This Day in Science History (Why Leonardo’s Flight Experiment Failed)

January 3, 1496—The restless curiosity of Leonardo da Vinci took wing literally, as the Renaissance painter tested a flying machine of his own device, a precursor of today’s helicopter. Unfortunately, the experiment failed, as he was unable to overcome the limitations of his time.

In a blog post from six years ago on Leonardo as a “Renaissance Man,” I discussed how science represented only one facet of his many interests: painting, sculpting, botany, architecture, urban planning, public spectacle and pageantry, and music.

But Leonardo’s aviation experiments, particularly on this occasion, deserve more in-depth analysis of how they foundered—and why his failure to disseminate his ideas slowed scientific progress for the next four centuries.

It took Leonardo a few more years before he realized that human beings did not have the appropriate proportion of muscles to weight that enabled flight of the birds that long fascinated him (more than 35,000 words and 500 sketches dealing with flying machines, the nature of air, and bird flight). At that point he turned his attention to gliders.

But besides this initial failure of understanding, Leonardo was handicapped by the lack of lightweight material like aluminum or strong propulsion systems like engines that later made man-made flight possible.

Science history is filled with examples of how technology trigger new ways of thinking that in turn make new inventions possible. Leonardo didn’t have trouble with concepts or imagining new realities. But the lack of necessary technology meant that his flying machine would be incapable of momentary flight, let alone the sustained kind.

The title of the podcast “The Brilliant, Groundbreaking, and Wildly Overrated Leonardo da Vinci" concisely summarizes the contrary negative view of Leonardo’s scientific achievement. To be sure, Sam Kean makes a couple of valid points: that Leonardo couldn’t concentrate enough to bring projects to fruition, and that by working in isolation he was unable to benefit from research by others that would either spark his creativity or correct his hypotheses.

However, Kean doesn’t take into account a few factors about Leonardo’s intellect and environment that may have affected how he worked.

First, why couldn’t the artist concentrate, particularly when the inability to do so severely disappointed patrons? I wondered if this might have been because he was manifesting adult ADHD, and sure enough that was strongly suggested in a 2019 study by King's College London researcher Professor Marco Catani.

The lack of collaboration requires even more context. At least as far as his painting was concerned, Leonardo did collaborate, through a common artistic practice of the Renaissance—employing young assistants who, by carrying out his instructions, could learn the craft themselves.

But when it came to science, he may have been afraid to let others know his thoughts. It was less a matter of paranoia that someone else might steal his ideas than a more justifiable fear that unconventional scientific conclusions could contradict Roman Catholic teaching and lead to heresy charges.

Consider, for instance, Copernicus (unwilling to publish his theory of a sun-centered universe until he was on the brink of death in 1543) or Galileo (who, a century after Leonardo, did attract the unfortunate attention of the Inquisition with his own astronomical studies).

Finally, Leonardo's opportunities to work with other scientists were few to far between. The first scientific society didn't start until Rome's Accademia dei Lincei (Lincean Academy) in 1601, two centuries after his speculations on flight.

In any case, posterity had no opportunity to benefit from his notes (in which the left-handed artist used "mirror writing," most likely either to prevent smudged notes or to force concentration).

Leonardo's 28,000 surviving pages, in notebooks and codices, were scattered after his death in 1519. After his papers were collated and decoded, they would not be published until  well into the 1800s, by which time most of the important early work in aerodynamics had been published.

Quote of the Day (Leonardo da Vinci, Defining Painting and Poetry)

“Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen.”—Italian Renaissance architect, musician, inventor, engineer, scientist, sculptor, and painter Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), First Part of the Book on Painting,“Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts" (1651)

Flashback, May 1519: Leonardo da Vinci, Quintessential ‘Renaissance Man,’ Dies

Three years and over the Alps from Florence and Milan, the city-states where he had staked out a reputation as a talent of wide-ranging brilliance and frequent infuriatingly late work, Leonardo da Vinci, 66, died in Amboise, France, five centuries ago this week. Not unlike his life, the events after his death have left his fate ambiguous: the church where he was buried was subsequently destroyed, so we cannot be completely sure we have his remains.

In a prior post on the death of Lisa Gherardini Gioconda—a.k.a. “Mona Lisa”—I discussed several aspects of Leonardo’s life that made him even more enigmatic than his iconic subject—namely, the myriads of notebooks in reverse handwriting meant to conceal his speculations and discoveries and his sexuality (two sodomy charges were suddenly and mysteriously dropped). But far more can and should be said about this many-sided genius.

There’s a nice, neat phrase for this kind of person: “Renaissance Man.” In our time, it’s practically useless, and easy to scorn. The late, lamented Spy Magazine chuckled that Caroline Kennedy’s husband, Edwin Schlossberg, was a "Renaissance man without a renaissance.” Six years ago, in a Saturday Night Live skit in which Justin Timberlake was welcomed into the “Five Timers Club” of guest hosts, he was introduced to fellow club member Steve Martin as a “Renaissance Man.”

“Do you play…the banjo?” Martin asked the pop star, referring to his instrument. When told no, Martin smiled triumphantly. 

But Leonardo’s attempts at multiple cultural pursuits were of an entirely different order from Schlossberg’s or Timberlake’s. I didn’t fully appreciate how much until I read Walter Isaacson’s 2017 biography, Leonardo da Vinci. Here is a list of the intellectual endeavors he pursued:

*painter;

*sculptor;

*scientist;

*botanist;

*architect;

*urban planner;

*public spectacle and pageantry—a kind of precursor of a theater scenic director; and

*musician.

(There was a downside to all of this, noted by his early biographer, Giorgio Vasari: “In erudition and letters he would have distinguished himself, if he had not been variable and unstable. For he set himself to learn many things, and when he had begun them gave them up.”)

Nor did I appreciate the contrasts between Leonardo and another “Renaissance Man,” his rival for painting commissions, Michelangelo Buonarroti:

* Leonardo was warm and gregarious; Michelangelo, cantankerous and quick with an insult;

* Leonardo was good-looking and blessed with a sharp sense of fashion, attracting all kinds of people; Michelangelo was dark, scruffy, and—since he often slept overnight in his studio—must have put some people off because he often neglected to bathe;

*Though both appear to have been gay, Leonardo did not alter his lifestyle to satisfy contemporary mores, while Michelangelo struggled desperately to remain chaste;

*Leonardo’s private scientific research led him to regard skeptically a number of doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, while Michelangelo remained intensely devout.

I was also surprised to learn that, by the end of his life, Leonardo, though he continued his scientific experimentation and offered intellectual advice when consulted by his latest patron, King Francis I of France, no longer cared to pick up a paintbrush. 

It is, of course, well-nigh impossible to become a “Renaissance Man” in the manner of Leonardo, Michelangelo, or, later, America’s own Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. Fields of knowledge are now so deep and specialized that they can require years of laser-like study. Moreover, the last decade has offered opportunities for digital distractions that lure people away from sustained intellectual and creative effort.

But the ideal of a well-rounded “Renaissance Man” that Leonardo epitomized should not become too foreign to us. Passions in one area of our lives can enrich us in another. The mind needs refreshment, to roam freely at play. 

The best example might be another Isaacson subject, Steve Jobs, who took a college course on design that influenced the creation of Apple products decades later.

In addition to Isaacson’s book and the section on Leonardo in Vasari, readers might also be interested in the following pieces on Leonardo:

*Michael White, Leonardo: The First Scientist. There is a valid question about Leonardo's influence as a scientist when his inability (and reluctance) to tell the world about his discoveries meant that it would take the world 200 years to rediscover what he had already learned. But White makes a convincing case that the artist "cross-fertilized ideas from different disciplines" in his work.

*The April 15 issue of New York Magazine contained a fascinating article by Matthew Shaer about how the auction house Christie's sold what is purportedly Leonardo's lost masterpiece Salvator Mundi, in a story of  "how the interests of dealers, museums, auction houses, and the global rich can conspire to build a masterpiece out of a painting of patchwork provenance and hotly debated authorship."

*The May 2019 issue of National Geographic featured a cover story by Claudia Kalb on how "pages from Leonardo's notebooks are finding their way into the hands of experts in the very fields Leonardo studied, from medicine and mechanical engineering to music."

*A 2016 article by Eric Blakemore for Smithsonian discusses one particular Leonardo discovery from the notebook: a 1493 observation of what seems to constitute "the first written evidence of the laws of friction."

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Bonus Quote of the Day (A Leonardo Fan, on the Theft of the “Mona Lisa”)

“In a thousand years, people will ask of the year 1911: ‘What did you do with the Joconde?’”—Joséphin Péladan, novelist and aficionado of Leonardo da Vinci, writing of the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, quoted in Simon Kuper, “Who Stole the ‘Mona Lisa’?, Financial Times, August 6, 2011

Today marks the centennial of the most audacious art theft of the 20th century. Kuper’s fine article analyzes the blasé attitude that led security at the Louvre to underestimate the chances that perhaps their most prized possession would be stolen, as well as the unlikely perpetrator of the crime, an Italian who showed no signs of being caught until, for no apparent reason, he turned himself in to the authorities.

(For a more successful bit of detection—albeit one of the historical kind, and one that took centuries to solve—see this earlier post of mine about how art scholars a couple of years ago at last solved the mystery of the woman who sat for this world-famous portrait.)