Customer Reviews

Leonardo: The First Scientist

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have previously enjoyed the writing of Mr. Michael White in the Biography he penned of "Isaac Newton The Last Sorcerer". Despite contemporary connotations the word sorcerer may bring to mind, the book was very well done. Mr. White is very honest from page 1 as to his admiration for Leonardo; he even shares a young dream of wanting to be the man he so admired. Candor can cut either way. The reader can read with a bit more skepticism, allowing for the Author's personal feelings, or read with less caution, justified by the Author having been so forthright at the outset.

Mr. White sets what some would argue is an impossible goal, he not only wants to establish that Leonardo was the first scientist, but that because his notebooks were largely lost for 200 hundred years following his death, his work was often repeated, and all History was held back because of this. While Mr. White writes an enjoyable narrative, I do not believe he makes his case.

Even with what remains of the 13,000 hand written pages that were Leonardo's notebooks, there are still vastly different interpretations of some of what he might, or might not have done. That he chose to write in a left handed mirror image style, that then was often encoded to protect his ideas, has not helped the understanding of this brilliant mind. Leonardo wrote extensively on a myriad of topics, and he did have thoughts, or perhaps insights about what he observed. There is no argument that his documentation of anatomy was extraordinary, and that his sketches of flying machines and parachutes resembled the inventions that came centuries later. But even if we do as the Author suggests, one almost has to have a separate definition for what a scientist does, so as to be able to apply the term, to Leonardo.

The Author "One must allow for a broader interpretation of what science means... To me, science is exploration, it is questioning, it is the application of imagination, it is analysis". The author also says that what Leonardo lacked in math skills, he made up for "with his genius as an artist".

Wanting something does not make it so.

His exceptional skills as an artist have no value as a replacement for what were his basic math skills at. A Scientist uses exacting rules laid down for performing observations and testing the soundness of conclusions, he is systematic he is accurate. And this is where Leonardo fails.

This is why the Author is forced to qualify, with few exceptions, that Leonardo's concepts were explored 200 years earlier by Villard de Honnecourt as to flying machines and parachutes, or that Leonardo predated Newton's third law of motion by 200 years except, he did not apply the concept to a range of situations, he was not studying conventional mechanics, and also he did NOT create a mathematical framework to support the idea. Said simply he observed birds, made an educated guess, and then designed flying machines that were absurd when pen was put to paper. And the why of it is, for all his brilliance in a wide range of subjects, Leonardo was not a formerly educated man, he was not possessed of math skills that even remotely approach what he would have required to prove the designs he had did not work, or to develop ones that did.

Leonardo was brilliant, he was a man with a mind that was unique, and he had a desire for knowledge so vast and wide, it at times prevented him from finishing much of what he was commissioned or promised to do.

A good Author, writing of one of the greatest minds in History, but a mind that nonetheless must utilize those tools, and meet the benchmarks, not be excused from them, that science requires of any who participate.

I liked this book - it is well written and easy to read - but I do have a few complaints. Frankly, I can't see how the author concludes that Leonardo was homosexual based on the lack of nude females (and the abundance of nude males) found in his existing notebooks. We know that many of Leonardo's notebooks are missing or incomplete, so it's quite likely that many of the female nudes were simply ripped out (remember: these notebooks got passed around quite a bit back in the days before photography and Playboy centerfolds). Furthermore, it is hard for me to believe that the man who painted the Mona Lisa and other women with such loving care did not spend a lot of time studying the female body. So I really doubt that the absence of evidence here should be construed as evidence of absence. Besides, who really cares? My other gripe centers around the author's attempt to prove that Leonardo was the first "real" scientist. I'm not sure why such a classification is so important (unless of course the author felt he needed a new "angle" of some kind for writing about Leonardo). After all, when viewing the totality of a person's life, it's hard to say when someone can be considered a "real" scientist 100%. For example, I would venture that there are thousands of biologists who attend church on a regular basis, but I doubt we would dismiss their scientific sincerity simply because they partake in something as totally unscientific as religious ritual, chanting, school vouchers, rattling beads, etc. But don't get me wrong. Despite my complaints I still enjoyed this book and felt well rewarded for my efforts, gaining a deeper look into the mind of this old master, scientist or no.

Michael White spends more time trying to use very tenuous evidence to ascertain whether or not da Vinci engaged in sex with other males than he spends trying to convince us that da Vinci should be classed as scientist. What is the purpose of this effort? Does da Vinci become a more credible scientist if White convinces us that da Vinci can be classed as a homosexual? In attemtping to convince himself and his readers that da Vinci would fit into either class -- scientist or homosexual -- White pursues a useless game. Why not simply tell us of the very superior insights that da Vinci achieved in his explorations and let us revel in the man's astouunding creativity. And, who cares about da Vinci's sex life? What difference could it possibly make relative to his creativity?

Leonarda da Vinci was one of the most versatile scientists and artists of all times, so a very good reason to read a biography. Most of Michael White's book is indeed very readable. What disturbed me a little is that there are quite some extrapolations in the book: thin facts (which is probably logical if you have to go back 500 years in time), followed by enormous conclusions, which then may or may not be true. I also had the feeling that sometimes there were more clues available, butthat for readability's sake the author had decided to leave them out, only giving a rather vague indication that there was more information available. I found this rather distressing, but that may be the scientist in me who wants to know all the facts. Apart from this it is a very fluently written book which gives you a nice idea of the live of a genius who does not wish to conform to society.

Leonardo the First Scientist by Michael White, while engagingly written, walks a dangerously fine line between biography and historical fiction. Biography is essentially the history of an individual based on historical fact, while historical fiction is fiction based on historical fact. For my money, White's biography of Leonardo da Vinci tips a little too far into the latter realm, particularly in the first half of the book where he tries to capture for his reader the inner workings of his subject. His flights of imagination and speculation are just a little too fanciful and frequent when trying to get at Leonardo the man. That's perhaps because there is too little remaining of the man except his art and his inventions with which to make a detailed personal profile.

White introduces his work by suggesting that he will discuss Leonardo as a scientist. Indeed he starts out to do so by devoting an early chapter of his book (Leonardo's Intellectual Inheritance) to the Greco-Roman roots of Renaissance science. This chapter reads like many introductions to the subject of science in the Classical world, and while it places Leonardo in the setting of common Renaissance learning, it does little to show his actual relationship to it. Despite his statement in the introduction that he is interested in creating something new by focusing on Leonard the scientist, the author strays into all manner of suppositions with regard to the great man's possible inner turmoil: his illegitimacy, his lack of formal education, his relationship to his parents, and to the great men of his age (particularly Lorenzo de Medici of Florence), his possible fear of water, his homosexuality, etc, for much of which he admits he has little if any evidence. Most of these psychological wanderings are prefaced with "might," "possibly," "could have," "might have," etc. While the latent historian within me may lift an eyebrow over it, I can let it pass, so long as the author makes the reader aware that there is very little actual data and of what that data is. However, when later in the book he refers to some of his past "might haves" as confirmed issues upon which he can make further suppositions, a bell goes off in my head, as it should in every reader's.

One might provide some leeway for such tenuous suppositions based on little data, were it not that Mr. White's credulity as a researcher is a little overworked at times. He seems to buy into sensationalism almost whole sale, with no references given to support his "facts." At one point he describes Lucretia Borgia and her family in very unflattering terms (P. 77) (not a totally unjustifiable stance on the whole) without bibliographic entries of any kind. The stories he relates are probably taken from accounts of the Borgias circulated at the time by political detractors with their own agendas, and not on the more extensive primary data on the family and their times or on competent secondary sources that provide a more realistic portrait of the family (as in Lucretia Borgia by Ferdinand Gregorovius, which while old is excellent especially for the citation of its source material on the topic). One has to admit the twice told tales of political enemies makes for more interesting reading, but that's not history; that's good story telling.

White probably spends more time laboring over Leonardo's sexual identity and his childhood than Leonardo did. Certainly more than one would expect for a work on the man as scientist. He labors in detail over the possible relationship the artist might have had with his mother during his formative years while he lived with his grandfather Antonio and while his mother lived in a near by town, and puts forth all manner of suggestions as to identities of Leonardo's possible lovers, even citing specific expenditures for clothing and other items made for Leonardo's companion Salai.

White's book is not a total bust. His insights into the scientist's career as engineer and anatomist are quite good, though all too brief (they occupy only about 4 chapters of the book). One could have hoped for more insights into the science and more illustrations from the notebooks to embellish the work. Their lack at crucial points, especially when describing some of the existing paintings or the designs for inventions, is frustrating. One hangs on White's verbal description, turning the page in expectation of seeing the described item, and....nothing! The best entries are the sketches of the crossbows and catapults on p. 89, the tanks on p. 163, the muscles of the arm and shoulder on 280, and the oft illustrated Vitruvian Man on p. 165. Of particular interest is the section on the science of art, particularly the material on vision. The Renaissance was premier in the understanding and use of visual perspective in the art work of the time, both painting and architecture, and this single chapter is a good start for anyone interested in the topic.

Overall I came away with a sense of Leonardo, the artist who rarely finished anything he started, and Leonardo the scientist who spread himself too thin. If you just want to know a little bit about Leonardo, this might be adequate-if you're critical when you read it. If you're a Leonardo enthusiast I suggest the works on his art and life by Kenneth Clark or Martin Kemp or some of the modern publications of translations of his writings. Then you can form your own opinions.

This is the first serious book I've read about Leonardo da Vinci, so pretty anything the author told me was new. So when I often found the book to be dull and repetitive, I felt disappointed. How many times could I read that Leonardo was a multi-talented genius, that his scientific work really was in fact science, and that he didn't finish projects? And these were just the least of it; so many facts were repeated two, three, four, five times, leading me to believe the author thought I'd somehow forgotten them ten pages earlier. Perhaps my problem was that I read the book in two days' time. Maybe I should have stretched it out a bit more.

That said, the biography was still informative for me, and was well-researched and mostly accessibly written, which is why I'm giving it three stars.

But, there were other negative points. The author points out that Leonardo needed to study anatomy and engineering to become a really great painter. What this brought to mind for me was an analogy: that I wished the author really knew more about human psychology before he wrote a biography! He presented so much about Leonardo in snippets of unprocessed, unanalyzed facts. I wish he had had more ability to synthesize these facts, or at least attempt to synthesize them, into something coherent. As such, although I found Leonardo, in spite of all his flaws, to be a daring original, I did not find the same about this author. This book was published in the year 2000, yet several times the best the author could do to understand Leonardo's psychology was to quote silly things Freud wrote about him more than half a century earlier. How unoriginal! And when the author, very rarely, did take a stab at making his own interpretations on Leonardo's behavior or character, I found them weak, shallow, and fragmented, and not infrequently wrong.

My simple synthesis about Leonardo: he was a brilliant, lost, lonely, isolated, courageous, screwed up, immature, desperate, frightened, hardworking man. I personally did not find him to be paranoid, as the author so often pointed out. To be paranoid a person has to have fears that are utterly out of proportion to the danger he is facing. The biographer -- a person who is supposed to empathize most profoundly with his subject -- failed to recognize the danger Leonardo was in. I did not find it so hard to see that Leonardo lived in a time when he was constantly at risk of being destroyed or killed by no lack of short-sighted, jealous, bigoted, superstitious enemies. That's why I see it as unfair to label him as paranoid for being secretive and writing in code! I think the reason the author failed to understand this about Leonardo is that the author himself has never taken any serious risks, and for that reason had from frame of personal reference from which to identify emotionally with his subject.

Similarly, I found the author utterly trivial when he said that Leonardo was most certainly loved as a child. C'mon, a few people may have cared for him a bit, but it was clear to me that Leonardo was radically unloved. In fact, to me that suggests a big part of his motivation for being such a creative and scientific force: he was desperately looking for love and approval. That also explains why he, an ardent pacific, was so willing to put massive amounts of his energy inventing weapons of war (that is, murder!) to I ingratiate himself with autocratic or despotic rulers (that is, mom and dad!). I think to really understand Leonardo's character he must be viewed through the lens of his unresolved childhood traumas and desperate, unresolved childhood needs; any other lens fails to put him in perspective.

On the subject of weakness, let me close with this annoying point about the biography: I rolled my eyes when the author defended Leonardo for his little middle-aged dalliances with teenage boys, whom he kept around with his money. Defending Leonardo's inappropriate behavior is quite a separate thing from psychologically understanding why he engaged in that behavior. (He did it because he was lonely, desperate to be in control, had no real peers, and felt hopeless, and essentially buying pretty adolescent boys and young men, sick as it was, was the best he could do to feel whole.) The author, on the other hand, bypassed this whole issue by saying that we can't impose our modern morals on such a different culture and time. Oh no? Would the author have used the same stale argument if Leonardo was having sexual dalliances with five-year-olds?

Known as one of the most advanced thinkers of his time, Leonardo da Vinci explored technology, art and science much beyond that of his era and surroundings. This novel delves into Leonardo as a scientist, his struggles, accomplishments and overwhelming amount of knowledge in more fields than any one scientist should endeavor into. From a rough childhood to the center of Renaissance society, Leonardo's life isn't easy, whether he is dealing with societal pressures, or just pressures he puts on himself, there is always something occupying his mind. He defies popular belief in his works in anatomy, making over 30 successful dissections accompanied by thousands of detailed and nearly perfect diagrams and drawings of the human body and its systems. In exploring technology, he diagrams countless ideas for flying machines and military warfare, most of which were years ahead of the current technology and technology in centuries to come. From his struggles in homosexuality to his coded notebooks, Michael White explores the lasting influence that Leonardo da Vinci has had on his society and ours as well.
Michael White wanted to make known the scientific side of da Vinci, emphasizing not only his artistic abilities, but his scientific knowledge as well. Many people disagree about Leonardo's role as the world's very first scientist, but White defines what he believes it to be: "...exploration, it is questioning, it is the application of imagination, it is analysis." As Leonardo fulfills all these requirements and more, White finds him to be the first true scientist. White's fascination with this man is understandable, stemming from Leonardo's knowledge, ambition and overall figure of humanity. If you enjoy thrilling stories about knights, thieves and princesses, don't read this book, but if you enjoy the thrill of discovery, passion and overwhelming genius of a man, jump right in. This book is a clue to why humanity and society is shaped the way it is today, and why science in the 21st century is advanced as it is, all influenced by one man: Leonardo da Vinci.

It is appropriate that Leonardo da Vinci painted the woman with the mysterious smile, the Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting of all time. For just as there are many questions surrounding the subject matter, and why she is smiling (or is she), and whether her eyes follow you around the room, there are also many unknowns surrounding the artist. He is an enigma himself, so THAT is why he painted the Mona Lisa.

Michael White gives a broad picture of the artist, and how he broke new ground, both within art, and also is his investigations. Da Vinci also managed to bridge science and art. He was able to see science from the perspective of an artist, to visualise art with the mindset of a scientist, and capture architecture from the viewpoint of the artist-scientist.

White postulates that da Vinci was the first scientist. However, we have to remember that the 21st century of a `scientist' is very different to that in 15th century Florence, or Milan. There was still the scope for individuals to engage in an all-embracing approach, so the body of knowledge was sufficiently small as to be able to be grasped. Furthermore, this was so for about 250 years after da Vinci's time.

Da Vinci was a very talented man, and it is tempting to question what he might have achieved if he had been more focussed. He tended to flit from one thing to another, leaving many incomplete projects, and ever two or three books-in-the-writing, not finished, or indeed, hardly started. White does bring out the breadth of the tasks that the Italian tackled, correctly giving emphasis to some achievements not generally known.

However, whereever you look, there is the enigma that is da Vinci. He is a peculiar mix of old and new, showing in his studies of eyes that he was far ahead of his time. Da Vinci goes some of the way towards the notion of blood circulating, but not quite making the impossible leap that William Harvey was to make over 200 years later. What White does is show that da Vinci was one of the first to systematically investigate, to move from the cognitive to the experimental scientist.

Da Vinci left a huge collection of notes, drawings and "scribblings", and these were firstly lost for over 200 years, and then dissipated into private collections and archives. It is always possible to show tenuous links with hindsight. Maybe there is some over eagerness on White's part, but da Vinci was a marvellous man.
Geology, rain, water and clouds, anatomy, fortifications and machinery of war, canals, and the list goes on. He was forward looking, and many have claimed that da Vinci invented helicopters, and other diverse items of machinery. Yet he was steeped in the Aristotelian view of the four elements; earth, air, fire and water. He also did not spend large amounts of time investigating cosmology, as many of his age did.

Da Vinci had feet of clay, yet a very freethinking mind. He used science to aid him, to help him as an artist. His only published work, a book on art gives views ahead of his time, on distance, perspective, light and shade. That in itself would have made the man worthy of praise. He also continued to study, to both aid his art, and for scientific discovery. The fact that he was a bridge between the old and the new is another facet of the enigma that is Leonardo.

Peter Morgan, Bath, UK (morganp@supanet.com)

Seldom have I read a book that purported and looked as though it could be of interest and been so disappointed - perhaps I should have realised from the very title, insofar as most interested people rate Roger Bacon as the 'First Scientist'. The main point is however, that Mr White having conceived what he must of thought was a good idea then proceeds to regurgitate all the hoary old rhubarb that most truly interested observers consigned to the bin in their kindergartens. It is also, so dispiriting to read yet another unresearched comment about the likes of Ludovico Sforza and Lucrezia Borgia and others; and to find the chronology wrong and even some of the dates. I have not read any of Mr White's other books but I am amazed that a publisher of the quality of Little Brown should put its name to a book that overtly suggests it is authoritative but, quite clearly, is a tuppenny comic - they should be ashamed of themselves...unless of course, it is a spoof(?)...in which case it falls short of the mark on that score too.

Leonardo Da Vinci is one of the reasons we have so many of the scientific, medical, and artistic principles that we use every day. Though I have always enjoyed Da Vinci's work as an artist, I have only known briefly of his accomplishments as a person who kept pushing the boundaries of what makes our world and our human physiology work. This book only highlights his vision as a artist, but allows the reader who might be an artist to better understand the role that human anatomy played in his work. White is an excellent writer, making this very complex and fascinating man come to life for a new century.