The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance [Hardcover]

Fritjof Capra (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 2007

Leonardo da Vinci’s pioneering scientific work was virtually unknown during his lifetime. Now acclaimed scientist and bestselling author Fritjof Capra reveals that Leonardo was in many ways the unacknowledged “father of modern science.” Drawing on an examination of over 6,000 pages of Leonardo’s surviving notebooks, Capra explains that Leonardo approached scientific knowledge with the eyes of an artist. Through his studies of living and nonliving forms, from architecture and human anatomy to the turbulence of water and the growth patterns of grasses, he pioneered the empirical, systematic approach to the observation of nature—what is now known as the scientific method.

Leonardo's scientific explorations were extraordinarily wide-ranging. He studied the flight patterns of birds to create some of the first human flying machines. Using his understanding of weights and levers and trajectories and forces, he designed military weapons and defenses, and was in fact regarded as one of the foremost military engineers of his era. He studied optics, the nature of light, and the workings of the human heart and circulatory system. Because of his vast knowledge of hydraulics, he was hired to create designs for rebuilding the infrastructure of Milan and the plain of Lombardy, employing the very principles still used by city planners today. He was a mechanical genius, and yet his worldview was not mechanistic but organic and ecological. This is why, in Capra's view, Leonardo's science—centuries ahead of his time in a host of fields—is eminently relevant to our time.

Enhanced with fifty beautiful sepia-toned illustrations, The Science of Leonardo is a fresh and important portrait of a colossal figure in the world of science and the arts.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Capra, author of the classic The Tao of Physics, makes the case in this fascinating intellectual biography for the great artist Leonardo being the unsung father of modern science. Drawing on approximately 6,000 pages and 100,000 drawings surviving from Leonardo's scattered notebooks, Capra explores the groundbreaking research of this quintessential Renaissance man. Illegitimate, born in a Tuscan village in 1452, Leonardo did not receive a classical education, a fact that, Capra notes, later freed him from the intellectual conventions of his time and allowed him to develop his own holistic, empirical approach to science. Apprenticed with Verrocchio in Florence around the age of 15, Leonardo became an independent artist when he was 25, but his intellectual appetites demanded more. He taught himself Latin and began the famous notebooks, a record of his artistic and scientific explorations. The recurring patterns he saw in nature led him to create what Capra calls a science of wholeness, of movement and transformation. Capra expresses his own intellectual kinship with Leonardo's multidisciplinary perspective on science, one that recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all natural phenomena—a view he sees as particularly relevant today. Illus. (Oct. 30)
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Review

Advance Praise for The Science of Leonardo

"Minutely researched, vividly written, and endlessly fascinating, The Science of Leonardo opens up a realm which has never been adequately appreciated. It makes one wonder, as Capra does, whether the history of science might have been quite different had a full publication of Leonardo's notebooks not had to wait until four centuries after his death."
--Dr. Oliver Sacks

“The Science of Leonardo is a fascinating glimpse of the road not taken by Western Science. Capra makes a compelling case that the science of the future may look a lot more like Leonardo's than Bacon's or Descartes -- a science of systems, non-reductive and akin to an art.
--Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
"A brilliant and sound assessment of Leonardo's approach to science, viewed in the cultural context of his time, and through the development of scientific thought in the succeeding centuries. Both deep and new, it is a bold and successful exploration of the working of Leonardo's mind."

--Carlo Pedretti, Armand Hammer Chair of Leonardo Studies, UCLA

“Fritjof Capra paints a vivid and compelling picture of one of the greatest geniuses in history, Leonardo da Vinci, by skillfully weaving together all the different strands of Leonardo's master works and finally revealing the true power and breathtaking scope of his life. Leonardo himself would have nodded in approval of this book, because for the first time it crystallizes the entire body of his work into a coherent, unified whole.”
--Michio Kaku, Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and bestselling author of HYPERSPACE.

Praise for Tao of Physics
 
"A brilliant best-seller."— New York Magazine
 
"A pioneering book of real value and wide appeal."— Washington Post
 
“I have been reading the book with amazement and the greatest interest, recommending it to everyone I meet. . . .[Capra has] done a magnificent and extremely important job.” —Joseph Campbell
 
Praise for The Web of Life

“[Capra] has reassembled the fragments of modern science into something that at last we can understand . . . a wonderful book we all need to read.” —James Lovelock, author of Healing Gaia
 
“This book, a rare blending of the heart and the head, should be required reading.” —Theodore Roszak, Director, Ecopsychology Institute, California State University, Hayward, and author of The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1St Edition edition (October 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385513909
• ISBN-13: 978-0385513906
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #405,123 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Multifarious Man, November 30, 2007

By 

Jeremy Mates (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Hardcover)

Fritjof Capra provides fascinating insight into Leonardo da Vinci, his life, and his many accomplishments. No special knowledge is assumed: all terms, such as sfumato and chiaroscuro, are well defined. The Greek and Latin schools of thought are introduced, and how Leonardo variously accepted, rejected, or improved upon this body of knowledge.

Particular attention is paid to Leonardo's methods, a man so interested in the process and underlying principals as to be a renowned sculptor in his time without a sculpture, one who left a trail of magnificent (yet variously incomplete) artwork. Leonardo asked not just "how", but also "why", and tested these questions with detailed experiments in many fields: optics, anatomy, and fluid dynamics, to name a few.

The text does repeat itself, though like a arabesque rope, repeats back on the core strengths of Leonardo, and shows in turn how these strengths allowed Leonardo to advance the fields of art, science, and engineering. Highly recommended.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good biography of da vinci's life and thought, January 29, 2008

By 

Dan Arias (Santa Cruz, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Hardcover)

I heard of this book during an interview of the author on NPR. The interview was fascinating and motivated me to get the book.

The book is wonderful for its balance and grace. It is a concise telling of da Vinci's life and his thinking gleaned from his manuscripts and from contemporary writers. It is interesting to discover that little is known about da Vinci's personal or inner life. However, we discover that da Vinci was truly one of the first scientists in the modern sense, predating Galileo. His gifts for observation, illustration, and painting combined with his energy and enthusiasm for experimentation led him to discoveries and conclusions that would not be widely recognized for centuries.

It was a good inspiring read! I'm looking forward to reading Capra's book on systemic thinking.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A disappointing book, doesn't live up to its title, January 2, 2010

By 

D. Dobkin (Sunnyvale, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Paperback)

This book was a disappointment. The title leads the reader to believe that we will see a detailed exposition of contributions made (at least potentially) by da Vinci, but actually very little of the volume is devoted to such examination. The first half is a fairly interesting but overly long biography of the great man, more focused on his art than his science; and the discussion of the artistic work is mostly about the use of color, not helped by grayscale reproductions of the paintings! The second half, which purports to detail his scientific contributions, is all too often a rehash of the first half, telling us that he was really smart without providing any demonstration of the fact.

For a book about a man whose greatest talent was his ability to draw, it is woefully under-illustrated. Few pages from his voluminous notebooks are reproduced, and when they are, the pages are unannotated. This is absurd: the text is mirror-written Italian and illegible anyway in the reduced-size reproductions, and without it the drawings are mysterious in many cases.

The text is full of unsupported claims about Leonardo's discoveries; the few that are examined in sufficient detail don't really jibe with Capra's summaries. For example, Capra represents Leonardo as having discovered that light is a wave; the detailed text shows that he had in fact made the remarkably astute assertion that sound is a wave phenomenon, but did not grasp the importance of frequency or wavelength in determining perceived pitch. Capra gives no example of Leonardo exhibiting the essential properties of waves -- phase, wavelength, interference -- in discussions of light. Leonardo worked with geometric optics, which doesn't require that the underlying phenomenon be wavelike.

Similarly, he is described as having discovered the reason the sky is blue, but a more careful examination of Leonardo's remarks shows that he got only half the problem right: he correctly understood that the particles of "moisture" (actually the individual atoms) in the air are scattering incoming solar radiation, but since he didn't understand the impact of frequency on color, he could not and did not grasp that this scattering was wavelength-dependent (the 'blue' part).

The book has some gems, for Leonardo was of course a remarkable man, but all too often we have Capra reading into Leonardo's work 20th century science that either isn't there or is not demonstrated to be there. Someone will have to write a better book so that we can more fully and correctly appreciate the great man's work.

Just for completeness, I hold advanced degrees in applied physics, and have written some technical books, so my expectations for content may be a bit different from most readers!