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)

This Day in Art History (Death of Benvenuto Cellini, Celebrated, Scandalous Renaissance Man)

Feb. 13, 1571— Benvenuto Cellini, an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, draftsman, soldier, and musician who chronicled his multiple creative interests and tumultuous escapades in a frank and celebrated autobiography, died at age 70 of pleurisy in his native Florence.

“Renaissance man” has come to be shorthand for a prodigiously talented individual who engages in multiple pursuits. But, aside from Michelangelo, who wrote commendable poetry, and Giorgio Vasari, a pioneering biographer, no other great craftsman of the period besides Cellini left a literary record that could be mentioned in the same breath as his visual one.

Unlike Michelangelo (who wrote verses on an unnamed love) and Vasari (who focused on other artists), Cellini was a born raconteur, holding forth in characteristic hot-tempered, boastful, witty, and loyal fashion on himself and, to a lesser extent, his views on the theory of art. He vented about his adventures voluminously, over nearly a decade, in his La Vita di Benvenuto di maestro Giovanni Cellini (“The Life of Benvenuto Cellini”)—and still hadn’t completed the project at his death, as he interspersed this with more than one hundred poems, two treatises on goldsmithing and sculpture, and several discourses on art.

Ironically, while defending his visual primacy among his peers (at a time when his contentious personality had sidelined him from new commissions), Cellini furnished a strong counterargument: that his real talent lay with the written word, rather than with his products as a goldsmith and sculptor.

In one chapter of his autobiography, Cellini catalogues his meticulous preparation for his bronze “Perseus” sculpture, followed by a description of how he save his creation from destruction by fire and was congratulated by his assistants for helping them to have “learned and seen things done which other masters judged impossible.”  

But the artist can’t leave it at that: he must also write how the two men he suspected of trying to sabotage his latest masterwork said “was no man, but of a certainty some powerful devil, since I had accomplished what no craft of the art could do; indeed they did not believe a mere ordinary fiend could work such miracles as I in other ways had shown.”

At this late stage of the Renaissance, readers are beholding a new kind of artistic consciousness: a man unapologetically basking in his personal glory. Cellini has presented not just an advertisement for himself in his own time, but for his undying fame in the eyes of posterity.

His autobiography offers up a new persona: a creator passionately committed to his art, cynical in his fashion (“When the poor give to the rich, the devil laughs,” he recalled the wife of a rich Roman banker telling him), and defiant of conventional morality. He even surpassed Caravaggio, whose aggressiveness (hitting waiters, slandering rivals) climaxed in flight from Rome for killing a man in a street fight. Cellini openly admitted to three killings: of his brother’s murderer, a rival goldsmith, and an innkeeper. Only the protection of Popes Clement VII and Paul III saved him from punishment.

(There were some limits to Cellini’s alarming candor: contemporary mores meant that he could cop to vainglory and murder, but not to bisexuality, even though several indictments and even convictions for sodomy were path of his rap sheet in both Italy and France.)

Other Renaissance artists have inspired novels and/or films (Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, Caravaggio in Derek Jarman’s 1986 movie named for the painter). But how many such figures have become the subject of operas?

Yet Cellini has—not once, but twice, in Camille Saint-Saëns’s Ascanio and Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. The dramatic, even over-the-top, elements of the artist’s personality lend themselves to the genre. Nevertheless, it would have disappointed the ego-driven Florentine that neither opera has entered the canon of musical theater (though the overture of Berlioz’s work is frequently performed in concert halls by orchestras, as seen in this YouTube clip).

For a fascinating overview of Cellini’s life, see Harold Sack’s November 2019 post from the blog SciHi (i.e., “Science, Technology and Art in History”).

(The self-portrait of Cellini in the image accompanying my post is a sketch now held in the Royal Library in Turin, believed to have been drawn sometime between 1540 and 1543.)

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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Quote of the Day (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, on Reason and Freedom as God-Given Gifts)

“O sublime generosity of God the Father! O highest and most wonderful felicity of man! To him it was granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills….When man came into life, the Father endowed him with all kinds of seeds and with the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow and bear fruit in him. If these seeds are vegetative, he will be like a plant; if they are sensitive, he will become like the beasts; if they are rational he will become like a heavenly creature; if intellectual, he will be an angel and a son of God. And if, content with the lot of no created being, his spirit, made one with God in the solitary darkness of the Father, which is above all things, will surpass all things.

“Who then will not wonder at this chameleon of ours, or who could not wonder more greatly at anything else?”— Italian Renaissance philosopher and scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), “The Dignity of Man,” 1486, in The Portable Renaissance Reader, edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary M. McLaughlin (1953)

Just as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar” address of 1837 kicked off American intellectual thought, so “The Dignity of Man” (or, as I heard it more formally referred to in college, the “Oration on the Dignity of Man”) has generally been considered the manifesto of the Renaissance.

In Dorothy Dunnett’s seventh novel in her “House of Niccolo” historical fiction series, Caprice and Rondo, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is a correspondent of Callimachus, an Italian humanist poet exiled to Poland. But Pico could easily be a major character in his own right. 

He was gifted beyond the dreams of ordinary men, not just with the riches one might expect of the heir to the principality of Mirandola but also (as suggested by the accompanying portrait in from the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence) with good looks, a phenomenal memory, effortless command of Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, and a charisma that drew women and men. Altogether, he was a dazzler in the Platonic Academy of Florence founded by Cosimo de' Medici. Aspiring to soar with the angels, he could only be brought down by his own impetuosity and the jealousy of others.

By his early 20s, Pico had decided not just to issue his equivalent of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologica, boiled down to 900 theses, but to defend it against all comers. Like Aquinas’ systematic body of knowledge, it was never finished. And like the Summa, it attracted early on the baleful eye of censors who regarded some of its propositions as heretical.

Though he argued for human freedom, dignity and autonomy, Pico’s thought had none of the secular overtones associated with today’s brand of humanism. Reason and the intellect, because they are God-given, he believed, not only separate us from the beasts but, when fully and properly used, lift men to the level of angels. 

By seeking to reconcile traditional church teachings with newly available texts on the Kabbala and ancient Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle, Pico provoked clerical enemies in the Inquisition (as well as personal enemies outside it, when he tried to run away with the wife of a cousin of his protector, Lorenzo de’Medici). The last half-dozen years of his life were marked by papal censure (Innocent VIII), Pico’s flight from Rome, imprisonment in France, release, and a late reconciliation with new pontiff Alexander VI.

Pico’s death at age 31 left far more open questions than just the manner of his passing. (The rumor that he and friend Angelo Poliziano were poisoned at the instigation of Lorenzo’s son, Piero de’ Medici, was confirmed only a decade ago by scientists using biomolecular technology, scanning equipment, and DNA analysis.) 

Nobody knows how much more he would have contributed to world thought if he had had the chance. Even though he wrote comparatively little in his truncated life, that residue remains enduring and powerful, as noted by conservative political and cultural theorist Russell Kirk:

“If Things are to be thrust out of the saddle once more, and Man mounted (in Pico’s phrase) ‘to join battle as to the sound of a trumpet of war’ on behalf of man’s higher nature, then some of us must go barefoot through the world, like Pico, preaching the vegetative and sensual errors of our time.”

(This blog post was inspired by two teachers highly different in temperament but similar in their commitment to reason: Prof. Eugene Rice, who, over several decades in his Modern European History survey course at my college, recounted to me and thousands of other students the personality and importance of Pico; and Sister Margaret Bradley, a Knick-loving Sister of Charity in my high school who told me not only that there was such a thing as a “Christian humanist,” but also that it was a title to be worn with pride.)

Quote of the Day (Erasmus, on ‘The Charity of a Christian Man’)

“The charity of a Christian man knoweth no property: let him love good men in Christ, evil men for Christ’s sake, which so loved us first when we were yet his enemies, that he bestowed himself on us altogether for our redemption: let him embrace the one because they be good: the other nevertheless to make them good: he shall hate no man at all, no more verily than a faithful physician hateth a sick man: let him be an enemy only unto vices: the greater the disease is, the greater cure will pure charity put thereto: he is an adulterer, he hath committed sacrilege, he is a Turk: let a Christian man defy the adulterer, not the man: He must defy and abhor the vices, but not the man. Let him despise the committer of sacrilege, not the man: let him kill the Turk, not the man: let him find the means that the evil man perish such as he hath made himself to be, but let the man be saved whom God made: let him will well, wish well, and do well, to all men unfeignedly: neither hurt them which have deserved it, but do good to them which have not deserved it; let him be glad of all men’s commodities as well as of his own, and also be sorry for all men’s harms none otherwise than for his own. For verily this is that which the apostle commandeth: to weep with them that weep, to joy with them that joy, yea let him rather take another man’s harm grievouser than his own: and of his brother’s wealth be gladder than of his own. It is not a Christian man’s part to think on this wise: what have I to do with this fellow, I know not whether he be black or white, he is unknown to me, he is a stranger to me, he never did aught for me, he hath hurt me sometime, but did me never good. Think none of these things: remember only for what deserving can those things which Christ hath done for thee, which would his kindness done to thee, should be recompensed, not in himself, but in thy neighbour.”— Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536), The Manual of a Christian Knight (1501)