlying principles inherent in the things he studied. He was able to figure out many complex system by understanding what drove them. For example, there was a self supporting bridge that he developed that allowed soldiers to quickly put together a way over a stream given a pile of tree trunks. He was able to see the forces each piece would exert on the adjacent pieces and devise a way that the result was a self-supporting span. It was ingenious in its simplicity.

Part of the reason that he was in touch with all these underlying principles was because he took the time to observe and study things from scratch. He was interested in flight and spent a lot of time studying birds. His most famous set of observations were anatomical. He was a meticulous and obsessive chronicler and his volumes of notebooks contained beautiful sketches of the human body, among other interests. Of course, being an artist helped make the sketches easily readable and an amazing aid to comprehension of the systems he was exploring, describing, and explaining.

His art was also dissected in great detail in the exhibit. Everyone is familiar with his last supper and all the speculations about Mary Magdalene and Judas, but the picture is also diagrammed showing the way all lines in the drawing point to Christ's head. The big focus of the exhibit was the Mona Lisa. That drawing has been analyzed to a degree that I find unbelievable. They showed colorized versions of it and all kinds of different versions with various methods of analysis showing various aspects of the painting or construction. She used to have eyebrows and eyelashes that have since faded. One thing I did not notice was the speculation that it was actually a self-portrait, feminized.

The amazing thing about an exhibit like this was that you go through it and feel overwhelmed by the breadth of his work, and you realize that this is just a little taste of the whole amount of works that he has done. They call him a Renaissance Man because of his variety of interests, but he was also a river that ran deep as well as broad.